Cold War SAQ-A

“An arrogant and stubborn faith in America’s power to shape the course of foreign events compounded the dangers sown by ideological rigidity. Policymakers . . . shared a common . . . conviction that the United States not only should, but could, control political conditions in South Vietnam, as elsewhere throughout much of the world. This conviction had led Washington to intervene progressively deeper in South Vietnamese affairs over the years. . . . This conviction prompted policymakers to escalate the war. Domestic political pressures exerted an equally powerful . . . influence over the course of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. . . . Another ‘loss’ to communism in East Asia risked renewed and devastating attacks from the right.”

Brian VanDeMark, historian, Into the Quagmire, 1995

“The escalation of U.S. military intervention [in Vietnam] grew out of a complicated chain of events and a complex web of decisions that slowly transformed the conflict . . . into an American war. . . . [President Lyndon Johnson] made the critical decisions that took the United States into war almost without realizing. it. . . . Although impersonal forces . . . influenced the president’s Vietnam decisions, those decisions depended primarily on his character, his motivations, and his relationships with his principal advisers. . . . The war in Vietnam was not lost in the field, nor was it lost on the front pages of The New York Times or on the college campuses. It was lost in Washington, D.C., even before Americans assumed sole responsibility for the fighting.”

H. R. McMaster, historian, Dereliction of Duty, 1997