The Great Society and the Roots of Vietnam

Lyndon Johnson, sworn in after Kennedy's assassination, used his considerable political skill to pass an ambitious domestic agenda called the Great Society. Medicare (health coverage for the elderly) and Medicaid (health coverage for the poor), both enacted in 1965, remain in place today; the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965) increased federal school funding; the Immigration and Nationality Act (1965) finally ended the discriminatory national-origins quota system from the 1924 law you studied in Unit 3; and the Economic Opportunity Act (1964) launched a "War on Poverty," including the Head Start early-education program. Together, this was the largest expansion of the federal government's domestic role since the New Deal.

At the very same time, a war with roots decades old was drawing America in. France had ruled Vietnam as a colony; Ho Chi Minh's communist-nationalist movement defeated France at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, after which the Geneva Accords temporarily divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel, pending elections that were never held. Fearing a "domino theory" -- that one country falling to communism would topple its neighbors in turn -- the U.S. backed South Vietnam's government under Ngo Dinh Diem, whose growing unpopularity led to his overthrow and killing in a 1963 coup the U.S. had tacitly approved. In August 1964, following a murky naval incident in the Gulf of Tonkin -- later evidence suggests the second reported attack likely did not happen as originally described -- Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, granting Johnson broad authority to escalate American military involvement without a formal declaration of war, setting the stage for hundreds of thousands of American troops to be drawn into a conflict whose origins reached back a full generation before most of them were born.