Vietnam, war, and the United States

Interactions among Vietnam, war, and the United States go back much farther than many realize, including having a direct influence on the Japanese attack at the Battle of Pearl Harbor. In early 1941, the U.S. had troubled relations with Vichy France, which controlled what was then French Indochina. The U.S. gave two conditional embargoes to Japan, on metal and oil, which would be withdrawn only if Japan withdrew from Indochina. Japan considered expansion into Southeast Asia, as well as the Western shipments, as a matter of national security, and, for its internal reasons, chose war as a means of achieving its resource goals.

Following World War II, there were many issues, worldwide, with colonial states. In general, the U.S. did not support the restoral of colonial rule, but it was also developing a containment policy toward Communism. In 1945, China was in civil war, and some of the Vietnamese politicians in exile were in China. An Office of Strategic Services team, commanded by MAJ Archimedes Patti, had been in China with the Vietnamese, and moved south with them. The formal containment policy would not emerge until 1947, but Washington was already uncomfortable with relations with any Communist organization, internal or external.

Partition, 1954

While some U.S. leaders, such as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Arthur Radford had recommended U.S. military intervention to help the French hold Dien Bien Phu, this idea gained very little momentum, and was firmly rejected by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. After the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the focus of U.S. interest moved to the Geneva conference on the future of Indochina. Eisenhower's Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was vigorously opposed to any relations with Communist parties.

By the end of French rule in 1954, however, the U.S. had a clear policy of containment (see X Article). When the former Indochina was partitioned into North and South, the U.S. priority was supporting whoever would best limit Northern Communist expansion. Self-determination, true democracy, and other high values for the people of South Vietnam were simply not serious considerations, especially with some of the more politically influential supporters of the strongly anticommunist Catholic leaders in the south. These leaders centered around Ngo Dinh Diem and, indirectly, his family; the supporters included Francis Cardinal Spellman and the Kennedy family.

North Vietnamese decision to expand, 1959

In the late Eisenhower administration, the U.S. was quietly concerned with the expansion of North Vietnam. Although it is somewhat unclear when the U.S. firmly knew of the North Vietnamese decision to take control of the south, it is now known that the key decision was made in May 1959, the date commemorated in the name of the [[SIGINT from 1945 to 1989#SIGINT and the Development of NVA Logistics|559th Transportation Group, established to build what was to become the Ho Chi Minh trail. Additional transportation groups were created for maritime supply to the South: Group 759 ran sea-based operations, while Group 959 supplied the Pathet Lao by land routes.

It was the Pathet Lao that most concerned the Eisenhower Administration. In 1959, clandestine military advisors were sent to Laos, under a program originally called Operation Hotfoot. Brigadier General John Heintges, headed the "Program Evaluation Office", the cover name for the program.

This concern, with Laos rather than South Vietnam, continued into the first years of the Kennedy Administration. The Kennedy and Diem families had had a relationship going back to the mid-fifties. The National Security Agency set up a 24-hour monitoring watch on Laos and Thailand.

John F. Kennedy, however, also became concerned with South Vietnam, and started to send advisors. This appealed to strongly anticommunist parts of the U.S. political system, but was not widely publicized. Compared with organized Eastern European and Cuban exiles in the U.S., there was little widespread constituency in the U.S. for any of Southeast Asia.