America Should Never Have Entered the Vietnam War Essay

During the Lyndon Baines Johnson presidential administration, both those policy makers who supported America’s involvement in Vietnam and those who opposed the war were part of the â€Å"containment generation.† They had reached political maturity during World War II and the early years of the Cold War and had experienced the intense anticommunism of the McCarthy era of the early 1950s. These leaders understood and applied the lessons of American nationalism, which had the primary message that the U.S. was the dominating nation that had to embrace its responsibility to aid and improve nations in America’s image. Therefore, when they saw that there was a threat of the spread of communism to areas of Southeast Asia, a majority of the†¦show more content†¦This logic led many to flee to Canada or simply resist the draft. Protesters felt that the United States should not be involved in another nation’s civil war especially a war that uses tactics su ch as saturation bombing, the killing of civilians, and the use of toxic chemicals. David Harris, a draft resister, wrote, â€Å"The war was an extraordinarily obvious violation of everything that I had been led to expect from the country I was a part of†¦.when my generation’s war showed up it turned to out to be a propping up of petty dictators so they could keep a good portion of their population in servitude† (Handout page 9). Mass protests occurred all around America. The New York Times wrote about just one protest that had occurred, â€Å"A vast throng of Americans, predominantly youthful and constituting the largest mass march in the nation’s capital, demonstrated peaceably in the heart of the city today, demanding a rapid withdrawal of United States troops from Vietnam†¦.There were a number of arrests and minor injuries, mostly the result of tear gas† (Handout page 10). These protesters understood what the war was really doing to Ame rica and how immoral our actions truly were, but many others were in support of the war, thus causing a division in the United States. In addition, there were an increasing number of politicians who were opposed to the war. Initially, the majority of politicians felt thatShow MoreRelatedThe Vietnam War and Communism1192 Words   |  5 Pages The Vietnam War was costly not only to our armed forces but to our American economy and American morale. 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