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Dien Bien Phu
In late 1953, Viet Minh commander Vo Nguyen Giap amassed troops and placed heavy artillery in caves of the mountains overlooking the French camp. Viet Minh forces overran the base in early May, prompting the French government to seek an end to the fighting with the signing of the Geneva Accords of 1954. -
Geneva Conference
In an effort to resolve several problems in Asia, including the war between the French and Vietnamese nationalists in Indochina, representatives from the world’s powers meet in Geneva. One of the most troubling concerns was the long and bloody battle between Vietnamese nationalist forces, under the leadership of the communist Ho Chi Minh, and the French, who were intent on continuing colonial control over Vietnam. -
Gulf of Tonkin Incident
A joint resolution of Congress dated August 7, 1964, gave the president authority to increase U.S. involvement in the war between North and South Vietnam and served as the legal basis for escalations in the Johnson and Nixon administrations that likely dwarfed what most Americans could have imagined in August 1964. At approximately 1430 hours Vietnam time on August 2, 1964, USS Maddox (DD-731) detected three North Vietnamese torpedo boats approaching at high speed. -
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution ("Blank Check")
During the spring of 1964, military planners had developed a detailed design for major attacks on the North, but at that time President Lyndon B. Johnson and his advisers feared that the public would not support an expansion of the war. On August 2, shortly after a clandestine raid on the North Vietnamese coast by South Vietnamese gunboats, the U.S. destroyer Maddox was fired on by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. -
Operation Rolling Thunder
Operation Rolling Thunder marked the first sustained American assault on North Vietnamese territory and thus represented a major expansion of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. The U.S. provided military equipment and advisors to help the government of South Vietnam resist a Communist takeover by North Vietnam and its South Vietnam-based allies, the Viet Cong guerilla fighters. -
Tet Offensive
A coordinated series of fierce attacks on more than 100 cities and towns in South Vietnam. Though U.S. and South Vietnamese forces managed to hold off the Communist attacks, news coverage of the offensive shocked and dismayed the American public and further eroded support for the war effort. -
My Lai Massacare
A company of American soldiers brutally killed the majority of the population of the South Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai in March 1968. In 1970, a U.S. Army board charged 14 officers of crimes related to the events at My Lai; only one was convicted. -
Kent State University Massacre
On April 30, 1970, President Richard M. Nixon appeared on national television to announce the invasion of Cambodia by the United States and the need to draft 150,000 more soldiers for an expansion of the Vietnam War effort. On May 4, twenty-eight guardsmen opened fire on a crowd, killing four students and wounding nine. -
Last US troops withdraw from South Vietnam
Two months after the signing of the Vietnam peace agreement, the last U.S. combat troops leave South Vietnam as Hanoi frees the remaining American prisoners of war held in North Vietnam. In 1961, after two decades of indirect military aid, U.S. President John F. Kennedy sent the first large force of U.S. military personnel to Vietnam to bolster the ineffectual autocratic regime of South Vietnam against the communist North. -
War Powers Act
The act sought to restrain the president’s ability to commit U.S. forces overseas by requiring the executive branch to consult with and report to Congress before involving U.S. forces in foreign hostilities. Widely considered a measure for preventing “future Vietnams,” it was nonetheless generally resisted or ignored by subsequent presidents, many of whom regarded it as an unconstitutional usurpation of their executive authority.
