CS

Key Events in Vietnam War

Key events:

  • Dien Bien Phu

A French outpost that the Vietminh overruns and causes France to surrender. 

  • Geneva Accords

Temporarily divided Vietnam along the 17th parallel. Elections to unify Vietnam were rallied for in 1956. 

  • Gulf of Tonkin Incident/Resolution

US Destroyer Maddox thought NV was attacking them in the Gulf of Tonkin, but it was a sonar malfunction. This lie was used to get Congress to pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which gave the US President (LBJ) “broad military powers in Vietnam”. 

  • Operation Rolling Thunder

Initiated because 8 Americans were killed at the Pleiku air base. The first sustained carpet bombing of North Vietnam and brought in 50,000+ American troops to South Vietnam. The bombing was ineffective because weapons were being made in China and USSR, Ho Chi Minh trail was in Laos and Cambodia, and Vietcong had intricate underground tunnels. 

  • Invasion of Cambodia

Nixon wanted to root out Vietcong bases and the Ho Chi Minh trail, but he was without Congressional approval and campus protests resurge against the war. 

  • Tet Offensive

Beginning of 1968, the Viet Cong attacked South Vietnam cities to try to gain land, but they didn’t hold land for very long. Although it was militarily unsuccessful, it killed American belief that the US was winning and LBJ backed out of re-election because his escalation killed his ratings. 

  • 1968 Democratic National Convention

(Chicago) Fights on convention floor over Vietnam, Humphrey won nomination, Democratic party in shambles, the SDS and Yippie protestors were clashing with police. Led to trial of the Chicago 7 to make an example of the protestors. 

  • Kent State shootings

(Ohio) 4 students were shot and killed by National Guardsmen after days of anti-Nixon protests in reaction to his expansion into Cambodia and Laos. Student protestors had burned the ROTC office and threw rocks at the National Guard previously, and the NG opened fire on the crowd. 

  • Fall of Saigon

(April 30, 1975) Communist forces took over Saigon after NV rolled tanks down National Highway One. 1.5 million fled South Vietnam, 400,000 forced into re-education camps. NV bombed airports to keep people from leaving. The US was already out of Vietnam. 

  • Paris Peace Accords

The US left Vietnam by 1973, with the agreement of a ceasefire, US troop withdrawal, and the return of American POWs. In Vietnam, however, the war continued. 

  • Watergate

Named after Watergate Hotel, where 5 of Nixon’s plumbers were caught trying to fix a bug they’d already placed at a Democratic Party meeting (1972). McCord, one of the plumbers, was carrying a check that led back to CREEP (Committee to Re-Elect the President), and exposed the entire conspiracy during an investigation. John Dean testified that Nixon knew and approved of all of it since the beginning (1973), and Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of the Oval Office Tapes to the Senate Committee. 18.5 min of tape was missing when the Committee finally had access to them. All led to 30+ people jailed, but Nixon got away with it as an “unindicted co-conspirator” and was later pardoned by Gerald Ford. 

  • War Powers Act

(1973) Congress passed this with the intention of limiting a President’s power over military actions during war and required the President to justify their military actions to Congress within a set amount of time after the action. 

  • My Lai

(1968) A city in South Vietnam that suffered a massacre at the hands of US troops after the Vietcong failed to occupy it. US soldiers raped and murdered Vietnamese women, children, and infants. The troop’s leader tried to report it to his higher-ups but it was covered up. Seymour Hersh discovered and exposed it in 1969 after hearing soldiers bragging about it in a bar, and the military threw the troop leader under the bus for it.