![]() ![]() Vietnam was the first “living room war.” Television, print media, and liberal access to the battlefield provided unprecedented coverage of the war’s brutality. Americans confronted grisly images of casualties and atrocities. In one protest, hundreds were arrested after surrounding the Pentagon. By 1967, anti-war demonstrations drew crowds in the hundreds of thousands. With no end in sight, protesters burned their draft cards, refused to pay income tax, occupied government buildings, and delayed trains loaded with war materials. Stalemate, body counts, hazy war aims, and the draft all catalyzed the anti-war movement and triggered protests throughout the United States and Europe. Soon hundreds of thousands of troops were deployed. The first combat troops arrived in South Vietnam in 1965 and as the war deteriorated the Johnson administration escalated the war. Only two senators opposed the resolution. The resolution authorized the president to send bombs and troops into Vietnam. ![]() The Johnson administration distorted the incident to provide a pretext for escalating American involvement in Vietnam. ![]() This all changed in 1964, when Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution after a minor episode involving American and North Vietnamese naval forces. Kennedy deployed over sixteen thousand military advisers to help South Vietnam suppress a domestic communist insurgency. The American public remained largely unaware of Vietnam in the early 1960s, even as President John F. But the French were defeated in 1954 and Vietnam was divided into the communist North and anti-communist South. After the communist takeover of China in 1949, the United States financially supported the French military’s effort to retain control over its colonies in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. The “domino theory”-the idea that if a country fell to communism, then neighboring states would soon follow-governed American foreign policy. Perhaps no single issue contributed more to public disillusionment than the Vietnam War. Frank Wolfe, Vietnam War protestors at the March on the Pentagon, Lyndon B. ![]()
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