The United States, France, China, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, Laos and other countries would over time become involved in the lengthy war, which finally ended in when North and South Vietnam were reunited as one country. The following Vietnam War timeline is a guide to the complex political and military issues involved in a war that would ultimately claim millions of lives.
Laos is added in France begins to reassert its authority over Vietnam. The policy becomes known as the Truman Doctrine.
The defeat solidifies the end of French rule in Indochina. President Dwight D. This so-called domino theory guides U. The agreement also stipulates that elections are to be held within two years to unify Vietnam under a single democratic government. These elections never happen. Kennedy sends helicopters and Green Berets to South Vietnam and authorizes secret operations against the Viet Cong. The South Vietnamese are overcome despite their four-to-one advantage and the technical and planning assistance of U.
Eight people, including children, are killed. Between and , 12 different governments take the lead in South Vietnam as military coups replace one government after another. Lyndon B. Johnson becomes president.
Two U. Meanwhile, China sends several engineering troops to North Vietnam to assist in building critical defense infrastructure. The same month, U. The six-day operation diffuses the Viet Cong regiment, although it would quickly rebuild. Kennedy argued that if the U. That type of approach would just play into the hands of the communists, and in any case, Kennedy believed that the U.
Kennedy employed the rhetoric of idealism to try to convince the American public that the U. Historians still debate what Kennedy would have done regarding Vietnam had he lived beyond November Some close to Kennedy and members of his administration believe he would have escalated as Johnson did.
Others have maintained that he would not have escalated. President Lyndon B. Johnson ascribed to the domino theory, and he believed that South Vietnam was the victim of communist aggression from and directed by North Vietnam. If the U. He believed the South Vietnamese should fight for themselves with American aid and advice. Publicly, though, he and members of his administration, especially Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, emphasized the strategic importance of South Vietnam.
A Hanoi victory in the war, McNamara argued, would place Vietnam that much closer to Chinese control, and then all of Southeast Asia would be in danger. His successor, Richard Nixon, entered the presidency in a world that looked much different than it had in Americans across the political spectrum opposed the Vietnam War, the U.
The changing conditions of the context surrounding Vietnam made what happened there seem less strategically important to the U. Additionally, Nixon was more pragmatic than idealistic in his foreign policy worldview. He believed that the U. Regional alliances in Southeast Asia and superpower tensions between the U. March 16, Over the course of four hours, American soldiers kill more than unarmed civilians in and around the hamlet of My Lai.
May 4, Four days after Nixon announced the expansion of the war into Cambodia, four students at Kent State are shot by National Guardsmen during a protest. March 30 — Oct. POWs begin to return home. It had little interest in the sort of covert operations Lansdale specialized in. Lansdale was not able to accomplish much, and he returned to the United States in Reception of the book was not kind.
From the letters Boot quotes, it is clear that Pat was the love of his life. He suffered for many years from longing and remorse. When Lansdale was with his wife, Pat dated other men.
There appear to have been no significant dalliances on his part. Only after his wife died, in , were he and Pat married. But it is expansive and detailed, it is well written, and it sheds light on a good deal about U. Boot is a military historian, a columnist, and a foreign-policy adviser who has worked with the Presidential campaigns of John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Marco Rubio.
One might therefore have expected his book to adopt a revisionist line on Vietnam—to argue, for example, that the antiwar media misrepresented the military situation and made it politically impossible for us to prosecute the war to the fullest of our capabilities. It was a war with too many variables for a single strategic choice to have tipped the balance. Everyone knew that he was C. He had faith in his own good motives. He had a great talent for practical politics and for personal involvement in what to most Americans would seem the most distinctly foreign of affairs.
And why should we read it? In many ways, Lansdale was a throwback. He operated in the spirit of the old O. He treated all conditions as wartime conditions, and so did not scruple to use whatever means necessary—from bribes and misinformation to black ops—to achieve ends favorable to the interests of the United States.
Like the man who created the O. He made his own rules. That is exactly what his C. And it is why, after the American military took charge in Vietnam and bureaucratic punctilio was back in style, his influence waned and he was put on the shelf. They did not even find him entertaining.
They looked on him as a harebrained troglodyte. Boot thinks he did, and one purpose of his book is to revive Lansdale as a pioneer of counter-insurgency theory. It was a search-and-destroy mission that resulted in the massacre of hundreds of civilians at My Lai, in They need to sell the benefits of the regime they are fighting for, and to do so by demonstrating, concretely, their commitment to the lives of the people.
This is what Lansdale believed that the Vietcong were doing, and what the Philippine rebels, who called themselves the Hukbalahap, had done. They understood the Maoist notion that the people are the water, and the soldiers must live among them as the fish.
As Boot notes, Lansdale was by no means the only person who believed that the way to beat the Vietcong was to play their game by embedding anti-Communist forces, trained by American advisers, in the villages.
Lederer and Lansdale were friends, and Lansdale appears in the book as a character named Colonel Hillandale, who entertains locals with his harmonica as Lansdale was known to do. Although the title has come to refer to vulgar American tourists, that was not the intention.
He just happens to be ugly. Through the Agency for International Development, we had been providing agricultural, educational, infrastructural, and medical assistance. There was graft, but there were also results. Rice production doubled between and , and production of livestock tripled. We gave far more in military aid, but that is because our policy was to enable South Vietnam to defend itself.
In the pursuit of civic action, though, there was always the practical question of just how South Vietnamese troops and their American advisers were supposed to insinuate themselves into villages in the countryside. It was universally understood, long before the marines arrived, that in the countryside the night belonged to the Vietcong. No one wanted to be out after sunset away from a fortified position. John Paul Vann was notorious for riding his jeep at night along country roads.
What was crucially missing for a counter-insurgency program to work, as Lansdale pointed out, was a government to which the population could feel loyalty. As many historians do, Boot believes that the Diem coup was the key event in the war, that it put the United States on a path of intervention from which there was no escape and no return. Probably not. Lansdale was writing on water. The Vietnam he imagined was a Western fantasy.
Although the best and the brightest in Washington shunned and ignored him, Lansdale shared their world view, the world view that defined the Cold War. He was a liberal internationalist. He believed that if you scratched a Vietnamese or a Filipino you found a James Madison under the skin.
Langguth, assumed that the artlessness and the harmonica playing were an act, that Lansdale was a deeply canny operative who hid his real nature from everyone. His Lansdale is a very simple man. Unquestioned faith in his own motives is what allowed him to manipulate others for what he knew would be their own ultimate good.
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