Vietnam War Era: Web Sites

"For the people of Vietnam, who were just beginning to recover from five years of ruthless economic exploitation by the Japanese, the end of World War II promised to bring eighty years of French control to a close. As the League for the Independence of Vietnam (Vietnam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi), better known as the Viet Minh, Vietnamese nationalists had fought against the Japanese invaders as well as the defeated French colonial authorities. With the support of rich and poor peasants, workers, businessmen, landlords, students, and intellectuals, the Viet Minh (led by Ho Chi Minh) had expanded throughout northern Vietnam where it established new local governments, redistributed some lands, and opened granaries to alleviate the famine."

"The 226 video interviews currently available range from 25-minutes to two hours in length. The material presented is part of a rapidly growing archive, the Veterans History Project, created by Congress in 2000 to collect stories from the 19 million veterans presently alive. Other sections highlight World War I; World War II’s forgotten theaters in China, Burma, and India; and 27 other unique war experiences. Visitors are encouraged to participate in this project to document veterans’ experiences by interviewing relatives, friends, and acquaintances. The materials provide an array of personal views on the American war experience along with visual examples of oral history methods."

Also see the FSM-A (Free Speech Movement Archives) for additional information on the history and activities of the FSM.

"Users can enter the site by selecting any of 12 photographs, nine newspaper headlines, three places in the city where rioting occurred, or 10 summaries of views on the events and their meaning by historians and journalists. Selected items link to additional resources, including a police report and interviews with a student and a construction worker. The creators challenge users to fit the riots into wider contexts and to assess variant attempts at historical understanding. Offers about a dozen suggested activities for high school and college teachers. Though limited in scope and quantity of material, this site is of great value to those studying social class in the Vietnam War era, labor history, and media influence in American life."

"In addition, 16 chapters of materials collected from diverse sources and published by the Project in 1998 as The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. are available. Includes important sermons and speeches from later periods, including the 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” the March on Washington address; the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech; and “Rediscovering Lost Values,” a sermon from 1954. The site also provides an interactive chronology of King’s life, two 1,000-word biographical essays by project director and historian Clayborne Carson; 23 audio files of recorded speeches and sermons; 12 articles on King by scholars and others; over 30 photographs; and 11 links to other resources. The site additionally offers a searchable inventory to King’s major papers and recordings. Regularly updated and expanded, this site is useful for studying the development of King’s views and discourse on civil rights, race relations, non-violence, education, peace, the war in Vietnam, and other political, religious, and philosophical topics."

Also “ … includes recently released audio files and transcripts of Nixon Administration telephone conversations and meetings; Supreme Court briefs (including some material originally kept secret) and opinions; audio files and transcripts of oral arguments before the Court; appellate court documents; and excerpts from memoirs by Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and H. R. Haldeman. Also provides a 4,500-word commentary on the documents.”

The site contains links to primary documents, including documents from the Black Panther Party, the Free Speech Movement, and GI’s United Against War in Viet Nam. You will also find images of political buttons and posters from the era and a full-text version of VIETNAM: AN ANTIWAR COMIC BOOK, written by civil rights activist Julian Bond (who was expelled from the Georgia legislature for protesting the Vietnam War). Additional items on the site include several full-text back issues of Viet Nam Generation, a journal of recent history and Vietnam War studies published between 1988 and 1996. The site also contains syllabi for courses on the 1960s and the Vietnam War. Users of the site may contribute their own personal narratives about the 1960s.

In his four-minute conversation with Adlai Stevenson, Johnson attempts to get the U.N. Ambassador’s opinion on the situation in Vietnam and Laos. McGeorge Bundy spoke to Johnson for seven minutes about communicating with North Vietnam through Canada. Johnson spoke to Press Secretary George Reedy for ten minutes about Dean Rusk’s activities. Johnson spoke with Richard Russell for 26 minutes about his anxieties regarding American involvement in Vietnam. The site offers 30-word descriptions of the conversations.

This site also provides 15 samples of the newly declassified material, 27 additional documents related to the war already available, 17 photographs of Ford and his advisors during meetings, and finding aids for those planning to travel to the Ford Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The sample documents include important memos, letters, and cables regarding corruption in South Vietnam; “ominous developments” by the North Vietnamese reported to Kissinger in March 1975; the evacuation decision and its execution; the seizure of the U.S. merchant ship Mayaguez by a Cambodian gunboat crew in May 1975; the plight of Vietnamese refugees; “lessons of the war” imparted to Ford by Kissinger; and notes from Scowcroft to Ford on the then-ongoing reconstruction of Cambodian society by the Khmer Rouge. This site will be valuable for those teaching courses on the Vietnam War and its aftermath and the internal workings of the Ford Administration.

The primary documents in the 3,000-word overview of the war includes the 1954 Geneva Peace Accords, the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, and several items translated by Brigham, such as a 1965 letter from the Hanoi Politburo to the Communist Party in the South. This is a useful site that concentrates on the military and diplomatic dimensions of the war.

Also, human rights, gay rights, feminism and women’s issues, racism, socialism and labor, farm workers, peace candidates, environment, religion, fanaticism, civil liberties, freedom of speech, anarchy, communism, and Palestinian protests. Basic keyword and advanced searches are available. This website is a useful resource for researching the history of campus protest in the 1960s and 1970s.

"A brief introduction to each set of recordings is provided and edited transcriptions of the Kennedy tapes are available. “From the Headlines” relates current events to the recordings. Eight exhibits with short scholarly essays utilizing clips from the presidential recordings feature such topics as the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” and the Space Race. Additionally, the site presents 16 pre-selected multimedia clips that include recordings of Kennedy discussing withdrawing from Vietnam, Johnson talking to McNamara about leaks, Johnson discussing women in politics, and Nixon discussing Mark Felt during the Watergate cover up. The site provides links to more than 40 related articles and, for each of the six presidents, links to the presidential libraries, document collections, related websites, and articles. An outstanding resource for researching the administrations of these presidents."

"During World War II, the U.S. collaborated with the resistance group the Vietminh and their leader, Ho Chi Minh, in their fight against Japan. In the postwar period, however, the U.S. feared Communist expansion into Southeast Asia. In 1954, as France withdrew its forces in defeat, the Geneva Accords established the countries of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Vietnam was partitioned into north and south sectors until elections to be held by 1956. Fearing a victory by Ho Chi Minh, the Eisenhower administration collaborated with the South Vietnam leadership to prevent elections and subsequently sent military aid and advisors. Under President John F. Kennedy, the number of “advisors” increased to more than 16,000, some of whom engaged in counterinsurgency efforts and actual combat. Although Kennedy opposed large scale U.S. involvement, his successor, Lyndon Johnson, began regular bombings and escalated troops to more than 500,000 by 1967. Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, scaled back to 39,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam by September 1972, but initiated bombing raids into Cambodia in 1969 and sent ground troops there in 1970. The U.S. and North Vietnam reached a cease-fire agreement in January 1973, and the South Vietnamese regime fell in April 1975. More than one million people died during the war, including an estimated 925,000 North Vietnamese, 184,000 South Vietnamese, and 57,000 American soldiers."