While U. S. involvement in Vietnam had increased under Kennedy, it entered a whole new phase under his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson.  Following the Tonkin Gulf Incident , Congress handed the president the total authority to take military action against communist forces threatening South Vietnam.   Thus, even as LBJ geared up to fight for civil rights and eliminate poverty from American life, which he hoped would be his legacy, his campaign decision to increased U. S. commitment to military action in Vietnam laid the seeds for the destruction of that legacy.

After obtaining passage of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, LBJ took no further action until after the 1964 election.  Indeed, throughout the campaign, he denied any plan to increase U. S. involvement.  Telling the American people that we would not "get tied down in a land war in Asia,"  he assured the electorate that he would "not send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves."  In reality, Johnson was in a quandry:  he did not want escalate in Vietnam because it might destroy his consensus and drain money away from the Great Society, but he also did not want to be charged with "losing" Vietnam the way Truman had been charged with "losing" China.

Following his defeat of Goldwater in November, LBJ faced major decisions over Vietnam.  In December, Viet Cong agents exploded a car bomb at a Saigon hotel that housed U. S. military advisors.  The new ambassador, General Maxwell Taylor, recommended a major air offensive against the source of Viet Cong power, North Vietnam.  In February, Johnson sent National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy to Saigon to appraise the situation.  Bundy had been in Saigon only a few days when the Viet Cong atacked the American base at Pleiku, killed 80 American military advisors, wounded another 100, and detroyed ten planes.  

Operation Rolling Thunder

Acting on the advice of Taylor and General William Westmoreland, the U. S. commander in Vietnam, Bundy recommended to Johnson that the U. S. commence bombing attacks against the North as soon as possible to show America's commitment to "stay the course" in Vietnam.  Within hours, American planes bombed a North Vietnames target north of the 17th parallel, and in March, Johnson ordered the commencement of a prolonged bombing camapign against North Vietnam, Operation Rolling Thunder to force the North to desist from further attacks and come to the bargaining table.  On March 8th, the first U. S. combat troops, a division of Marines, arrived at Da Nang to protect the air base there.

By early April, it was clear that the bombing campaign had failed to achieve the desired result, and the president sent in additional U. S. Marines and authorized their use in offensive actions.  Soon thereafter, U. S. troops participated in their first "search and destroy" mission against the Viet Cong.  Thus began the full participation of the United States in the longest and least defensible war in its history.

The Nature of the War

To Johnson and his advisors, the war in Vietnam seemed a vital effort to hold the line against communism--a policy begun under President Truman.  To Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese communists, the war represented a continuation of their struggle to destroy the South Vietnamese government and unite the country.  The Americans, however, could not see this nationalist goal in any other light than that of communism versus freedom.  They saw it simply as an extension of the desire of the Soviets and Red Chinese to dominate the world.

Unfortunately, American technology and power proved ineffective in Vietnam.  There, the enemy seldom appeared in battle.  Instead, they used stealth, ambush, and infiltration to hit the ARVN (South Vietnamese army) and American troops.  Vietnam became a dirty guerrilla war where American troops struggled to fight an elusive enemy in an unfamiliar and atrociouis environment of jagged mountains, leach-infested swamps, and steaming jungles.  The Viet Cong lived on a few handfuls of rice a day and were armed primarily with knives, rifles, and light mortars.  They had little heavy equipment to destroy.  The North Vietnamese economy was primitive by modern standards and was scarcely affected by the U. S. bombing campaign.  Moreover, bombing North Vietnam failed to break communist morale and only strengthened its resolve to hold out.  

Protest

The sudden escalation of the war prompted stirrings of protest on American college campuses.  As casualties mounted with no end in sight, this protest blossomed into a widespread anti-war movement.  Campus antiwar demonstrations increased, and grew more violent as the war continued.  Riots broke out over the presence of the ROTC on campus, or recruiters from major war contractors such as Dow Chemcial Co., which manufactured napalm, the incendiary jelly used against guerrillas in Vietnam.

The Cost of Deception

Anger at Johnson's Vietnam policies was reinforced by his failure to confide in the American public.  Johnson's years in Washington had convinced him that deception was often wiser than truth.  Besides, he wanted both "guns and butter," and feared that revealing the costs of the war would jeopardize his cherished Great Society programs.  The administration talked constantly of "the light at the end of the tunnel," but the months dragged on without the tunnel's end.  Before long critics were referring to the president's "credibility gap."

The president's most serious deception was financial.  Johnson avoided asking for new taxes from Congress to pay for Vietnam's costs and instead his the bill in the Pentagon's huge annual budget.  In effect, he borrowed the money, creating a federal deficit of almost $10 billion in 1966.  By 1968, this figure was over $25 billion.  The process only created inflationary pressures.  By 1968, consumer prices were rising at almost 5% annually--a figure that appeared deeply disturbing after the stable prices of the past decade.

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1968

Sources:

Irwin and Debi Unger, Postwar America:  The United States Since 1945 (New York, 1990).