Introduction

Hello.

My name is Mark Atwood Lawrence,

and I'm professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.

In this course,

I'm going to be talking about the history of the Vietnam War

and especially about the involvement of the United States in that conflict.

For the United States,

the Vietnam War stands out as one of the most important events of the 20th century.

It was important for a range of reasons.

Most obviously,

the war brought about a major turning point in

the way the United States exerted its influence internationally

during the quarter century from America's entry into the Second World War.

Until the Vietnam conflict, American leaders, strongly backed by public opinion,

wielded US power boldly.

They expanded US economic and military influence

around the globe and steadily gained confidence in

their ability to shape foreign societies and the

international order more generally in America's image.

The failure to achieve US objectives in Vietnam called all this into question,

leading many Americans to urge a more restrained foreign policy rooted

in a clear eyed sense of the limits on U.

S power.

Ever since then,

Americans have often been sharply divided about

their nation's role on the global stage,

certainly to the Vietnam War,

caused people around the world to question the United States,

not just American capabilities but also the

morality with which Washington asserted US power.

If the United States was riding high in the 19 forties

and 19 fifties as the champion of democracy and economic uplift,

the Vietnam War caused many people abroad to view.

The United States is an unprincipled, if not reckless, nation

in the arena of American politics to

the Vietnam War sowed doubt and division,

The Second World War in the 19 fifties gave rise to a period of social cohesion,

even conformity across much of the American population,

with most citizens clustering around similar values and aspirations in

a similar sense of their obligation to their country.

The Vietnam War, combined with other developments in the 19 sixties,

had the effect of fragmenting the American population.

Some Americans protested the war,

viewing it as a mistaken and even in Wirral

venture that revealed fundamental flaws in American societies.

Others backed the American intervention in Vietnam and believe

that the United States failed to achieve its goals,

not because there was anything wrong with the cause,

but because other Americans failed to embrace

the measures that were necessary to win.

These divisions endure even in the 21st century,

when attitudes about the 19 sixties and the Vietnam War in particular,

helped drive political polarisation.

Given the war's profound importance in American history,

it's unsurprising that it has attracted an

enormous amount of attention from scholars,

journalists, memoirists and other authors.

By one estimate,

more than 30,000 nonfiction books have been published about the Vietnam War,

So conveying the history of the war, in a succinct way, is no small challenge.

My strategy in the following Five Modules is not to tell the story

of the war in a rigorous blow by blow fashion to attempt.

That would mean we might get lost in a sea of detail.

Rather,

I'm going to build my five presentations around five broad interpretive questions

that have driven the vast scholarship on the war.

To be sure,

answering these questions will move us more or

less chronologically through the history of the war.

But it's the interpretive questions that sit at the heart of my approach.

Well, what are these questions?

The first is why was there so much political and military turmoil in Vietnam.

Why, that is,

Was there a crisis in Vietnam that so powerfully drew

American concern in the 19 fifties sixties and seventies?

Second, why did American leaders decide to invest US resources, money,

expertise and, eventually, blood

in Vietnam?

Why did Vietnam matter so much to the United States that it would ultimately become

the third most expensive war in American history

and caused the deaths

of more than 58,000 Americans?

Third, I want to ask,

Why did the United States failed to achieve its objectives in Vietnam?

Despite such a vast political, economic and military effort

forth?

How did the United States end its war in Vietnam and managed to withdraw its forces

in fifth? What were the legacies of the war for the United States?

By answering these questions, we will, I hope,

gain a good sense of the basic trajectory of the American experience in Vietnam

and a sense of why the war has been so controversial for so long.

Let's get started