The War In Vietnam

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enemy of the United States. Drawing an analogy with the unsuccessful
appeasement of fascist dictators before World War II, the Truman administration
believed that any sign of communist aggression must be met quickly and
forcefully by the United States and its allies. This reactive policy was known
as containment.
In Vietnam the target of containment was Ho Chi Minh and the Vietminh
front he had created in 1941. Ho and his chief lieutenants were communists with
long-standing connections to the Soviet Union. They were also ardent Vietnamese
nationalists who fought first to rid their country of the Japanese and then,
after 1945, to prevent France from reestablishing its former colonial mastery
over Vietnam and the rest of Indochina. Harry S. Truman and other American
leaders, having no sympathy for French colonialism, favored Vietnamese
independence. But expanding communist control of Eastern Europe and the triumph
of the communists in China's civil was made ...

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all administrations from
1950 through the 1960s into a firm anticommunist stand in Vietnam.
Because American policy makers failed to appreciate the amount of effort
that would be required to exert influence on Vietnam's political and social
structure, the course of American policy led to a steady escalation of U.S.
involvement. President Dwight D. Eisenhower increased the level of aide to the
French but continued to avoid military intervention, even when the French
experienced a devastating defeat at Dien Bien Phu in the spring of 1954.
Following that battle, an international conference at Geneva, Switzerland,
arranged a cease-fire and provided for a North-South partition of Vietnam ...

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