Many people wonder how the Americans managed to become involved in a war 10,000 miles away from their native continent, but the initial reasons for U.S. involvement in Vietnam seemed logical and compelling to American leaders. Following its success in World War II, the United States faced the future with confidence. From George Washington's perspective, the threat to U.S. security and world peace was communism emanating from the Soviet Union. Any communist anywhere, at home or abroad was, by definition, and enemy of the United States. With the unsuccessful appeasement of fascist dictators before World War II, the Truman administration believed that the United States and its allies must meet any sign of communist aggression quickly and forcefully. This was known as containment.

In Vietnam the target of containment was Ho Chi Minh and the Vietminh front he had created in 1941. Ho Chi Minh was a communist with long-standing connections to the Soviet Union. He was also a Vietnamese nationalist who fought first to rid their country of the Japanese and then, after 1945, to stop France from establishing its former leadership of Vietnam and the rest of Indochina. Truman and other American leaders

President John F. Kennedy, along with his predecessor's, believed in the domino theory and also that the U.S. anticommunist commitment around the world was (in 1961) in danger. To counter this he had tripled American aid to South Vietnam by 1963, giving money to recruit 20,000 more troops in S. Vietnam and expanding the number of military advisers to over 12,000. Diem government still failed to show any progress (economic or political). Buddhists, spiritual leaders of the majority of Vietnamese, staged dramatic protests, including self-immolation (to sacrifice ones self) against the dictatorship of Diem. Finally, after receiving an assurance of non-interference from the U.S. officials, South Vietnamese military officers conducted an operation that murdered Diem and his brother also. Whether these developments would have led Kennedy to alter U.S. involvement in Vietnam is unknown, since Kennedy himself was assassinated three weeks later.

Suddenly, the American forces had found themselves in "a bottomless military and political swamp" as President de Gaulle of France had warned years earlier.

Because America failed to appreciate the effort that would be required to exert influence on Vietnam's structure, the course of American policy led to an escalation of U.S. involvement. President Eisenhower increased the level of aid to the Frenc

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Approximate Word count = 906
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)