United States Involvement In Vietnam

The main idea of the causation of the Vietnam War has always revolved around the USA’s fear of the spread of communism. In short, the Vietnam War started as a result of US strategy of containment during the Cold War, which aimed to prevent the spread of communism throughout the world. The cold war was started in 1947 under the presidency of Harry S. Truman. His advisors told him that he needed to prevent Stalin’s efforts to undermine the US from proving fruitful. People were afraid of how Russian Communism might undermine the American Capitalism. Technically, the war lasted until 1991, which means that 9 men were President during this period of unrest between the world’s greatest superpowers. One such President was John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

His popularisation in the American media led to him being fondly recalled as America’s Favourite President – even though the rest of the world saw him as so weak, Nikita Khrushchev thought he could put rockets in Cuba with no negative consequences. As America’s only Catholic President, he fervently disapproved of Atheist Communism - and it was because of his concerns about the Cold War that he increased US involvement in Vietnam. Source C and B would encourage this: C because JFK was so backed into an anti-Communist corner with his campaign promises, and B because he ignored reasonable ways out of Vietnam in favour of increasing US involvement.

JFK had a book ghostwritten for him called Profiles in Courage which he received a Pullitzer for. Because of this, Eleanor Roosevelt coined the statement, ‘I wish that Kennedy had a little less profile and more courage,’ which could be seen as the defining quote of his presidency. Source C suggests that JFK was mostly focused on securing anti-Communist votes

military advisors in Indochina. He refused to withdraw from the escalating conflict in Vietnam because, he said, "to withdraw from that effort would mean a collapse not only of South Vietnam, but Southeast Asia. So we are going to stay there." US policymakers saw Vietnam as an obvious and integral part of their struggle with communism. In early 1950, they decided that ‘Soviet expansion had reached a point beyond which it must not be permitted to go’. This was in part due to the ‘domino theory’ that Vietnam could not fall without taking with it other Asian countries to the Soviets. This theory was supplanted by the Kennedy-Johnson idea of ‘credibility’; that the US must stand up to Vietnam to show strength to the rest of the world. This idea came from the 1930s, known as the Manchurian or Munch ideology. Similarly, the idea that the fall of Vietnam would be disastrous at home came from a supposed historical view; no administration could survive the loss of a war, particularly against such a small country. The policy of containment wold never work with Vietnam’s conflicts at the time, and as such US policymakers dramatically misjudged Vietnam internal dynamics. Historically speaking, there is plenty of evidence to support the fact that not all adversaries can be treated in the same way, which shows they had not done their