Vietnam War

4 Pages 1000 Words

America’s Longest War

From the late 1950’s through the early 1970’s, America faced its most difficult challenge in recent history. That conflict was the Vietnam War. For the Americans, it was a war based on fear, economical protection, and public outcry, along with numerous executive changes that kept the war going for so long. There were many reasons why the Americans eventually left Vietnam. Those reasons are what remain of the legacies of the Vietnam War.
The war started off with the Kennedy administration, in which believed that “Vietnam represents the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone in the arch, the finger in the dike.” Should the “red tide of Communism” pour into it, Kennedy warned, much of Asia would be threatened (Herring 53). Kennedy didn’t take action once he came into office. Instead Kennedy supplied aid and money to the government to help them with relief. Kennedy then acted with stronger intentions only because the Diem government appeared on the verge of collapse. The president started to send highly skilled “advisers” to South Vietnam to properly train the soldiers of Vietnam to be successful in their missions. After a while, the Diem government questioned whether the United States knew what they were doing. “All these soldiers,” Diem complained. “I never asked them to come here. They don’t even have passports.” The growing uneasiness was clearly revealed in May 1963 when Nhu publicly questioned whether the United States knew what it was doing in Vietnam (Herring 113). In this atmosphere of confusion and mounting conflict, the Kennedy administration also began to discuss the possibility of troop withdrawals. In November 1, 1963, the South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother were murdered. The murder of Diem shocked President Kennedy and reinforced his concerns about American involvement in South Vietnam. Less than a month la...