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Lyndon Johnson: Incidents
American troops had been in Vietnam for more than a decade as advisers to the South Vietnamese by August 1964, when the U.S.S. Maddox reported that it had been fired upon by North Korean units. Although the radar records were sketchy, and it is now believed that the attack never took place, the attack served as the rationale for the Senate's passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. The resolution granted Johnson wide latitude in his use of American troops in Vietnam, and he used the resolution to justify a retaliatory raid on North Vietnam following an attack on American barracks in South Vietnam. This retaliatory raid quickly became a systematic bombing campaign. Over the next few months, Johnson began dispatching increased numbers of American troops to defend South Vietnam, with manpower levels reaching nearly 550,000 by the end of his term. These soldiers fought in dense jungles where tactics favored Communist guerrillas, whose hit-and-fade tactics caused heavy casualties among American units. The Vietnamese saw the conflict as an extension of their now decades-long effort to expel their colonial masters, beginning under the Japanese in the Second World War, continuing against the French when the Fourth Republic reclaimed its colony of Indochina, and finally ending up as a David-and-Goliath fight against the world's predominant nation after the French granted the colony independence. For the Americans, the "armed conflict" (so called because Congress never formally declared war) was part of the struggle against Communism. Johnson, like his predecessors, thought that if Vietnam fell under Communist influence, then eventually a number of Southeast Asian states would become Communist as well -- the infamous "domino theory." This was the basic American misconception of the war: treating it as a battle against a global Communist conspiracy instead of a war of national independence. In propping up the corrupt and tyrannical South Vietnamese government, the Americans unwittingly proved the North Vietnamese point that foreigners had ruined Vietnam. As the war ground on, antiwar demonstrations became more common and more violent in the United States. Eventually, after the Tet Offensive, the antiwar forces became strong enough to convince Johnson not to seek another term. Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, is a national holiday. When Communist forces struck thirty provincial capitals on January 30, 1968, South Vietnam was completely unprepared for such a massive assault. The armed units, which were completely uncoordinated from one battle to another, encountered varying degrees of success: in many cities, they were repulsed and defeated fairly quickly, but in Saigon they seized part of the U.S. embassy and in the traditional capital of Hue they maintained control for nearly a month. Today, most analysts agree that Tet was a military defeat. The guerrilla troops, so effective in the jungle, were wiped out in urban warfare where the U.S. Army's superior technology proved an insuperable advantage. But psychologically, Tet was a terrible blow to the United States, convincing many in the government that the war could not be won without far more lives being lost. Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection on March 31, 1968. For the rest of his term, he sought to negotiate with the North Vietnamese, but his efforts came to naught, and his successor, Richard Nixon, would have to undertake what Henry Kissinger called the "heartbreaking" assignment of ending the first war America had lost. |
Incidents
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