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CH 30 STUDY GUIDE THE VIETNAM ERA

PEOPLE, PLACES & EVENTS

1. The Marines in Vietnam and National Guardsmen at Kent State

2. U.S. soldiers in Vietnam : demographics

3. The measure of U.S. military success

4. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution

5. America’s superior technology & the war in Vietnam

6. Support for the war

7. Agent Orange

8. President Kennedy & the space program

9. The Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara

10. The “Tet offensive” of 1968

11. Vo Nguyen Giap & Ho Chi Minh

12. The events of 1963

13. My Lai & the massacre of Vietnamese civilians

14. Presidential candidates in the election of November 1968

15. Richard Nixon & law and order

16. George Wallace and Richard Nixon vie for votes

17. The Nixon-Kissinger team

18. The Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy

19. The term “Vietnamization”

20. President Nixon’s plan to end the war in Vietnam

21. The Nixon Doctrine

22. America’s new detente

23. Richard Nixon: pragmatist or doctrinaire

24. Indians in the 1950s: mainstream or preserve tribal culture

25. Hispanics, Indians and blacks: organizing methodologies

26. The escalating war in Vietnam & American politics

27. U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam

28. Supreme Court & Roe v. Wade

COMPLETION

1. Students were killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State University during a demonstration protesting the invasion of [ ].

2. Ho Chi Minh became a communist after his petition was ignored by world leaders at the [ ] peace conference.

3. Levels of American troops in Vietnam rose gradually under a conscious strategy—dubbed [ ] by its architects—designed to apply increasing pressure on North Vietnam.

4. “Rolling Thunder” was the code name of a military operation engaged in [ ]; it neither stabilized South Vietnam nor substantially stopped supplies from flowing from the North.

5. A South Vietnamese communist was known by the label [ ].

6. One of the foreign countries through which the Ho Chi Minh trail ran was [ ].

7. The “war at home”—the debate over the war in Vietnam—was centered in a particular kind of place: [ ].

8. [ ] stunned the nation when he announced he would not be a candidate for president in 1968.

9. [ ] was the third-party candidate in 1968 who opposed civil rights and integration.

10. Richard Nixon proclaimed that he represented not some small, noisy protest group, but rather [ ].

11. Among Americans of Hispanic heritage, the subgroup that had achieved an evident ethnic identity and developed an active movement was [ .

12. Cesar Chavez gained prominence through his efforts to organize [ ] workers into a union.

13. Nixon’s strategy for winding down U.S. involvement in Vietnam, known as [ ], attempted to shift the burden of actual combat to the South Vietnamese.

14. The Nixon and Kissinger tactic of “playing the China card” referred to an effort to influence the nation of [ ] by improving diplomatic relations between the U.S. and China.

IDENTIFICATION QUESTIONS

Students should be able to describe the following key terms, concepts, individuals and places, and explain their significance:

Terms and Concepts

|Gulf of Tonkin Resolution |Escalation |

|Rolling Thunder |body count |

|hawks and doves |Napalm |

|Tet Offensive |silent majority |

|southern strategy |Détente |

|SALT I |La Huelga |

|AIM | |

Individuals and Places

|Jackson State |Ho Chi Minh |

|Ho Chi Minh Trail |Pleiku |

|William Westmoreland |Robert McNamara |

|My Lai |Muhammad Ali |

|George Wallace |Daniel Patrick Moynihan |

|Spiro Agnew |César Chavez |

|Russell Means |Paris Peace Conference |

|Clark Clifford | |

MAP IDENTIFICATIONS

Students have been given the following map exercise: On the map on the following page, label or shade in the following places. In a sentence, note their significance to the chapter.

1. Pleiku

2. Ho Chi Minh Trail

3. Hue

4. Saigon

5. Haiphong

.

[pic]

1.

Critical Thinking

EVALUATING EVIDENCE (MAPS)

1. Looking at the election map of 1968 (page 1024), what assumption does Richard Nixon seem to have made about the Wallace voters when he planned his “southern strategy”?

2. What do the combined Nixon-Wallace votes, shown on the election map of 1968 (page 1024), indicate about the electorate in 1968?

3. What international complications does the route of the Ho Chi Minh Trail suggest on the map of Vietnam (page 1014)?

4. On the map of Vietnam (page 1014), find the outposts of Con Thien, Song Be, Dak Tho, and Khe Sanh. According to the text, why did the Vietcong attack at these points in the months preceding the Tet offensive?

5. Looking at the map of Vietnam, what are the major geographic problems affecting the war and the conditions under which it was fought?

EVALUATING EVIDENCE (ILLUSTRATIONS AND CHARTS)

1. What does the picture on page 1009 suggest to you about the role of helicopters in the Vietnam War?

2. What image of Robert Kennedy is projected on page 1021? How does that affect your response to the charge that his candidacy was inspired by political opportunism? How might the picture be misleading?

