U.S. and Vietnam: Gulf of Tonkin IncidentStarting in 1964, U.S. and anticommunist South Vietnamese military personnel, quietly entering into N. Vietnam, attempted to prevent the infiltration of the communist North Vietnamese into South Vietnam. Moreover, these efforts attempted to destabilize the N. Vietnamese military effort to absorb S. Vietnam. The secret S. Vietnamese and U.S. deployment was named Operation Plan 34A, OPLAN-34A. As part of the Plan, U.S. ships were stationed off the coast of N. Vietnam, in the Gulf of Tonkin, monitoring N. Vietnamese military action in the region. Even though Lyndon Johnson and his top military officials knew that the evidence for repeated attacks on U.S. ships was sketchy, they used a North Vietnamese attack on a U.S. ship in the Gulf in early August 1964 as a means of asking the U.S. Congress for a “blank check” to escalate the U.S. war effort in S. Vietnam. Congress agreed. Abetted by a perceived mandate from a landslide Presidential victory in November 1964, President Lyndon Johnson embarked on massive U.S. military escalation, thought necessary to contain communism in Southeast Asia. In the end, over the course of nine years, Presidents Johnson and Richard M. Nixon ordered about 8.7 million U.S. military and civilian personnel to S. Vietnam.
INSTRUCTOR James Siekmeier received his PhD in History from Cornell in 1993, specializing in the history of U.S. foreign relations towards Latin America. He has taught at colleges and universities in Washington, D.C., New York, Iowa, Texas, and in Bolivia, on two Fulbright Grants (where he taught courses on North American history in Spanish). From 2001 to 2007 he compiled the American Republics volumes in the Foreign Relations of the US Series, the official documentary history of US foreign policy put out by the US State Department. He has published The Bolivian Revolution and the United States, 1952-Present (Penn State University Press, 2011) as well Latin American Nationalism: Identity in Globalizing World (Bloomsbury, 2017). Currently, he is a Professor of History at West Virginia University. He is working a history of the “war on drugs” in South America from the 1970s to the present.
Event Venue
People's University at the Ohio County Public Library, 52 16th Street,Wheeling, West Virginia, United States
