ABSTRACT
Americans intervened in South Vietnam in 1965 with the aim of preventing "Communist domination" and creating in that country a "viable and increasingly democratic society." They participated directly in the psychological battle for Vietnamese "hearts and minds" by unleashing an intensive propaganda campaign on behalf of the Saigon government. American-paid minstrel and drama teams traveled about the country with patriotic appeals to the rural populace. In Hanoi's eyes, the final victory over Saigon and its American patrons climaxed a thirty year struggle for independence from a colonial rule that had controlled the country since the late nineteenth century. Portraying the US as a new "foreign invader" and "colonial oppressor," appeals in both parts of the country called on the population to "Save Vietnam from American Imperialism." As foreigners, Americans could not produce national unity for the Vietnamese. Yet it was precisely such an anti-Communist nationalism that the Americans tried to create when they interjected themselves into the Vietnamese civil war.
