E-Seminar Summary

In the e-seminar The Vietnam War , the seventh in the series America Since 1945, Alan Brinkley discusses the policies and decisions that led to the expansion of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. He explains why the United States, the world's strongest military power, failed to meets its objectives, one of which was to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam.

The Lesson

The Goals of the Lesson

This teaching activity focuses on a troubling question: Why did the United States government fail to prevent the communist takeover of South Vietnam in 1975? Did the war go badly as early as the 1960s, under the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson? Did their administrations make an insufficient military commitment to South Vietnam? Did the antiwar movement at home and abroad affect U.S. diplomatic and military decisions? In this activity, students are asked to analyze two primary sources, one textual and one visual. The textual source is a memorandum—from Robert McNamara, secretary of state, to President Lyndon Johnson in 1965—in which McNamara recommends additional military deployments to Vietnam. The visual source is a photograph from 1968 showing antiwar protesters outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Both documents are from the AP-level DBQ The Vietnam War: The Home Front.

This teaching activity will teach students how to

• pose questions about a document's author, date, and publication
• identify the author's point of view
• determine the author's intended audience
• understand the author's purpose or agenda
• recognize the author's style and tone

Primary Sources to be Examined

• Robert McNamara, "Recommendations of Additional Deployments to Vietnam," memorandum to President Lyndon Johnson (20 July 1965)
• The Siege of Chicago, August 1968, AP / Wide World photos
• Reproductions of material artifacts at the Web site The Psychedelic '60s: Literary Tradition and Social Change, University of Virginia

Step 1: Document Analysis: McNamara Memorandum

Distribute copies of the full-text memorandum and photograph to your students.

• Document Analysis Worksheet
• Photo Analysis Worksheet

Suggest that students read either their textbooks or Professor Brinkley's e-seminar The Vietnam War.

Step 2: Class Discussion

While in pairs, students will first discuss the full text (and not the excerpt) of Robert McNamara's memorandum of 1965. Their discussion is likely to lead them to the questions of how and why the United States became involved in South Vietnam during the 1960s and of why U.S. military involvement was escalated during the Johnson administration. Professor Brinkley explains that officials in the Johnson administration felt that, without increased U.S. support, the South Vietnamese government would collapse. In their pairs, your students can discuss and answer the following questions.

Guiding Questions: McNamara Memorandum

1. What events have occurred or what decisions have been made that set the stage for the making of this document (McNamara memorandum)? The student will need to call on outside information.
2. What is the military significance of the document? What is its political significance? What is its diplomatic significance?
3. Was the document confidential? How does its having been, or not having been, confidential affect how the document's intended audience might have received or acted on it?
4. What did the Tonkin Gulf Resolution indicate about the power of the president?
5. What were the political and military events and conditions, during the period 1965 to 1968, that most influenced President Johnson's decision to escalate U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War?
6. Why did President Johnson and many officials in his administration think that they had no choice but to escalate? Do you think they were correct in their assessment that they had no choice?
7. Why did the U.S. military, the most formidable in the world, fail to defend South Vietnam from North Vietnam or, for that matter, fail to gain control over the North? Who bore more responsibility for that failure, the political leadership in Washington or the military leadership on the ground in Vietnam? Were the strategies or battlefield tactics of the U.S. military not sound? Was a successful outcome impossible from the war's beginning, when the French intervened in Indochina in the 1950s?
8. Did domestic politics—specifically, the antiwar movement—affect the diplomatic and military considerations of the U.S. government?

Step 3: Image Analysis: Protest Photograph

The analysis of the photograph of antiwar protestors facing the National Guard in 1968 can lead to a lively debate on how the antiwar movement affected the Johnson administration and Nixon's presidential campaign and eventual victory. Conflict on the home front should be analyzed to determine how domestic issues influenced decisions that the U.S. government made about the war. Professor Brinkley points out the "ironic consequences of the war": As the war escalated, so did domestic opposition to it, and that in turn undermined the United States' war effort. In pairs (you might want to reassign the partners for the image analysis), your students should discuss the following questions.

Guiding Questions: Protest Photograph

1. What is happening in this photograph? Who are the people in it? Why are they confronting each other?
2. What up to this point has happened in the prosecution of the war to incite young people to protest outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968?

Step 4: Class Discussion

For the class discussion, ask your students to remain with their partners but to turn toward you, the teacher. Review each guiding question. When you are satisfied with your students' level of understanding, raise the larger issue of why the U.S. failed in its efforts to prevent the communist takeover in Vietnam. Lead your students to integrate the domestic and the military considerations. If they have difficulty, draw a chart on the board (see below). You can add more columns if you choose.

