1. Readiness standards comprise 65% of the U. S. History Test
8 D & F

2. The Student is expected to:
Readiness Standard (8) The student understands the impact of significant national & international decisions & conflicts in the Cold War on the United States.
The Student is expected to:
(D) Explain reasons & outcomes for U. S. involvement in foreign countries & their relationship to the Domino Theory, including Vietnam

3. The Domino Theory
The domino theory dominated American foreign policy philosophy from 1950s to the 1980s. The basic argument was that if one state in a region came under the influence of communism, then the surrounding countries would follow that lead, toppling like dominoes lined up one in front of the other.
American foreign policy “experts” & diplomats invoked the domino theory during the Cold War to justify the need for American intervention around the world.

4. Eisenhower was the first to refer to countries in danger of Communist takeover as dominoes, in response to a journalist's question about Indochina in an April 7, 1954 news conference, though he did not use the term “domino theory.” Referring to communism in Indochina, President Eisenhower described it thus in an April 7, 1954 news conference:
“Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the ‘falling domino’ principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.”

5. The Domino Theory
The domino theory seemed to be at play in Eastern & Central Europe, as Stalin’s Soviet Union gobbled up the nation-states in that region after the end of World War II.
In his famous 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech delivered at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri explained it thus:

6. The Domino Theory
Likewise, after the war, communist governments gained control in both North Korea and China, and by the mid-1950s the communists of Vietnam had established a strong foothold in Southeast Asia. If Communists succeeded in taking over the rest of Indochina (Vietnam), Eisenhower argued, local groups would then have the encouragement, material support and momentum to take over Burma, Thailand, Malaya, & Indonesia; all of these countries had large popular Communist movements and insurgencies within their borders at the time.

7. The Domino Theory
This would give them a geographical and economic strategic advantage, and it would make Japan, Taiwan, The Philippines, Australia, & New Zealand front-line defensive states. The loss of regions traditionally within the vital regional trading area of countries like Japan would encourage the front-line countries to compromise politically with communism.
The Kennedy Administration intervened in Vietnam in the early 1960s to, among other reasons, keep the South Vietnamese “domino: from falling. When Kennedy came to power there was concern that the communist-led Pathet Lao in Laos would provide the Viet Cong with bases, and that eventually they could take over Laos.

8. The Student is expected to:
Readiness Standard (8) The student understands the impact of significant national & international decisions & conflicts in the Cold War on the United States.
The Student is expected to:
(F) Describe the response to the Vietnam War such as the draft, the 26th Amendment, the role of the media, the credibility gap, the silent majority, & the anti-war movement

9. The Student is expected to:
Readiness Standard (8) The student understands the impact of significant national & international decisions & conflicts in the Cold War on the United States.
The Student is expected to:
(F) 1 Describe the response to the Vietnam War such as the draft

10. The Draft Lottery
On December 1, 1969, the Selective Service System of the U. S. conducted two lotteries to determine the order of call to military service in the Vietnam War for men born from 1944 to These lotteries occurred during “the draft” —a period of conscription, controlled by the President, from just before World War II to 1973.
The lottery numbers assigned in December 1969 were used during calendar year 1970 both to call for induction and to call for physical examination, a preliminary call covering more men.

11. The Draft Widespread resistance to the Draft stimulated . . .
As U.S. troop strength in Vietnam increased, more young men were drafted for service there, and many of those still at home sought means of avoiding the draft.
There were 8,744,000 service members between 1964 and 1975, of which 3,403,000 were deployed to Southeast Asia. From a pool of approximately 27 million, the draft raised 2,215,000 men for military service (in the United States, Vietnam, West Germany, and elsewhere) during the Vietnam era.
Of the nearly 16 million men not engaged in active military service, 57% were exempted (typically because of jobs including other military service), deferred (usually for educational reasons), or disqualified (usually for physical and mental deficiencies but also for criminal records including draft violations).
Widespread resistance to the Draft stimulated . . .
passage of the 26th Amendment

12. The Student is expected to:
Readiness Standard (8) The student understands the impact of significant national & international decisions & conflicts in the Cold War on the United States.
The Student is expected to:
(F) 2 Describe the response to the Vietnam War such as the 26th Amendment
July 1, 1971

13. 26th Amendment
Congress and the state legislatures felt increasing pressure to pass the Constitutional amendment because of the Vietnam War, in which many young men who were ineligible to vote were conscripted to fight in the war, thus lacking any means to influence the people sending them off to risk their lives. "Old enough to fight, old enough to vote," was a common slogan used by proponents of lowering the voting age. The slogan traced its roots to World War II, when President Roosevelt lowered the military draft age to eighteen.

