DBQ C—The Vietnam War Name ______________________________

History 8

2004

What factors explain the failure of the United States to achieve its objectives in the Vietnam War?

Reminders:

1. Use all the documents. Cite documents with parenthetical references.

2. Develop a clear thesis that covers the entire topic. Your thesis should answer the question.

3. Be consistent in your theme. Do not advocate conflicting views. Some evidence will not support your thesis and will need to be confronted in your argument.

4. Plan to have about 55 minutes to write.

Document 1

President Lyndon B. Johnson (Address at Johns Hopkins University) April 7, 1965:

Tonight Americans and Asians are dying for a world where each people may choose its own path to change….

Vietnam is far away from this quiet campus. We have no territory there, nor do we seek any. The war is dirty and brutal and difficult. And some 400 young men, born into an America that is bursting with opportunity and promise, have ended their lives on Vietnam's steaming soil….

Why must this Nation hazard its ease, and its interest, and its power for the sake of a people so far away?

We fight because we must fight if we are to live in a world where every country can shape its own destiny. And only in such a world will our own freedom be finally secure….

The first reality is that North Vietnam has attacked the independent nation of South Vietnam. Its object is total conquest.

Of course, some of the people of South Vietnam are participating in attack on their own government. But trained men and supplies, orders and arms, flow in a constant stream from north to south.

This support is the heartbeat of the war….

The confused nature of this conflict cannot mask the fact that it is the new face of an old enemy.

Over this war—and all Asia—is another reality: the deepening shadow of Communist China. The rulers in Hanoi are urged on by Peking. This is a regime which has destroyed freedom in Tibet, which has attacked India, and has been condemned by the United Nations for aggression in Korea. It is a nation which is helping the forces of violence in almost every continent. The contest in Vietnam is part of a wider pattern of aggressive purposes….

We are there because we have a promise to keep. Since 1954 every American president has offered support to the people of South Vietnam. We have helped to build, and we have helped to defend. Thus, over many years, we have made a national pledge to help South Vietnam defend its independence.

And I intend to keep that promise.

To dishonor that pledge, to abandon this small and brave nation to its enemies, and to the terror that must follow, would be an unforgivable wrong.

We are also there to strengthen world order. Around the globe, from Berlin to Thailand, are people whose well-being rests, in part, on the belief that they can count on us if they are attacked. To leave Vietnam to its fate would shake the confidence of all these people in the value of an American commitment and in the value of America's word. The result would be increased unrest and instability, and even wider war.

We are also there because there are great stakes in the balance. Let no one think for a moment that retreat from Vietnam would bring an end to conflict. The battle would be renewed in one country and then another. The central lesson of our time is that the appetite of aggression is never satisfied. To withdraw from one battlefield means only to prepare for the next. We must say in southeast Asia—as we did in Europe—in the words of the Bible: "Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further."

Document 2

Ho Chi Minh (from a letter to the American magazine Majority of One) May 1964:

For ten years now, U.S. Governments and their agents have tried to crush the resistance of a heroic people by the use of brutal force. They want to turn our fourteen million compatriots in South Vietnam into slaves, and the southern part of our country into a new-type colony and a military base with a view to menacing the independence of the Indochinese and other Southeast Asian countries and attacking North Vietnam....

But facts have shown that the path of aggression followed by the U.S. imperialists in South Vietnam is only a dark "tunnel" as admitted by the late President John Kennedy.

The heroic people of South Vietnam are resolved not to balk at the guns of the aggressors and traitors. Our compatriots would rather sacrifice everything than live in slavery. So far, under the leadership of the National Front for Liberation, the patriotic forces in South Vietnam have daily grown in strength and enjoy an increasing prestige at home and abroad. More than half of the population and over two-thirds of the territory of South Vietnam have been liberated. Over the past three years alone, the South Vietnam Liberation Armed Forces and people have wiped out or disintegrated hundreds of thousands of enemy troops, thousands of U.S. officers and servicemen have been killed or wounded. The Liberation Armed Forces have shot down hundreds of aircraft and captured tens of thousands of U.S.-made weapons of various kinds. All the strategies and tactics applied by the United States in South Vietnam have completely failed. Of the 8,000 strategic hamlets already set up (which are in fact fascist-like concentration camps) over 80 percent have been destroyed. All these victories of the patriotic forces in South Vietnam amply show that the people of South Vietnam by themselves are fully in a position to thwart all aggressive maneuvers and plans of the U.S. imperialists, and that the war of aggression now being waged by the U.S. Government and its agents is a hopeless war doomed to defeat.

Document 3

President Lyndon Johnson:

By keeping a lid on all the designated targets, I knew I could keep the control of the war in my own hands. If China reacted to our slow escalation by threatening to retaliate, we’d have plenty of time to ease off the bombing. But this control—so essential for preventing World War III—would be lost the moment we unleashed a total assault on the North—for that would be rape rather than seduction—and then there would be no turning back. The Chinese reaction would be instant and total.