Additional Activities

A Scrapbook: An Alternative Activity for AP or Non-AP Students

Many AP students fall into the trap of simply describing or "reporting" on the documents instead of analyzing various sources and integrating the evidence into a coherent essay. Collecting material for a scrapbook on the 1960s, students can assume the role of historian, interpreting the past through the use of primary and secondary sources.

Tell your students they were rummaging through the attic and found some of their parents' memorabilia from the 1960s. Ask them to create a scrapbook featuring any aspect of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. It can involve the home front, the military front, or a combination of both. If possible, your students should interview their parents and include in the scrapbooks brief notations from those interviews.

Guiding Questions for Student Interview of Parents

• What events in the personal lives of your parents during the 1960s influenced them to support or oppose the war?
• How did they convey their beliefs? Did they express them through music, art, fashion (e.g., hairstyles, jewelry), or some other medium?
• Did any of the events in the 1960s—political assassinations, race riots, the war itself—have an especially strong impact on them? How were they affected personally by any of the events they identify as significant?

To contextualize and document the stories of their parents, other relatives, or neighbors, students should try to procure photographs, album covers, or excerpts from magazine stories of the 1960s or to identify popular slogans that they think aptly express some widely shared mood of that period. Students should try to interview anyone willing to talk about any personal experiences they had with respect to the Vietnam War. They might contact a local chapter of an association of Vietnam veterans.

For documentation and background material on how the ideas of the 1960s drove the period's cultural revolutions, students can go to the AP teaching activity for the Brinkley e-seminar Cultural Revolutions. There students are asked to examine The Psychedelic '60s: Literary Tradition and Social Change, an online exhibit published by the University of Virginia. The site is divided into different thematic sections on the sixties, each of which includes annotated album covers, book covers, photographs, and posters. Divide your students into small groups of three or four, and assign a different section to each group. Sections include

• Civil Rights http://www.lib.virginia.edu/speccol/exhibits/sixties/civil.html
• Vietnam War http://www.lib.virginia.edu/speccol/exhibits/sixties/viet.html
• Rock Music http://www.lib.virginia.edu/speccol/exhibits/sixties/rock.html
• Hippies http://www.lib.virginia.edu/speccol/exhibits/sixties/hippies.html
• Four Radical Groups http://www.lib.virginia.edu/speccol/exhibits/sixties/radical.html
• Posters http://www.lib.virginia.edu/speccol/exhibits/sixties/posters.html

The memorabilia that students will choose and annotate for their scrapbooks can include commentary from their interview(s). For more related documents, see the DBQ The Vietnam War: The Home Front.

When students have recorded in their scrapbooks all their information about the primary sources, they can share their ideas with the rest of the class. As one student speaks, the others can take notes, and afterward they can pose questions. When all have had their turn at presenting their scrapbook, they will have been exposed to information on the primary sources and will have formed a vivid impression of the many strands of evidence, gathered from both Vietnam and the United States, that are woven into any description of the American response to the government decisions about U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

Finally, students should write a summary paragraph based on the materials they collected in their scrapbook, to which the paragraph should serve as an introduction. They should clearly state what they think were the chief reasons—whether political, social, or military—for the U.S. failure in South Vietnam. You might by asking them to write complete statements that begin with one of the following clauses or any other that you think would be be appropriate:

• I'm surprised that . . .
• I am convinced that . . .
• I wonder why . . .

Conclusion

By analyzing the two documents here, students should acquire an understanding of some of the important issues the U.S. government faced during the period leading up to the final withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam in 1975 and to North Vietnam's conquest of the South soon afterward. By focusing on the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, your students will gain appreciation for the political realities that Presidents Nixon and Ford inherited and affected each in his own turn. You can assign the related DBQ, The Vietnam War: The Home Front as a further activity.

Sources Used

• Robert McNamara, "Recommendations of Additional Deployments to Vietnam," memorandum to President Lyndon Johnson (20 July 1965), reprinted in The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam, Senator Gravel ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1971), 4:619–22, and reproduced at http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon4/doc261.htm.
• Photograph of demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention, Chicago, 1968, AP / Wide World. You can view this photograph in the Primary Sources directory.
• The Psychedelic '60s: Literary Tradition and Social Change, University of Virginia, http://www.lib.virginia.edu/speccol/exhibits/sixties/index.html.