who were the secretaries of defense during the vietnam war???
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Robert S. McNamara \nJanuary 21, 1961 - February 29, 1968\n8th Secretary of Defense\nKennedy and Johnson Administration \n\nClark M. Clifford\nMarch 1, 1968- January 20, 1969\n9th Secretary of Defense\nJohnson Administration \n\nand Melvin R. Laird\nJanuary 22, 1969 - January 29, 1973\n10th Secretary of Defense\nNixon Administration
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Do you mean the US NAVY? well I was there in long beach in 1964 and 65 then i went over seas but knew no one by that name,there is alot of guys there at that time most went to VietNam like me.
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U.S. involvement in Vietnam did not begin in the 1960's or even the 1940's, but in 1845. That's right -- 1845. In that year the people of Da Nang arrested a French missionary bishop for breaking local laws. The U.S. commander of "Old Ironsides" (the U.S.S. Constitution) landed U.S. Navy and Marines in support of French efforts to reclaim their missionary. Mad Jack Percival, the ship's captain, fired into the city of Da Nang, killing 3 dozen Vietnamese, wounding more, and taking the local mandarins hostage. He then demanded that the Catholic Bishop be freed in exchange for his hostages. The Vietnamese were unimpressed. They refused his demand and waited. "Mad Jack" got tired of waiting, released his hostages, and sailed away leaving the Bishop behind.\n\nDuring WW11, US and Vietnam fought against the Japanese. After the end of World war, Ho Chi Minh asked the Americans to honor their commitment to independence, citing the Atlantic Charter and the U.N. Charter on self-determination.\nHowever, by the end of the war, the U.S. government had begun to redirect its foreign policy from the wartime goal of the liberation of all occupied countries and colonies to the postwar anti-communist crusade, which became the Cold War. \nAmerican policy supported General Charles de Gaulle and his anti-communist "Free French." De Gaulle aimed to restore the glory of France, which meant the return of all former French colonies. U.S. relations with the Vietnamese turned sour. President Truman refused to answer letters or cables from Ho. Instead, the U.S. began to ship military aid to the French forces in Indochina.\nAccording to international agreement, Vietnam was to be temporarily divided into north and south, with free elections to take place nationwide in 1956. Even before the French were out, the U.S. was moving in.\n\nFrom there on the US involvement in Vietnam increased and so called vietnam war started.
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about wars, specifically the Vietnam war.
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Haha...yes, Bush's "service to his country" during the Vietnam War!
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End of War?\nApril 23, 1975 - President Gerald Ford gave a speech on declaring the end of the Vietnam War and the end of all U.S. aid to the Saigon regime.\n\nApril 30, 1975 - At 8:35 a.m., the last Americans, ten Marines from the embassy, depart Saigon, concluding the United States presence in Vietnam. North Vietnamese troops pour into Saigon and encounter little resistance. By 11 a.m., the red and blue Viet Cong flag flies from the presidential palace. President Minh broadcasts a message of unconditional surrender. The war is over.\n\nHowever, the last official U.S. battle in the conflict was on May 15, 1975 when 18 soldiers were killed on the last day of a rescue operation known as the Mayagüez incident involving a skirmish with the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Those soldiers are listed last on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
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Gerald Ford.\n\nMade VP for Nixon when Agnew resigned, then made Prez, when Nixon resigned. Thus not voted in by actual people. (But was confirmed as VP by senate.)\n\nI don't think it is clear if someone can go for more than 8 years if they are not elected to the third term. Like if Bush fired Cheny (boo), then picked Bill Clinton (yea), and then Bush resigned. I think Bill could fill out the rest of Bush's term.\n\nIn fact, I very much wish he would.\n\nAnd of course FDR was elected to 4 terms, but died in the begining of the fourth. The amendment limited Presidental terms came after - and because of - FDRs 4 terms.
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Democratic Presidents entering war:\nWar of 1812 under Madison\nMexican War under Polk\nFirst World War under Wilson\nSecond World War under Roosevelt\nKorean War under Truman\nVietnam War under Kennedy\n\nRepublican Presidents entering war:\nSpanish-American War under McKinley\nGulf War 1 under Bush (1)\nGulf War 2 under Bush (2)\n\nYou may also want to consider the Barbary Coast War under Jefferson (Democrat) and the American Civil War (not really entered into, but begins under Buchanin (Democrat) and escalates under Lincoln (Republican)\n\nNote:  The Vietnam War is actually difficult to define.  Advisers were sent under Eisenhower (Republican) but troops were not sent until Kennedy (Democrat)
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John Kerry; served in Vietnam, EARNED a Purple Heart. Three, in fact. George W; National Guard, given an "Honorable Discharge" after doing absolutely nothing. \n\nCare to compare?
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The U.S. first sent military advisors to Vietnam as early as 1950. But U.S. troops were involved from 1965-1973.
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I find it rather interesting that John Kerry said what he did.  He is constantly trying imply that Pres. Bush isn't very smart, but if you use Mr. Kerry's measuring stick.  John Kerry was the one that ended up in Vietnam, not Pres. Bush.  Does that mean that Mr. Kerry was stupid, didn't work hard, and couldn't find any other way to make a living?  Pres. Bush seems to be the more intelligent one if Mr. Kerry is to be believed.
