Thinking Like a Historian: Debating the War in Vietnam

The war in Vietnam divided Americans and ultimately divided world opinion. A product of the Cold War policy of containment, the war led many to question the application of that policy to Southeast Asia. Yet every American president from Truman to Nixon believed that opposing the unification of Vietnam under communist rule was essential. Historians continue to research, and debate, what led to the war and what effects the war had on both Vietnam and the United States. The following documents help us to consider different views of the war.

  1. President Dwight Eisenhower’s “Domino Theory” speech, April 7, 1954.

    Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the “falling domino” principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences. …

    But when we come to the possible sequence of events, the loss of Indochina, of Burma, of Thailand, of the Peninsula, and Indonesia following, now you begin to talk about areas that not only multiply the disadvantages that you would suffer through loss of materials, sources of materials, but now you’re talking about millions and millions and millions of people.

  2. Manifesto of the South Vietnam National Front for Liberation (NLF), 1968.

    Over the past hundred years the Vietnamese people repeatedly rose up to fight against foreign aggression for the independence and freedom of their fatherland. In 1945, the people throughout the country surged up in an armed uprising, overthrew the Japanese and French domination, and seized power. …

    However, the American imperialists, who had in the past helped the French colonialists to massacre our people, have now replaced the French in enslaving the southern part of our country through a disguised colonial regime. They have been using their stooge — the Ngo Dinh Diem administration — in their downright repression and exploitation of our compatriots, in their maneuvers to permanently divide our country and to turn its southern part into a base in preparation for war in Southeast Asia.

  3. President Lyndon Johnson, Johns Hopkins University speech, April 7, 1965.

    Over this war — and all Asia — is another reality: the deepening shadow of Communist China. The rulers in Hanoi are urged on by Peiping [Peiking]. This is a regime which has destroyed freedom in Tibet, which has attacked India, and has been condemned by the United Nations for aggression in Korea. It is helping the forces of violence in almost every continent. The contest in Viet-Nam is part of a wider pattern of aggressive purposes.

  4. James Fallows, “What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?” Washington Monthly, October 1975. The journalist Fallows highlighted the economic unfairness of the Vietnam-era draft.

    The children of the bright, good parents were spared the more immediate sort of suffering that our inferiors were undergoing. And because of that, when our parents were opposed to the war, they were opposed in a bloodless, theoretical fashion, as they might be opposed to political corruption or racism in South Africa. As long as the little gold stars [sent to parents whose son was killed in war] kept going to homes in Chelsea [a working-class part of Boston] and the backwoods of West Virginia, the mothers of Beverly Hills and Chevy Chase and Great Neck and Belmont [all affluent suburbs] were not on the telephone to their congressman screaming, “You killed my boy.” … It is clear by now that if the men of Harvard had wanted to do the very most they could to help shorten the war, they should have been drafted or imprisoned en masse.

  5. Students for a Democratic Society, Call for a March on Washington to End the War, 1965.

    The current war in Vietnam is being waged on behalf of a succession of unpopular South Vietnamese dictatorships, not in behalf of freedom. No American-supported South Vietnamese regime in the past few years has gained the support of its people, for the simple reason that the people overwhelmingly want peace, self-determination, and the opportunity for development. American prosecution of the war has deprived them of all three.

    The war is fundamentally a civil war. …

    It is a losing war. …

    It is a self-defeating war. …

    It is a dangerous war. …

    It is a war never declared by Congress. …

    It is a hideously immoral war.

  6. Richard Nixon, address to the nation on the Vietnam War, November 3, 1969.

    … President Eisenhower sent economic aid and military equipment to assist the people of South Vietnam in their efforts to prevent a Communist takeover. Seven years ago, President Kennedy sent 16,000 military personnel to Vietnam as combat advisors. Four years ago, President Johnson sent American combat forces to South Vietnam. …

    For these reasons, I reject the recommendation that I should end the war by immediately withdrawing all our forces. I choose instead to change American policy on both the negotiating front and the battlefront. …

  7. Evacuation of Vietnamese civilians in a burning village, c. 1965.
    image
    Source: Photo by Dominique BERETTY/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.

Sources: (1) George Katsiaficas, ed., Vietnam Documents: American and Vietnamese Views of the War (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1992), pp. 120–121. Used by permission of the author; (2) Katsiaficas, 43–44; (3) John Clark Pratt, Vietnam Voices: Perspectives on the War Years, 1941–1982 (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), 201; (4) The Washington Monthly, October 1975, 5–19; (5) Katsiaficas, 120–121; (6) Katsiaficas, 147.

ANALYZING THE EVIDENCE

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PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

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