t Asia left by assassinated President John F. Kennedy. He assumed that America's role in Vietnam would remain a limited one, but assured the world that he would not allow South Vietnam to be taken over by the Vietcong of the North.
What quickly happened, however, was that the war escalated into something quite different. In August 1964, the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred in which an American gunboat was attacked by Vietcong forces. This further exacerbated the situation, and by 1965 the war was in full force, Johnson now attempting to win the war rather than negotiate with the Communists. It is not the purpose of this paper to present a detailed history of the Vietnam conflict, however; it is sufficient to note that a costly stalemate developed. It quickly became certain that although the North lacked sufficient resources to forcibly drive the United States out of Vietnam, the United States also was unable to prevent Communist entrenchment in the South. In the next election, Johnson lost popularity, and became known as the President who took Americans to war. In 1968, Richard Nixon was elected to the White House largely on his campaign promise of a quick but honorable end of the unpopular Vietnam War of "peace with honor."
From its inception, America's policies toward Vietnam had their critics. Liberals, called "Doves" by Johnson, viewed the war as a local civil conflict, and sneered at the domino effect, denying that the Communist threat in Vietnam was as major as the administration purported it to be. Anti-war sentiment appeared in the university community, in some forms of the media, and was often taken up as a cause by civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. Most of the anti-war movement in the United States was based on what supporters of the peace movement believed to be the immorality of the Vietnam War. What was new, however, was that with the advent of increased television coverage, the brutality ...