Create a new account

It's simple, and free.

The Vietnam War

The Vietnam War was the longest of America's wars, lasting at least eight years from the Tonkin Gulf incident of 1965 to the end of direct US participation in combat in 1973. The bookends of the war extend additional years in each direction; American "advisors" were fighting and dying in Vietnam from the beginning of the 1960s, and the summary image of the war's end is the frantic helicopter evacuation from the roof of the American embassy in Saigon in 1975 (Sheehan, 790).

In between those events, the war in Vietnam cost America nearly seventy thousand soldiers' lives, and approximate half a trillion dollars (in present-day value). It helped to lauch the inflationary spiral that dominated the economy of the 1970s and early 1980s; an inflation which requires us to make the specification of "present-day value" above, and which still remains a lurking spectre in our economic life. It brought down the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, and was a central factor in the election of his successor, Richard Nixon. Five years later, it brought down Nixon in turn. Two decades and four presidencies later still, Vietnam, in the form of the "draft issue" (Rockman, 333) lurks behind the electorate's deeply polarized attitudes toward Bill Clinton.

Nearly a third of a century after the Vietnam War thrust itself onto the front pages and the evening news, its divisive influence still hangs over American public life. In the early 1960s, a large majority of Americans had confidence in the honesty and competency of the federal government. Today, suspicion of the government is pervasive. Many events and attitudes have contributed to that suspicion, but the largest factor in both elements of doubt is the legacy of Vietnam. Vietnam led to disbelief in the government's honesty because of the revelation that the government had lied, and to disbelief in the government's competence because the war was lost. The latter is perhaps even more fundamenta...

Page 1 of 8 Next >

More on The Vietnam War...

Loading...
APA     MLA     Chicago
The Vietnam War. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 08:39, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1707990.html