14. The Student is expected to:
Readiness Standard (8) The student understands the impact of significant national & international decisions & conflicts in the Cold War on the United States.
The Student is expected to:
(F) 3 Describe the response to the Vietnam War such as the role of the media
Dan Rather—
1966
telecast
Walter Cronkite— “most trusted man in America”

15. The Media & 1968 (Tet)
During a bombing halt in September 1967, Harrison E. Salisbury of the New York Times became the first correspondent from a major U.S. newspaper to go to North Vietnam. His reporting of the bombing damage to civilian targets forced the Pentagon to admit that accidents and “collateral damage” had occurred during the bombing campaign. For his effort, Salisbury received heavy condemnation and criticism from his peers, the administration, and the Pentagon.
Perhaps the most famous image of the Tet Offensive—a photo that was taken by Eddie Adams—was the photograph that depicted a Vietnamese man being executed by the Southern Vietnamese General, General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. The photo shows the moment of death for the young man. Adams won a prize for his iconic photo, which was said to be more influential than the video that was released of the same execution.

16. The Media & 1968
The impact that these photos had on the American public was astounding. Support for the war plummeted, and, though two hundred thousand troops were requested at the beginning of the Offensive, the request was denied.
Withdrawal, 1969–1973
On November 3, 1969 President Nixon made a televised “Silent Majority” speech promising to continue to support the South Vietnamese government (through Vietnamization). He also held out a plan for the withdrawal of American combat troops.
This speech, not the Tet Offensive, marked the real watershed of the American involvement. In it, Nixon permanently altered the nature of the issue. “No longer was the question whether the United States was going to get out, but rather how and how fast.” Nixon's policy toward the media was to reduce as far as possible the American public’s interest in and knowledge of the war in Vietnam. He began by sharply limiting the press’s access to information within Vietnam itself.

17. The Media & Withdrawal
Television’s image of the war, however, had been permanently altered: the “guts and glory” image of the pre-Tet period was gone forever. For the most part television remained a follower rather than a leader. The later years of Vietnam were “a remarkable testimony to the restraining power of the routines and ideology of objective journalism . . . ‘advocacy journalism’ made no real inroads into network television.”
As the American commitment waned there was an increasing media emphasis on Vietnamization, the South Vietnamese government, and casualties, both American and Vietnamese. There was also increasing coverage of the collapse of morale, interracial tensions, drug abuse, and disciplinary problems among American troops.

18. The Student is expected to:
Readiness Standard (8) The student understands the impact of significant national & international decisions & conflicts in the Cold War on the United States.
The Student is expected to:
(F) 4 Describe the response to the Vietnam War such as the credibility gap

19. “Credibility gap” was first used in association with the Vietnam War in the New York Herald Tribune in March 1965, to describe then-president Lyndon Johnson's handling of the escalation of American involvement in the war. A number of events—particularly the surprise Tet Offensive, and later the 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers—helped to confirm public suspicion that there was a significant “gap” between the administration's declarations of controlled military and political resolution, and the reality.
Throughout the war, Johnson worked with his officials to ensure that his public addresses would only disclose bare details of the war to the American public.

20. After the Vietnam War, the term “credibility gap” came to be used by political opponents in cases where an actual, perceived or implied discrepancy existed between a politician's public pronouncements and the actual, perceived or implied reality. For example, in the 1970s the term was applied to Nixon's own handling of the Vietnam War and subsequently to the discrepancy between evidence of Richard Nixon’s complicity in the Watergate break-in and his repeated claims of innocence.

