Glossary

Bay of Pigs

Despite the belief of the joint chiefs of staff that it would probably fail, Kennedy endorsed a CIA plan, hatched during the Eisenhower administration, involving the assassination of the Cuban leader Castro and the training and transporting of a force of Cuban exiles to Cuba.

Dien Bien Phu

The Vietnamese victory over the French forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 forced France to seek a negotiated settlement at peace talks in Geneva.

Gulf of Tonkin Resolution

During the presidential campaign of 1964, Johnson sought a free hand for conducting a more aggressive war in Vietnam but did not want to alarm voters by seeking a declaration of war. He used two reported North Vietnamese attacks on an American ship in the Gulf of Tonkin as a pretext for obtaining the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution from Congress.

Ho Chi Minh

As leader of the Vietnamese independence movement from 1945, Ho Chi Minh capitalized on the impatience of both France and the United States. At times cold-blooded and ruthless, he understood the cultural differences between Westerners and the Vietnamese and based his strategy on these differences.

la mission civilisatrice

From the seventeenth century onward, French traders and missionaries penetrated Vietnam, establishing their control over the country in the name of la mission civilisatrice. This "civilizing mission," however, robbed the Vietnamese of the wealth of their land and their independence, causing them to resist French colonialism.

New Frontier

Kennedy called his domestic program the New Frontier. However, he was ideologically a centrist Democrat who limited his domestic agenda to such traditional Democratic proposals as a higher minimum wage, increased Social Security benefits, and modest housing and educational programs. He had little success.

Nixon Doctrine

In the Nixon Doctrine, Nixon insisted that Asian soldiers must carry more of the combat burden. This formed the basis of his Vietnamization policy, by which he provided more military supplies, advice, and air support to South Vietnam while steadily removing American troops from that country.

SALT I

Once Nixon established friendly relations between the United States and Communist China, the Soviet Union also sought to move closer to the United States. In 1972 Nixon went to Moscow to sign the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), which provided arms control. It froze intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) deployment.

Tet offensive

Launched by North Vietnam in January 1968, the Tet offensive was repelled by United States forces. The Tet offensive was a military defeat for North Vietnam, but it proved to be a psychological victory because it turned the U.S. media against the war and exposed the widening "credibility gap" between official pronouncements and public beliefs about the war.

Vietcong

The absolutist policies of Ngo Dinh Diem, the South Vietnamese leader whom the United States supported, created problems. Vietnamese Communist and nationalist guerrillas in South Vietnam, known as Vietcong, openly revolted against Diem in 1957.

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