US and Vietnam War Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4500 words

US and Vietnam War - Essay ExampleThe final contingent of the U.S. commitment departed Vietnam 60 days after(prenominal) the signing, but the level of violence between Vietnamese adversaries did not significantly decline no peaceableness came to Vietnam. In the coupled States, Watergate was changing from amber to red, and as his presidency unraveled in 1973, President Richard Nixons secret commitments to southeastern Vietnams President Nguyen Van Thieu were rendered meaningless. Less than two years later, faced with funding a $722 million reckon supplement, the U.S. Congress showed little interest in providing military equipment or financial support to Americas longtime ally, reciprocal ohm Vietnam. On April 30, 1975, South Vietnam ceased to exist.For most Americans, the last images of the war were of the dazed U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin carrying a folded American flag under his arm during the final reasoning by elimination from the U.S. Embassy or perhaps the chaos surroun ding the evacuation of U.S. personnel and Vietnamese families from the Embassy rooftop.No one seemed interested in such critical questions as the personality of the war, why the get together States chose to fight the way it did, how North Vietnam had prevailed, the relationship of political objectives to military strategy, or the lessons that could be derived from the public diplomacy and secret negotiations that had characterized so much of the conflict. The dire situation would change as scholars gained ingress to a series of significant declassifications of primary source documents located in archival depositories in the United States, Vietnam, China, and Russia, and as principal architects of policy-the so-called best and brightest-began to reflect and write on their roles during the period. In 1995, former defence force Secretary Robert S. McNamara broke his own long silence on the subject with the admission that we were ill-use, terribly wrong (McNamara & Van De Mark 1995 ). Another principal architect of Vietnam policy, political scientist Henry Kissinger, has generated several books that address why the United States fought in Vietnam (Kissinger 1999). We approach our topic chronologically by examining 30 years of war from 1945 to 1975-beginning with the past Vietnamese proclamation of independence and ending with the fall of South Vietnam in April 1975. We arrive at identified what we count are important components of this unfolding saga, and we begin from the intellectual premise that truly understanding why the United States fought in Vietnam requires that we comprehend the roots of the conflict (before it became Americas war in Vietnam) from the perspective of countries other than the United States- specifically, Vietnam, China, and the Soviet Union. After all, it was the United States that chose to fight in Vietnams war (Young 1991).ResearchThe disciplines of history and political science have illuminated many important aspects of the war, including presidential personality and leadership, war powers, public opinion, the role of the media, advisory processes and interactions, political dissent, and congressional-executive relations. Political science has also contributed significant theoretical advances on