21. The Student is expected to:
Readiness Standard (8) The student understands the impact of significant national & international decisions & conflicts in the Cold War on the United States.
The Student is expected to:
(F) 5 Describe the response to the Vietnam War such as the silent majority

22. Nixon’s Nov. 3, 1969 “Silent Majority” Speech
The silent majority is an unspecified large majority of people in a country or group who do not express their opinions publicly. The term was popularized (though not first used) by U.S. President Nixon in a November 3, 1969, speech in which he said, “And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support.” In this usage it referred to those Americans who did not join in the large demonstrations against the Vietnam War at the time, who did not join in the counterculture, and who did not participate in public discourse. Nixon along with many others saw this group of “Middle Americans” as being overshadowed in the media by the more vocal minority.
A Sword that Cuts both ways

23. The Student is expected to:
Readiness Standard (8) The student understands the impact of significant national & international decisions & conflicts in the Cold War on the United States.
The Student is expected to:
(F) 6 Describe the response to the Vietnam War such as the anti-war movement
With the U.S. Capitol in the background, demonstrators march along Pennsylvania Avenue in an anti-Vietnam War protest in Washington, on Moratorium Day, Nov. 15, 1969.

24. Reasons Driving the Anti-War Movement
The reasons behind American opposition to the Vietnam War fell into the following main categories: opposition to the #1) draft; #2) moral concerns, #3) legal & pragmatic arguments against U.S. intervention; #4) reaction to the media portrayal of the devastation in Southeast Asia.
#1 The Draft, as a system of conscription which threatened lower class registrants and middle class registrants alike, drove much of the protest after 1965.
The prevailing sentiment that the draft was unfairly administered inflamed blue-collar American and African-American opposition to the military draft itself.

25. Reasons Driving the Anti-War Movement
Opposition to the war arose during a time of unprecedented student activism which followed the free speech movement and the civil rights movement. The military draft mobilized the Baby Boomers who were most at risk, but grew to include a varied cross-section of Americans. The growing opposition to the Vietnam War was partly attributed to greater access to uncensored information presented by the extensive television coverage on the ground in Vietnam.
#2 Anti-war protesters also made moral arguments against the United States’ involvement in Vietnam. This moral imperative argument against the war was especially popular among American college students.

26. Reasons Driving the Anti-War Movement
In an article entitled “Two Sources of Antiwar Sentiment in America,” Howard Schuman found that students were more likely than the general public to accuse the United States of having imperialistic goals in Vietnam. Students in Schuman's study were also more likely to criticize the war as “immoral.”
#3 Another element of the American opposition to the war was the perception that U.S intervention in Vietnam, which had been argued as acceptable due to the Domino Theory and the threat of Communism, was not legally justifiable. Some Americans believed that the Communist threat was used as a scapegoat to hide imperialistic intentions, while others argued that the American intervention in South Vietnam interfered with the “self-determination” of the country. In other words, the war in Vietnam was a civil war that ought to have determined the fate of the country and, therefore, America was not right to intervene.

27. Reasons Driving the Anti-War Movement
#4 Additionally, media coverage of the war in Vietnam shook the faith of citizens at home. That is, new media technologies, like television, brought images of wartime conflict to the kitchen table.
For the first time in American history the media was privileged to dispense battlefield footage to public. Graphic footage of casualties on the nightly news eliminated any myth of the glory of war. With no clear sign of victory in Vietnam, the media images of American military casualties helped to stimulate the opposition of the war in Americans.
Malcolm Browne’s Photo of Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist Monk Immolating Himself (June 11, 1963)

28. Elements of the Anti-War Movement
The Clergy—the clergy, often a forgotten group during the opposition to the Vietnam War, played a large role as well. There is a relationship and correlation between theology and political opinions and during the Vietnam. In basic summary, each specific clergy from each religion had their own view of the war and how they dealt with it, but as a whole, the clergy was completely against the war.
Protests in general grew after the Kent State killings, radicalizing more and more students. Although the media often portrayed the student antiwar movement as aggressive and widespread, only 10% of the 2500 colleges in the United States had violent protests throughout the Vietnam War years.

29. The Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D. C.
Vietnam has elicited the most ambiguous response by the American people toward any war before or since.
The Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D. C.