Truman’s attempt to prevent Ho Chi Minh’s communist insurgents from seizing Vietnam failed when the French army surrendered to Ho’s troops at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Eisenhower, equally unwilling to accept a communist victory, then supported creation of an anticommunist South Vietnam, headed by Ngo Dinh Diem, a Vietnamese nationalist who hated the communists. While the United States poured millions of dollars into strengthening Diem’s South Vietnam, and especially its army, Ho Chi Minh consolidated his rule in North Vietnam. Those Viet Minh units that remained in the South—they came to be known as Vietcong— were instructed to form secret cells and bide their time. During the late 1950s they gained in strength and militancy.
In May 1959 Ho decided that the time had come to overthrow Diem. Vietcong guerrillas infiltrated thousands of villages, ambushed South Vietnamese convoys, and assassinated government officials. Soon the Vietcong controlled large sections of the countryside, some almost within sight of the capital city of Saigon.
By the time Kennedy took office, Diem’s government was tottering. As a senator, Kennedy had endorsed Diem and the attempt to build a noncommunist South Vietnam. He called it the “cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone in the arch, the finger in the dike.” After the Bay of Pigs debacle, furthermore, Kennedy worried that his credibility with Khrushchev had been damaged. “If he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts,” he told an aide, “we won’t get anywhere with him. So we have to act.” Vietnam, he added, “looks like the place.”
Kennedy sharply increased the American military and economic commitment to South Vietnam. At the end of 1961 there were 3,200 American military personnel in the country; within two years, there were more than 16,000, and 120 American soldiers had been killed. Despite the expanded effort, by the summer of
In the summer of 1963, Buddhist monks protested against the rule of Diem (and his brother, the Catholic archbishop of Vietnam) by setting themselves on fire.
1963 Diem’s regime was in ruins. An ardent Catholic, he cracked down on the Buddhists, who, joined by students, protested his repression. Thousands were arrested, and some were shot. In protest, several Buddhist monks became martyrs by setting themselves on fire in public.
Unable to persuade Diem to moderate his policies, Kennedy sent word to dissident Vietnamese generals of his willingness to support them if they ousted Diem. On November 1 several of these generals surrounded the presidential palace with troops and tanks, seized Diem, and killed him. Kennedy, though appalled by Diem’s death, recognized the new junta. The decision to overthrow Diem was fateful; it committed the United States to finding a solution to a worsening situation in Vietnam.
World History
