The Vietnam War

Paper Summary:

This paper looks at why the Vietnam War was necessary - at least to many American policy-makers and to many ordinary Americans in the 1960s. Specifically, it outlines the general sentiments which made many draft-eligible baby-boomers suspicious of the war and how their suspicions were not shared by literally millions of other working-class Americans. Finally, the paper discusses the foreign policy and the military and economic considerations that also made the decision to go into Vietnam so imperative - and kept the war a major priority for US policy-makers even when things began to go sour in the final years of the conflict.

From the Paper:

"To close, this paper has looked at the factors which made the war in Vietnam so vital to so many. Not least of all, many Americans in that epoch took pride in the United States' pre-eminent role in beating back the forces of Communism, and many others believed that US institutions would come under increasing fire from outside the nation's borders if the spread of Communism was not stemmed in Southeast Asia. In the end, while it is easy to ridicule some of those decisions now, placing those determinations within the context of their times reveals that US fears were perfectly understandable."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Tim O'Brien, "On the Rainy River," in The Things They Carried (New York: Broadway Books, 1990), 40. 45, 58-61.
• David Farber, "The Silent Majority and the Talk About Revolution," in The 60s: From Memory to History. (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 291-316.
• John Lewis Gaddis, "Was the Truman Doctrine a Real Turning Point?' Foreign Affairs, 52(2): 386-387

More papers on The Vietnam War:

• Book Review # 142157 : "The Vietnam War On Trial": Book Review"
• Comparison Essay # 42331 : "The Vietnam War"
• Cause and Effect Essay # 112589 : "Student Unrest and the Vietnam War"
• Book Review # 57859 : "Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War"

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