For decades, the problem of Vietnam plagued American strategists and policy- makers, who viewed the struggle there as another front in the Cold War against the expansion of communism. From the Geneva Convention of 1954 that ended the French Indochina War to the fall of South Vietnam in 1975, the United States supported a panoply of military and political plans, among them various pacification programs, to shore up a succession of governments in Saigon. Broadly speaking, the Americans conceived pacification as a means to defeat a communist insurgency and help build a national political community in South Vietnam. the American-backed counterinsurgency efforts of the early 1950s that quelled the communist-led Huk movement in the Philippines helped generate a belief that the United States had a singular mission. As one historian expressed it, there were confident assertions in the Eisenhower years that "the American record authorized, if indeed it did not command, the United States to undertake nation building in Southeast Asia." From the beginning of South Vietnam's existence as an independent nation in 1954 to the end of the war, the pacification program assumed many guises, but its steadfast purpose was to help realize the ultimate American and South Vietnamese goal of an independent, sovereign, and non- communist South Vietnam. Pacification was an integral part of allied strategy to realize this goal.
This book examines the American role in pacification, which was largely one of providing advice and support for the program. America's involvement in the "other war," as pacification was sometimes known, was never as publicized as its participation in other aspects of the conflict, such as the U.S. Air Force (USAF) and Navy bombing campaigns or the "big-unit war" fought by U.S. Army and Marine Corps (USMC) units. But under Lyndon Baines Johnson, the United States enthusiastically embraced a unique nation-building mission in South Vietnam that had its origins in the same presidential impulses that gave birth to the Great Society and the April 1965 offer to North Vietnam of a billion-dollar economic development program for the Mekong River valley region on a scale to dwarf the Tennessee Valley Authority.
