How was the Vietnam War initially sold to the public in the USA?

[TriPolar]

@foolsguinea

Eh…pretty soon we were more or less allied to the Chinese.

I get the impression that the Russians were THE “enemy” in those days, considering the way the USA and the PRC got in bed later.

We could have had better relations with China much sooner if anyone had bothered to find out what was going on instead of assuming they were another satellite state of the Soviet Union. We got in bed with China only after we found out they were at odds with the Soviets.

[handsomeharry]

@Ranger_Jeff

I always thought of Vietnam as a tarbaby. And I didn’t think the NVs were communists as much as they just wanted a unified country without any French or US. But in exchange for Soviet arms, equipment, etc, they mouthed the pro-commie words.

IIRC, Ho Chi Minh was a real commie. Can’t really remember, so can’t provide a cite, just a recommendation to Wiki it.

[ratatoskK]

@TriPolar

We could have had better relations with China much sooner if anyone had bothered to find out what was going on instead of assuming they were another satellite state of the Soviet Union. We got in bed with China only after we found out they were at odds with the Soviets.

And one of the outcomes of this was U.S. support of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. From NY Times Obituary of Pol Pot :

In one of the cold war’s proxy battles, the United States took China’s side against the Soviet Union, which meant accepting the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate Government of Cambodia in opposition to the Vietnamese-imposed regime in Phnom Penh. Previously, the United States had sided with China to punish the Soviet Union for its 1979 invasion of Afghanistan.

It was not until last year, long after the Vietnamese had withdrawn, that the United States gave the green light to go after the elusive Khmer Rouge leader. By then the cold war had ended, peace had been secured for Cambodia and Pol Pot had lost any value in the power politics of the region.

[Siam_Sam]

@Little_Nemo

2. Communists all work together. The North Vietnamese, the Chinese, and the Soviets are all plotting together. If we let them win in Vietnam, they’ll attack us next somewhere else like Thailand or Greece or Mexico.

@Bayard

Somewhere in my disorganized mess of an office, I have a book, written by a fairly senior retired military guy maybe in 1968ish, that criticizes this argument (among other justifications for the war). The writer says that it was widely believed that advances by one communist entity would ultimately benefit the Soviets. The book argues that this was wrong and that the various communist countries were not all working together. I wish I could find that book now. Dagnabbit! Anyway, the book was interesting to me in that it really dismantled the case for the war when the war was still going full bore.

Right or wrong, it is the prevailing view in Thailand. Remember that Thais watched in horror as first South Vietnam, and then Cambodia and Laos fell. Look up what happened to the Lao royal family. Thais felt they were inevitably the next domino, or would have been if the Vietnam War had not given them enough time to build up the infrastructure in northeastern Thailand, the poorest part of the country and which borders Indochina. Even into the 1980s, there were certain areas of the Northeast that one could not travel to due to communist guerrilla activity.

[Siam_Sam]

@handsomeharry

IIRC, Ho Chi Minh was a real commie. Can’t really remember, so can’t provide a cite, just a recommendation to Wiki it.

I have the big Ho Chi Minh biography by William Duiker, who documents that while Ho always did have communist leanings, he appealed to the US for assistance in not falling back under French influence at the end of WWII. But the US did not want to upset France. So Ho then turned to the Soviet Union. Above all else, Ho was a nationalist. If the US had backed him at the end of WWII, there’s a good chance he would have become a good little capitalist if it meant an independent Vietnam.

[Rick_Kitchen]

You have to think about the atmosphere as a continuation of the 50s. The Red Scare, the McCarthy Era, the HUAC hearings. Commies were under the bed. The paranoia was rampant. This was just an extension of it.

[Little_Nemo]

@handsomeharry

IIRC, Ho Chi Minh was a real commie. Can’t really remember, so can’t provide a cite, just a recommendation to Wiki it.

