By 1966 the US had become officially involved in the war in Vietnam. In 1964 the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, issued by Congress, gave President Johnson the broad power to use military force in Southeast Asia without congressional approval or a formal declaration of war. This resolution therefore greatly increased the war-making power of the president. The resolution was signed after a destroyer, the USS Maddox, was allegedly attacked twice in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of North Vietnam. However, the Maddox had been on a secret intelligence mission, and it was revealed that the second attack never actually occurred. Nevertheless, both President Johnson and Congress used this alleged incident to justify increasing US involvement in Vietnam.
The number of US military advisors in Vietnam increased under President Kennedy, and by 1965 there were 200,000 US troops in Vietnam and the draft quota had doubled. In addition to increasing US troop presence, LBJ also increased US bombings of North Vietnam. By 1966 anti-war protests began, mainly led by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). These protests would increase and intensify by 1968.
In Johnson's State of the Union Address in 1966, the president attempted to appease these protesters and other opponents of the war. He stated that the US had no territorial or economic ambitions in Vietnam while also reaffirming the United States' commitment to assisting the South Vietnamese fight the North Vietnamese, no matter the cost. Thus LBJ confirmed his belief that the US should stay in Vietnam at a time when war was becoming increasingly unpopular. Throughout 1966, Johnson would continue increasing US troops in Vietnam to 400,000.
Friday, August 9, 2019
What was the significance of Lyndon B. Johnson's speech in 1966 on Vietnam War?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Why is the fact that the Americans are helping the Russians important?
In the late author Tom Clancy’s first novel, The Hunt for Red October, the assistance rendered to the Russians by the United States is impor...
-
There are a plethora of rules that Jonas and the other citizens must follow. Again, page numbers will vary given the edition of the book tha...
-
The poem contrasts the nighttime, imaginative world of a child with his daytime, prosaic world. In the first stanza, the child, on going to ...
-
The given two points of the exponential function are (2,24) and (3,144). To determine the exponential function y=ab^x plug-in the given x an...
-
The play Duchess of Malfi is named after the character and real life historical tragic figure of Duchess of Malfi who was the regent of the ...
-
The only example of simile in "The Lottery"—and a particularly weak one at that—is when Mrs. Hutchinson taps Mrs. Delacroix on the...
-
Hello! This expression is already a sum of two numbers, sin(32) and sin(54). Probably you want or express it as a product, or as an expressi...
-
Macbeth is reflecting on the Weird Sisters' prophecy and its astonishing accuracy. The witches were totally correct in predicting that M...
No comments:
Post a Comment