Document 4

Tim O’Brien (from If I Die In A Combat Zone) 1969:

We slay one of them, hit a mine, kill another, hit another mine. It is funny. We walk through the mines, trying to catch the Viet Cong Forty-eighth Battalion like inexperienced hunters after a hummingbird. But Charlie finds us far more often than we find him. He is hidden among the mass of civilians, or in tunnels, or in jungles. So we walk to find him, stalking the mythical, phantom-like Forty-eighth Battalion from here to there to here to there. And each piece of ground left behind us is his from the moment we are gone on our next hunt. It is not a war fought for territory, nor for pieces of land that will be won and held. It is not a war fought to win the hearts of the Vietnamese nationals, not in the wake of contempt drawn on our faces and on theirs, not in the wake of a burning village, a trampled rice paddy, a battered detainee.

Document 5

Michael Maclear (from The Ten Thousand Day War):

[Quoting General William Westmoreland on the effects of the Tet Offensive] “We had as fine a military force as America has ever assembled—a force that could have brought the war to an end if it hadn’t been for political decisions that prohibited that.” As Westmoreland sees it, “doom and gloom” reporting “gave the American people the impression that the Americans were being defeated on the battlefield, swayed public opinion to the point that political authority made the decision to take all the pressure off the enemy at a time he was virtually on the ropes.”

Document 6

Senator Robert F. Kennedy, February 8, 1968:

Our enemy, savagely striking at will across all of South Vietnam, has finally shattered the mask of official illusion with which we have concealed our true circumstances, even from ourselves. But a short time ago we were serene in our reports and predictions of progress.

The Viet Cong will probably withdraw from the cities, as they were forced to withdraw from the American Embassy. Thousands of them will be dead. But they will, nevertheless, have demonstrated that no part or person of South Vietnam is secure from their attacks: neither district capitals nor American bases, neither the peasant in his rice paddy nor the commanding general of our own great forces....

We must, first of all, rid ourselves of the illusion that the events of the past two weeks represent some sort of victory. That is not so. It is said the Viet Cong will not be able to hold the cities. This is probably true. But they have demonstrated despite all our reports of government strength and enemy weakness, that half a million American soldiers with 700,000 Vietnamese allies, with total command of the air, total command of the sea, backed by huge resources and the most modem weapons, are unable to secure even a single city from the attacks of an enemy whose total strength is about 250, 000….

For years we have been told that the measure of our success and progress in Vietnam was increasing security and control for the population. Now we have seen that none of the population is secure and no area is under sure control….

This has not happened because our men are not brave or effective, because they are. It is because we have misconceived the nature of the war. It is because we have sought to resolve by military might a conflict whose issue depends upon the will and conviction of the South Vietnamese people. It is like sending a lion to halt an epidemic of jungle rot.

This misconception rests on a second illusion—the illusion that we can win a war which the South Vietnamese cannot win for themselves. You cannot expect people to risk their lives and endure hardship unless they have a stake in their own society. They must have a clear sense of identification with their own government, a belief they are participating in a cause worth fighting for. People will not fight to line the pockets of generals or swell the bank accounts of the wealthy. They are far more likely to close their eyes and shut their doors in the face of the government—even as they did last week.

More than any election, more than any proud boost, that single fact reveals the truth. We have an ally in name only. We support a government without supporters. Without the efforts of American arms that government would not last a day.

The third illusion is that the unswerving pursuit of military victory, whatever its cost, is in the interest of either ourselves or the people of Vietnam. For the people of Vietnam, the last three years have meant little but horror. Their tiny land has been devastated by a weight of bombs and shells greater than Nazi Germany knew in the Second World War. We have dropped 12 tons of bombs for every square mile in North and South Vietnam. Whole provinces have been substantially destroyed. More than two million South Vietnamese are now homeless refugees.

Imagine the impact in our own country if an equivalent number—over 25 million Americans-were wandering homeless or interned in refugee camps, and millions more refugees were being created as New York and Chicago, Washington and Boston, were being destroyed by a war raging in their streets.

Whatever the outcome of these battles, it is the people we seek to defend who are the greatest losers . . .

Unable to defeat our enemy or break his will—at least without a huge, long and ever more costly effort—we must actively seek a peaceful settlement. We can no longer harden our terms every time Hanoi indicates it may be prepared to negotiate; and we must be willing to foresee a settlement which will give the Viet Cong a chance to participate in the political life of the country...

Document 7

President Richard Nixon, November 1969:

My fellow Americans … we really only have two choices open to us if we want to end this war:

I can order an immediate, precipitate withdrawal of all Americans from Vietnam without regard to the effects of that action.

Or we can persist in our search for a just peace, through a negotiated settlement if possible or through continued implementation of our plan for Vietnamization if necessary, a plan in which we will withdraw all of our forces from Vietnam on a schedule in accordance with our program, as the South Vietnamese become strong enough to defend their own freedom.

I have chosen this second course. It is not the easy way. It is the right way. It is a plan which will end the war and serve the cause of peace, not just in Vietnam but in the Pacific and in the world.

In speaking of the consequences of a precipitate withdrawal, I mentioned that our allies would lose confidence in America.

Far more dangerous, we would lose confidence in ourselves. Oh, the immediate reaction would be a sense of relief that our men were coming home. But as we saw the consequences of what we had done, inevitable remorse and divisive recrimination would scar our spirit as a people.

Document 8

Kissinger Picture

Document 9

President Richard Nixon, January 1973:

Now that we have achieved an honorable agreement, let us be proud that America did not settle for a peace that would have betrayed our allies, that would have abandoned our prisoners of war, or that would have ended the war for us but would have continued the war for the 50 million people of Indochina.