![]() ![]() The Eisenhower administration decided to create a nation of South Vietnam “by fabricating a government there, taking over control from the French, dispatching as many as 740 military advisers to train a South Vietnamese army, and unleashing the Central Intelligence Agency to conduct psychological warfare against the North.” Cognizant of the Allied experience in World War II as well as the costly but inconclusive outcome of the war in Korea, Eisenhower was unwilling to commit the United States to a land war in Southeast Asia. president wanted to lose a country to communism.” President Eisenhower himself acknowledged that, had the Vietnamese people been allowed to express themselves at the polls under the terms of the agreement, “‘Ho Chi Minh would have won 80 percent of the vote’–and no U.S. The United States, a participant in the peace conference, never accepted its outcome, and acted in concert with the government of the south to prevent the election from ever taking place. ![]() According to the agreement that emerged from the conference, countrywide elections were to follow in two years’ time whereby all the people of Vietnam would either unite under Ho Chi Minh’s government or leave the country permanently divided. ![]() At a peace conference later that year in Geneva, Ho Chi Minh obliged France to allow him to establish Communist control north of the 17th parallel while a non-Communist government would rule south of that line. ![]() The French were defeated in 1954 by the Vietnamese Nationalist Army–the Communist-led Vietminh. Beginning with modest steps as early as May 1950, when President Truman provided military and economic aid to the French effort to retain their colonial control of Indochina, the United States became increasingly involved in a difficult, distant war that did not end until 1973. ![]()
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