3. What do you learn about Cesar Chavez from the way he is dressed in the picture on page 1021?

4. The chart on page 1019 shows the level of American troops in Vietnam. Given those figures, what was the level of troops in Vietnam at the time of a) the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution; b) the commencement of Rolling Thunder; c) the march on the Pentagon in 1967; d) the Tet offensive; e) the proclamation of the Nixon Doctrine? How do these events each relate to the number of troops in Vietnam?

CRITICAL ANALYSIS

Students have been asked to read carefully the following excerpt from the text and then answer the questions that follow.

[Nixon] thus set two fundamental requirements for his campaign: to distance himself from President Johnson on Vietnam and to turn Wallace’s “average Americans” into a Republican “silent majority.” The Vietnam issue was delicate, because Nixon had generally supported the president’s desire to end the war. He told his aide Richard Whalen, “I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no way to win the war. But we can’t say that, of course. In fact, we have to seem to say the opposite.” For most of his campaign he hinted that he had a secret plan to end the war but steadfastly refused to disclose it. He pledged only to find an honorable solution.

Nixon’s managers promoted their candidate mostly through controlled television appearances. Nixon played on popular fears by promising to promote “law and order” while cracking down on “pot,” pornography, protest, and permissiveness. Hubert Humphrey had the more daunting task of surmounting the ruins of the Chicago convention. All through September antiwar protesters dogged his campaign with “Dump the Hump” posters. Finally, the vice president distanced his position on Vietnam, however slightly, from his unpopular boss. The protests then faded, Humphrey picked up momentum, and traditional blue-collar Democrats began to return to the fold. By November his rallies were enthusiastic and well-attended....

PRIMARY SOURCE: Norman Mailer: The March on the Pentagon[1]

In the 1960s, the lines between fiction and journalism began to blur as Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, and Norman Mailer—among others—pioneered the New Journalism. Neither truly fact nor fiction, the New Journalism went beyond the traditional “objective” reporting to include the author’s point of view, atmosphere, characterization, and other literary devices. In the following excerpt, Mailer describes the violence that broke out late at night during the October 1967 protest march on the Pentagon.

The brutality by every eye witness account was not insignificant, and was made doubly unattractive by its legalistic apparatus. The line of soldiers would stamp forward until they reached the seated demonstrators, then they would kick forward with their toes until the demonstrators were sitting on their feet (or legally speaking, now interfering with the soldiers). Then the Marshals would leap between their legs again and pull the demonstrators out of line; he or she would then be beaten and taken away. It was a quiet rapt scene with muted curses, a spill in the dark of the most heated biles of the hottest patriotic hearts—to the Marshals and the soldiers, the enemy was finally there before them, all that Jew female legalistic stew of corruptions which would dirty the name of the nation and revile the grave of soldiers like themselves back in Vietnam, yes, the beatings went on, one by one generally of women, more women than men. Here is the most brutal description of a single beating by Harvey Mayes of the English Department at Hunter.

One soldier spilled the water from his canteen on the ground in order to add to the discomfort of the female demonstrator at his feet. She cursed him—understandably, I think—and shifted her body. She lost her balance and her shoulder hit the rifle at the soldier’s side. He raised the rifle, and with its butt, came down hard on the girl’s leg. The girl tried to move back but was not fast enough to avoid the billy-club of a soldier in the second row of troops. At least four times that soldier hit her with all his force, then as she lay covering her head with her arms, thrust his club sword like between her hands into her face. Two more troops came up and began dragging the girl toward the Pentagon.... She twisted her body so we could see her face. But there was no face there: All we saw were some raw skin and blood. We couldn’t see even if she was crying—her eyes had filled with the blood pouring down her head. She vomited, and that too was blood. They rushed her away.

One wonders at the logic. There is always logic in repression, just as there is always a logic in the worst commercial. The logic is there for a reason—it will drive something into flesh.

The logic here speaks of the old misery of the professional soldier, centuries old. He is, at his most brutal, a man who managed to stay alive until the age of seven because there were men, at least his father, or his brothers, to keep him alive—his mother had drowned him in no oceans of love; his fear is therefore of the cruelty of women, he may never have another opportunity like this—to beat a woman without having to make love to her. So the Marshals went to work; so did those special soldiers saved for the hour when everyone but themselves and the Marshals was gone from the Pentagon. Now they could begin their beatings.... Yes, and they beat the women for another reason. To humiliate the demonstrators, to break them from their new resistance down to the old passive disobedience of the helpless sit-in waiting one’s turn to be clubbed....

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[1] From Armies of the Night: History as a Novel/The Novel as History by Norman Mailer. Copyright 1968 by Norman Mailer. Reprinted by arrangement with New American Library, a Division of Penguin Books USA Inc. New York, New York.

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