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This Day in History: America Inches Toward Vietnam War

by Catherine Maddux

   In the fall of 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed off on sending
   more U.S. military aid to Vietnam -- just a few hundred soldiers to
   train South Vietnamese soldiers.

   Kennedy was neither the first nor the last American president to
   confront the conundrum of the so-called domino theory, the idea that
   the Soviet Union (and Communist China) were seeking to expand their
   influence in Southeast Asia, first in Vietnam and then its neighbors.

   President Kennedy (R) meets with Secretary of Defense Robert S.
   McNamara and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Maxwell D.
   Taylor (L) in the Oval Office at the White House on Oct. 2, 1963.

   President Dwight D. Eisenhower addressed the "domino" metaphor in a
   speech in 1954 as it related to U.S. policy in Vietnam -- and wider
   concerns regarding Soviet expansion.

   "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."

   From 1954 to 1975, four American presidents would have to contend with
   whether or not to deepen U.S. involvement in Vietnam's war over what
   turned out to be misguided fears of Soviet expansion.

   By the time the United States withdrew in 1975, 2.5 million Americans
   had fought in Vietnam.

   58,000 of them died.

   U.S. paratroopers carry a wounded man on a stretcher into a waiting
   helicopter in Vietnam, May 7, 1966.

   Kennedy's decision 55 years ago Wednesday (Nov. 16, 2016) ultimately
   was one of many, made over many years -- culminating in a war that
   spawned street protests, ended the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, and
   was deemed a lost conflict.