Answer:
On March 8, 1965, two battalions of about 3,500 Marines waded ashore on Red Beach 2 — becoming the first American combat troops deployed to Vietnam. Six months before the landing — in the midst of a presidential election campaign — Johnson told an audience at University of Akron in Ohio, “We are not about to send American boys nine or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”
Three months after that speech, a victorious Johnson said in his inaugural address: “We can never again stand aside, prideful in isolation. Terrific dangers and troubles that we once called ‘foreign’ now constantly live among us.”
By 1965 a confluence of events — South Vietnamese defeats on the battlefield, political turmoil in Saigon and North Vietnamese resolve in the face of an American bombing campaign — had come together to produce a situation in which Washington faced the choice of war or disengagement.At the height of the Cold War, phrases like “American credibility” and “the Domino Theory” — a belief that defeat in South Vietnam would spread communism throughout Southeast Asia — clouded judgment as Washington weighed its options.
When Johnson assumed the presidency Nov. 22, 1963, after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the new president inherited a Cold War foreign policy forged during the three previous administrations. At the heart of that policy was confronting communism.
The failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the building of the Berlin Wall and communist incursions into Vietnam’s neighbor Laos had convinced Kennedy that the U.S. needed to stand firm against communist expansion. Kennedy told a New York Times journalist in 1961 that “we have a problem making our power credible and Vietnam looks like the place.”
Although reluctant to commit ground combat forces, Kennedy increased the number of U.S. military advisers to 16,000 — up from 900 who had been there since President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration.
Explanation:
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