ABSTRACT

The United States supported Ngo Dinh Diem as an intense anti-French, anti-Communist, nationalist leader with a legendary record of honesty and integrity and paraded him as a nationalist alternative to Communist Ho Chi Minh. In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson did not want to look too "soft" on Communism when his rival, Barry Goldwater, was advocating a policy of military escalation against North Vietnam, including limited use of nuclear weapons. There was more saturation bombing of Vietnam—North and South—than ever before, mining of the harbor at Haiphong, escalation of the "clandestine war" in Laos, and an overt invasion of Cambodia. The single most important provision of the Geneva settlement was the Vietnam-wide elections in July 1956, leading to the reunification of the country. Continual conflict, with only a brief period of peace following the Geneva settlement of 1954, has marked its history.