History of the United States II / Unit 15 USH2 2174 review, 2 to 3 minutes
Why the United States Lost in Vietnam
The idea
Why the United States lost in Vietnam is a question with military, political and domestic answers, and the sources give evidence for each. The military answer begins with the enemy's persistence: the Tet Offensive of unit fourteen failed on the battlefield yet showed, the Yawp says, that the enemy could strike anywhere in the country after years of war, and the Paris accords left over one hundred thousand North Vietnamese soldiers in the South. The political answer concerns the government the United States defended: Digital History records that South Vietnamese generals overthrew and murdered President Diem in nineteen sixty-three, with Kennedy's sanction, and the anchor records that Diem had refused the countrywide elections the Geneva Accords called for.
In practice
A war fought on three fronts at once: in the countryside, in Saigon's government, and on American campuses and television screens.
Where people slip
The domestic answer is the one the anchor dwells on. Tet cut approval of Johnson's handling of the war from forty to twenty-six percent, Digital History records; journalists called the official briefings the Five O'Clock Follies; the Pentagon Papers and My Lai eroded trust; and Kent State and Jackson State brought the war onto campus. Nixon's own policy, Vietnamization, assumed that American troops would leave. Two misreadings sit on either side. The first says the war was lost at home alone, betrayed by protest and press; the anchor's judgement that the South had no hope against the North, and the Yawp's account of the North overwhelming it once fighting resumed, contradict that. The second says the war was unwinnable from the start; the sources do not claim that, and they record a war that American leaders chose to widen and then to leave. The course states the three explanations and the evidence for each, and does not reduce them to one.
Your place on the trail
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Builds on
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- Nothing yet depends on this.
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