The Cold War origins and legacy of the Vietnam War

The Vietnam War has its roots in the early years of the Cold War, when the political fallout over the "loss" of China to Communism in 1949 and the Korean War and the rise of American anti-communism in 1950 converged to inflict severe political damage on President Harry Truman and the Democratic Party. The thesis is that American political leaders took the lessons of the early 1950s and applied them to the perceived fight against communism in Vietnam a decade later.;This thesis studies the Cold War roots of the Vietnam War during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations and examines---in a domestic political context---the following issues: (1) U.S. Asian policy and the Cold War, and the impact on U.S. politics in the early 1950s, (2) the political roots of the initial U.S. presence in Indochina under Harry Truman, (3) the growth of the U.S. role under President John F. Kennedy and the legacy of early-1950s Cold War politics that influenced that growth, and (4) the expansion of the war under Lyndon Johnson and how the Cold War politics of the 1950s influenced and guided Johnson's Vietnam policies in the early days of his administration.