American involvement in Vietnam began in 1946 when the United States dispatched supplies to French forces during France's failed attempt to restore its colonies in Southeast Asia. In 1954, the French withdrew under a cease-fire agreement, calling for a two-year partition of the country into North and South Vietnam, after which they were to be united following a general election. In the interim, American military and diplomatic advisers replaced the remaining French troops. By 1956, it was clear that the winner of the general election would be the Communist government in the North, led by the popular Ho Chi Minh. Backed by the United States, the leader in the South, Ngo Dinh Diem, refused to hold the election. Meanwhile Diem's autocratic rule had created widespread discontent that led to the development of a strong Communist group within South Vietnam, the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF), also known as the Viet Cong.

In 1958, a civil war broke out, pitting Diem's troops against the Viet Cong, who were closely allied with and supplied by Ho Chi Minh's forces in the North. By 1963, dissatisfaction with Diem and the conduct of the civil war led to a military coup, implicitly sanctioned by the John F. Kennedy administration, in which Diem was executed and replaced by Nguyen van Thieu. After Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, President Lyndon Johnson, operating on the so-called Domino Theory--the fear that if Vietnam became communist, all of Southeast Asia would follow--rapidly expanded the American military presence, which included special-forces shock troops known as Green Berets.

In 1964, Vietnamese torpedo boats (subsequent revelations indicated that President Johnson had misinformed Congress about the nature of the attacks and the activities of the destroyers) allegedly attacked two American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, and by a virtually unanimous vote the U.S. Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave the administration a free hand in expanding the war. American combat troops began operations in February 1965 with the bombing of supply lines in North Vietnam. The following month, the first regular (as opposed to Special Forces) ground troops landed. By the end of 1965, their number had increased to 180,000. By the end of 1967, close to 500,000 American troops were in Vietnam, employing the state-of-the-art destructive technology of modern warfare--saturation bombing, chemical defoliation, the use of napalm, and the destruction of villages after "relocating" the inhabitants. All of this proved to have little significant impact on the enemy. In January 1968, the Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive, attacking more than 40 South Vietnamese cities and towns, including Saigon, and capturing the city of Hue.

The Tet Offensive, portrayed every evening on television news, proved to be the turning point of the war for American citizens at home. More than a year earlier, American college students, conditioned by the Civil Rights Movement, had begun demonstrations, sit-ins, and acts of civil disobedience, assailing the war and the Johnson administration's conduct of it. Fueled by a mixture of idealism and self-interest (they did not want to be drafted to fight the war), the students initiated a national debate filled with passionate intensity, often taking the form of a battle of the young versus the older generations. The Tet Offensive--and, later, the My Lai massacre--demonstrated not only that the war was not going well but also that American generals and politicians had been lying about its success. Johnson's approval ratings plunged, and he subsequently announced that he would not be a candidate for reelection. The stormy 1968 presidential campaign, which saw the assassination of Robert Kennedy and subsequent division among Democrats, ended with the election of Richard M. Nixon, who campaigned on a slogan of "peace with honor" in Vietnam.

Nixon's strategy consisted of arming and training the South Vietnamese military to enable them to replace the American army in the actual conduct of the war. But this approach involved expanding the war by first bombing, and later invading, neighboring Cambodia, which the Viet Cong had been using as a staging area from which to launch their offensives. In 1971, South Vietnamese troops, with American air support, invaded Laos, but the invaders were repelled. In December 1972, the Americans launched the largest, most destructive bombing campaign of the war, concentrating on Hanoi (the northern capital), Haiphong, and other Vietnamese cities. In January 1973, after five years of negotiation, the warring parties signed a cease-fire agreement, which provided for the withdrawal of American military forces, the return of American prisoners of war, and what proved to be the temporary survival of the South Vietnamese regime. Two years later, South Vietnam fell, the evacuation of the American embassy providing the last and most telling picture of a humiliating American defeat.

The death toll of the 10-year war included more than 1 million Vietnamese soldiers, North and South, and more than 55,000 American troops. The final ironic note was that the Domino Theory proved to be a complete misreading of the situation. Postwar Communist regimes in Southeast Asia spent more time in internecine warfare with each other and in developing forms of a capitalist economy than in spreading the doctrines of Karl Marx or Mao Zedong. In America, the war produced a large segment of alienated and disaffected people, especially among those who had either served in or had bitterly opposed the conflict. Both of these groups developed an enduring skepticism of their government. That skepticism would soon grow even stronger as a result of the Watergate investigation.

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