Ho was definitely a communist. But he was willing to work with anyone who was trying to get Vietnam out from under foreign control. So he was almost as distrustful of the Soviets and the Chinese as he was of the French and Americans. And he didn’t feel that being a communist made it impossible for him to work with the United States. He had worked with Americans to throw out the Japanese during WWII and didn’t see any reason why he couldn’t work with them to throw out the French afterwards. It wasn’t a completely unrealistic hope - lots of Americans at the time felt that the European colonial empires should be broken up.

But Britain and France were determined to maintain their empires after the war. And when America began having problems with the Soviet Union, it wanted Britain and France as allies. So a deal was reached: Britain and France backed the United States against the Soviet Union and the United States backed Britain and France against their colonial independence movements.

[septimus]

Fear of the “international communist conspiracy” was very real in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Drills were held where we schoolkids hid from atom bombs under our desks. :smack:

And the “Domino Theory” that if Communists took over South Vietnam, they’d soon have Thailand as well wasn’t really so far-fetched: There were communist insurgencies in Northern, Northeastern, and Southern Thailand.

And, as others said, the War developed much more gradually than Operation Desert Lunacy did:

@panache45

All of the above. And it happened so gradually, you really had to be paying attention to realize anything of any importance was going on. And it was going on, in some god-forsaken backwater on the other side of the world. Who cared?

One point worth mentioning: Apparently J.F. Kennedy told some of his intimates that he was planning to back out of Vietnam but, due to domestic political considerations, wanted to wait until after the 1964 election. Unfortunately he forgot to tell LBJ.

[Kobal2]

@Siam_Sam

I have the big Ho Chi Minh biography by William Duiker, who documents that while Ho always did have communist leanings, he appealed to the US for assistance in not falling back under French influence at the end of WWII. But the US did not want to upset France. So Ho then turned to the Soviet Union. Above all else, Ho was a nationalist. If the US had backed him at the end of WWII, there’s a good chance he would have become a good little capitalist if it meant an independent Vietnam.

Yup. And why wouldn’t he naturally turn to the US, when the OSS had been helping him bushwhack the Japanese in Vietnam throughout WW2 (since France had fallen to Germany, and VN was a French colony at the time, VN naturally became a very friendly place for Japan) ?

[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
But Britain and France were determined to maintain their empires after the war. And when America began having problems with the Soviet Union, it wanted Britain and France as allies. So a deal was reached: Britain and France backed the United States against the Soviet Union and the United States backed Britain and France against their colonial independence movements.
[/QUOTE]

Yup and the tragic thing is, at the tail end of the war the US was pretty hostile to the idea of France coming back in VN, and pretty hostile to colonialism in general - that’s pretty much why Allied Command in the Pacific traced that stupid line in the sand clipping Vietnam in two in the first place, with the Chinese occupying the north (and disarming Japanese soldiers there) and the British handling the south. The US knew this would lead to both regions developing distinct administrations that would have to be dismantled and merged back later, they knew that both powers would kind of entrench their troops there and take time to move back out ; and that it would all buy the Vietnamese time to solidify their military and diplomatic positions, the better to fuck up the French when they came back.

But then the Cold War happened and all those neat ideas turned hard right into compromise-city because OMG, russians and commies and conspiracies oh my.

[Little_Nemo]

If there was a moment when the United States should have gotten out of Vietnam it was 1954. We had been supporting France’s efforts to re-establish control over Vietnam. Unofficially, it was because France wanted to maintain its colonies. But that idea couldn’t be sold to the American public so the official story was that France was fighting to keep the communists from taking over Vietnam.

The divide between the French and American goals had been causing problems. France was fighting all Vietnamese nationalists, communist and non-communist alike. But the United States saw the establishment of an independent non-communist Vietnam as a good idea. France, on the other hand, saw no reason to fight for an independent Vietnam.

So France finally walked away from Vietnam (mainly because its other colonial problems in Algeria were closer to home and growing in difficulty). And Britain, which had been supporting France, left Vietnam as well - their interest had been to help a fellow imperialist power and they were willing to walk away as soon as France was.

But the United States had publicly turned this into a contest against communism. And while the issue of French control was settled, the issue of communism was still alive. So even though the reason we got involved in Vietnam was to support France, we stayed in Vietnam after France left.