The Vietnam War.

After the end of the First Indochina War and the Viet Minh defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the countries meeting at the Geneva Conference divided Vietnam into northern and southern halves, ruled by separate governments, and scheduled elections to reunite the country under a unified government. The communists seemed likely to win those elections.   The United States, however, was dedicated to containing the spread of communist rules because they believed in something what was known as a domino theory, which means that when one country falls for communism, the ones around will fall too. The U.S. have appealed the contract of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (1954) and supported the South Vietnamese leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, when he refused to hold the elections. Diem held control of the South Vietnamese Government, but he could not stop the communist intrusion of the South. By 1959, the Viet Cong, South Vietnamese communist guerrillas, and the Viet Minh, began a large scale revolution in the South that marked the opening of the Second Indochina War.
Ngo Dinh Diem failed to capture the loyalties of the people of South Vietnam the way that Ho Chi Minh had done among the population of North Vietnam. Despite U.S. support, Diem’s rural policies and undecided attitude toward necessary changes like land reform only strengthened support for the Viet Cong in the southern countryside. By 1963, Diem’s rule had so deteriorated that he was overthrown and assassinated by several of his generals with the unspoken approval of the Kennedy Administration. Three weeks later, U.S. President John F. Kennedy was also assassinated and the war continued under new leadership in both countries. Before his death, Kennedy had increased the U.S. advisory presence in South Vietnam in the hopes that a U.S.-supported program of “nation-building” would strengthen the new South Vietnamese government.
By August, 1964, the Johnson Administration believed that escalation of the U.S....