Background To The Vietnam War
The background leading up to direct American military involvement in Vietnam can be traced to the close of World War II, when a power vacuum was created with the defeat of the Japanese, and the rise of the Viet Minh under Ho Chi Minh. From 1945 through the events leading up to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Vietnam would become a state divided into North Vietnam, controlled by Ho Chi Minh, and South Vietnam, allied and propped up by western powers. Through the incursion and attempt to recolonize Vietnam by France and the United Kingdom, Vietnam would be set on the path for eventual direct American incursion in a containment policy intended to curb the spread of Communism throughout southeast Asia.
Read more about Background To The Vietnam War: French Colonial Period, The Rise of Ho Chi Minh, Containment, The End of French Involvement, The Partition of Vietnam and The Diem Government
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“No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.”
—Richard M. Nixon (b. 1913)
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“I was proud of the youths who opposed the war in Vietnam because they were my babies.”
—Benjamin Spock (b. 1903)
“Once lead this people into war and they will forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)