Vietnam War Dbq Essay

The Vietnam War, which lasted from 1955 to 1975, was one of the most divisive and controversial conflicts in American history. It was a military conflict between the Communist North Vietnam, and South Vietnam, with the United States and other Western powers supporting the Southern Vietnamese. The war was fought in the context of the Cold War because the United States feared that Communism would spread throughout Southeast Asia if North Vietnam managed to take control of the entire country. The war had such a profound impact on American society, and still remains a subject of intense debate and analysis today.

After World War I, Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh, expressed many grievances against the French colonialists. In document one, Ho

The Indochinese were so exhausted from all the oppression and discrimination that the French encroached on them that Minh’s idea of the ideal world seemed perfect, Communism was the answer. Everyone would be “equal,” and their needs would be met and paid for according to their abilities, this ideology was paradise. Ho Chi Minh proposed there to be ten main goals for this Communist revolution. He first claimed that they need to completely overthrow French imperialism and the reactionary Vietnamese capitalist class. Their demand for resources, raw materials, and cheap labor has worked the Indochinese people to the bone and they were not paid properly for their services. He also stated that Indochina needed to be completely independent and that they needed to establish a worker-peasant and soldier government. He expressed that they needed to confiscate banks and other enterprises belonging to the imperialists and the capitalist classes and distribute them to Indochina’s poor peasants, and to implement an eight-hour working day. He also said that the taxation on the Vietnamese was too harsh, and to abolish the French’s public loans and poll taxes, because these unjust tariffs were too expensive for the lower class to handle. He wanted to carry out universal education for all Vietnamese citizens, and most of all, he wanted

McNamara, about the beginning of the Vietnam War. After President Kennedy died, and Lindon B. Johnson took over, shortly after, on August 2, 1964, North Vietnam attacked the USS Maddox with patrol torpedo boats when they were in international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. However, President Johnson and McNamara did not respond to that attack, though it devastated them both, but then again, on August 4, 1964, it was claimed that another torpedo attack happened again. With that event, President Johnson recommended a resolution: one that would give him complete authority to take the nation to war––the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. However, McNamara later found out that other reports, when looked at more closely, showed that the attack did not really happen on August 4th, although, the August 2nd one was in fact, correct. McNamara stated in the documentary that we were right once, but wrong the other, and that second mistake caused terrible side effects to occur. He claimed that President Johnson authorized the attack, only on the assumption that had occurred, he did not put in the effort to investigate