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Serious negotiations to end the war began after U.S. President Lyndon Johnson's decision not to seek reelection in 1968. Contacts between North Vietnam and the United States in Paris in 1968 were expanded in 1969 to include South Vietnam and the NLF. The United States, under the leadership of President Richard M. Nixon, altered its tactics to combine U.S. troop withdrawals with intensified bombing and the invasion of Communist sanctuaries in Cambodia (1970).\n\nThe length of the war, the high number of U.S. casualties, and the exposure of U.S. involvement in war crimes such as the massacre at My Lai (see My Lai incident) helped to turn many in the United States against the war. Politically, the movement was led by Senators James William Fulbright, Robert F. Kennedy, Eugene J. McCarthy, and George S. McGovern; there were also huge public demonstrations in Washington, D.C., as well as in many other cities in the United States and on college campuses.\n\nEven as the war continued, peace talks in Paris progressed, with Henry Kissinger as U.S. negotiator. A break in negotiations followed by U.S. saturation bombing of North Vietnam did not derail the talks, and a peace agreement was reached, signed on Jan. 27, 1973, by the United States, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and the NLF's provisional revolutionary government. The accord provided for the end of hostilities, the withdrawal of U.S. and allied troops (several Southeast Asia Treaty Organization countries had sent token forces), the return of prisoners of war, and the formation of a four-nation international control commission to ensure peace.
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Madeleine Korbel Albright (born May 15, 1937) served as the 64th United States Secretary of State. She currently serves as the Mortara Distinguished Professor of Diplomacy at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.\n\nMadeleine Albright was nominated by President Bill Clinton on December 5, 1996, as Secretary of State. After being unanimously confirmed by the United States Senate, she was sworn in as the 64th Secretary of State on January 23, 1997. Albright was the first woman Secretary of State.
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I only know 2, George HW Bush and Ronald Reagan.... as for the third, it must have been before my time.\n\nUpdate: It was  Dwight D. Eisenhower. I knew it was before my time.
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The answer is Harry Truman. The position was established in 1946.
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The Causes of the Vietnam War\n\n------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\n\nAndrew J. Rotter\n\nMost American wars have obvious starting points or precipitating causes: the Battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775, the capture of Fort Sumter in 1861, the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and the North Korean invasion of South Korea in June 1950, for example. But there was no fixed beginning for the U.S. war in Vietnam. The United States entered that war incrementally, in a series of steps between 1950 and 1965. In May 1950, President Harry S. Truman authorized a modest program of economic and military aid to the French, who were fighting to retain control of their Indochina colony, including Laos and Cambodia as well as Vietnam. When the Vietnamese Nationalist (and Communist-led) Vietminh army defeated French forces at Dienbienphu in 1954, the French were compelled to accede to the creation of a Communist Vietnam north of the 17th parallel while leaving a non-Communist entity south of that line. The United States refused to accept the arrangement. The administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower undertook instead to build a nation from the spurious political entity that was South Vietnam by fabricating a government there, taking over control from the French, dispatching military advisers to train a South Vietnamese army, and unleashing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to conduct psychological warfare against the North.\n\nPresident John F. Kennedy rounded another turning point in early 1961, when he secretly sent 400 Special Operations Forces-trained (Green Beret) soldiers to teach the South Vietnamese how to fight what was called counterinsurgency war against Communist guerrillas in South Vietnam. When Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, there were more than 16,000 U.S. military advisers in South Vietnam, and more than 100 Americans had been killed. Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, committed the United States most fully to the war. In August 1964, he secured from Congress a functional (not actual) declaration of war: the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Then, in February and March 1965, Johnson authorized the sustained bombing, by U.S. aircraft, of targets north of the 17th parallel, and on 8 March dispatched 3,500 Marines to South Vietnam. Legal declaration or no, the United States was now at war.\n\nThe multiple starting dates for the war complicate efforts to describe the causes of U.S. entry. The United States became involved in the war for a number of reasons, and these evolved and shifted over time. Primarily, every American president regarded the enemy in Vietnam--the Vietminh; its 1960s successor, the National Liberation Front (NLF); and the government of North Vietnam, led by *Ho Chi Minh--as agents of global communism. U.S. policymakers, and most Americans, regarded communism as the antithesis of all they held dear. Communists scorned democracy, violated human rights, pursued military aggression, and created closed state economies that barely traded with capitalist countries. Americans compared communism to a contagious disease. If it took hold in one nation, U.S. policymakers expected contiguous nations to fall to communism, too, as if nations were dominoes lined up on end. In 1949, when the Communist Party came to power in China, Washington feared that Vietnam would become the next Asian domino. That was one reason for Truman's 1950 decision to give aid to the French who were fighting the Vietminh,\n\nTruman also hoped that assisting the French in Vietnam would help to shore up the developed, non-Communist nations, whose fates were in surprising ways tied to the preservation of Vietnam and, given the domino theory, all of Southeast Asia. Free world dominion over the region would provide markets for Japan, rebuilding with American help after the Pacific War. U.S. involvement in Vietnam reassured the British, who linked their postwar recovery to the revival of t
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If the administration would have allowed unrestricted bombing of North Vietnam from the beginning of the war. I'd said 1 and 3. But seeing how Johnson wanted to approve every target, the best choice would be none of the above.The bombing was too little too late.