forces were already engaged in bombing campaigns on the border of Vietnam and Laos (with the intention of disrupting supply transport to North Vietnamese troops) and supporting the South Vietnamese in raids of Viet Cong strongholds in rural areas of the country. President Kennedy was himself assassinated a few weeks later and his successor, Johnson, believed that the only way to stem the losses suffered by South Vietnamese troops was to increase U.S. Kennedy, which had already sent military advisors to the country to support homegrown forces. By 1963, his hold over power in South Vietnam was so tenuous that he was ultimately overthrown (and assassinated) by some of his own generals in a move reportedly sanctioned by the administration of President John F. Support for Diem continued to erode within South Vietnam, and it wasn’t helped by the leader’s unpopular domestic agriculture policies. This insurgency marked the beginning of the Second Indochina War. Still, the communists still held sway in much of South Vietnam and, by 1959, the communist guerrillas known as the Viet Cong and the Viet Minh (the Northern Vietnamese military) had launched an insurgency in Diem’s country. However, the United States was committed to containing the spread of communism-this was at the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union-and by the late 1950s, the American government had thrown its support behind South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem when he refused to hold elections. In 1954, following the defeat of the French colonialists at the hands of the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu, the last battle of the First Indochina War, the country of Vietnam was divided into northern and southern halves, ruled by separate regimes, during the Geneva Conference.Įlections were scheduled to reform the country under a unified government-elections the communists of the North, who had support in the rural South, were favored to win. However, that ultimately proved not to be the case. Johnson, with the understanding that the president would seek their approval before launching a full-scale war in Vietnam with U.S. Navy, both Maddox and Turner Joy reported being fired upon by North Vietnamese patrol boats, but later doubts surrounding the veracity of the second attack, on Turner Joy, emerged.Ĭongress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution at the insistence of President Lyndon B.
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