The White House tried to fight dissent with news of progress. In October 1967, nearly 100,000 people joined the March on the Pentagon to protest the war. Public support for the war fell below 50 percent for the first time. Kennedy was ambivalent about abandoning Diem, and knew it would anger members of Congress, but said they would "be madder if Vietnam goes down the drain."īack in the United States, antiwar protests intensified. The United States offered support when a group of generals plotted a coup d’état. He resisted sending ground troops, however, against his advisers’ persistent urging.Īdditionally, protests grew within South Vietnam against the increasingly unpopular Diem regime but Diem ignored U.S. Kennedy supplied thousands of additional military advisers and equipment to South Vietnam to fight the Communist insurgents. The Diem government faced attacks from within South Vietnam from Communist insurgents (the People’s Liberation Armed Forces) in rural areas. He was convinced the United States could restore its Cold War credibility by saving Vietnam from communism. His administration had experienced the Bay of Pigs defeat in Cuba and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. When Kennedy became President, he told a reporter: "Vietnam is the place" for a win. involvement with the South Vietnamese government. Against all odds, Diem consolidated power.Įisenhower’s decision to support Diem with supplies and military advisers was the beginning of U.S. Diem faced multiple threats: some members of his inherited government and military were associated with the hated French mobsters controlled much of Saigon and French-supported armed religious sects and military officers challenged his leadership. So he pledged support to an emerging leader-Ngo Dinh Diem-a devout Catholic and fervent anti-French, anti-communist nationalist. He believed "losing" South Vietnam to communism would be a strategic, economic, and humanitarian disaster. Then-President Eisenhower didn't want reunification to result in a Communist Vietnam. It also called for an election in 1956 to reunify the two. The agreement separated Vietnam at the 17th Parallel, creating a communist state in the North and a French-backed non-communist state in the south. The 1954 Geneva Accords settled the war between France and North Vietnam, called the First Indochina War.
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