Vietnam War
Terms
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- Henry kissinger
- He was Nixon's key foreign-policy advicer. He fled the country as a teenager with his parents to escape the Nazis. Also he joined the U.S. Army Counter-intelligenge Corps and served for three years.
- Pentagon papers
- Secret government documents published in 1971; revealed that the U.S. government had misled Americans about the Vietnam War.
- Domino Theory
- (Cold War-era belief that if one nation in Southeast Asia fell to communism, the rest of Southeast Asia would also fall.
- Vietminh
- League for the Independence of Vietnam; group of Vietnamese nationalists organized in the 1940's by Ho Chi Minh to drive the Japanese out of Vietnam.
- Tonkin Gulf Resolution
- In response, both houses of congress overwhelmingly passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. This gave the president the authority to take "all necessary measure to repel any armed attack against forces of the United States."
- War Powers Act
- (1973) Legislation that reaffirmed congress's constitutional power to declare War; set a 60-day limit on the president's authority to commit U.S. troops to serve in a foreign conflict.
- Ho Chi Minh Trail
- Network of jungle path from North Vietnam though Laos and Cambodia and into South Vietnam; served as the major supply route of the Vietcong.
- General William Westmoreland
- The commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, described the offensive as a Vietcong defeat. At a cost of 1,100 American and 2,300 ARVN lives, most of the attackers had been repelled.
- Vietnamization
- Policy followed by the Nixon administration of gradually turning over all the fighting in the Vietnam War to the South Vietnamese Army.
- Ngo Dinh Diem
- President Eisenhower hoped that Southern Vietnam at least might be kept noncommunist. He pinned his hopes on Ngo Dinh Diem.
- Hawks
- Americans who supported the Vietnam War.
- Tet offensive
- (1968) attack by North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops against South Vietnam during the Vietnam War; came during Tet, the Vietnamese New Year; demostrated that the North Vietnamese were still militarily strong.
- Students for a democratic Society
- (SDS) Student group that actively protested the Vietnam War.
- Dien Bien Phu
- Is where the French tried to lure the Vietminh into a conventional battle, deep within Vietminh-held Northern Vietnam. The plan backfired. An international conference to settle the Indochina conflict began in Genera, Switzerland.
- Vietcong
- National liberation front; communist guerrilla force that began fighting against Ngo Dinh Diem's government in South Vietnam in the 1950's.
- Doves
- Americans who opposed the Vietnam War.
- Ho Chi Minh
- A world wandered and man of money names, he is best known as Ho Chi Minh. During the 1920's and 1930's Ho lived in China and the Soviet Union while working for Vietnamese independence.