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To return to the Inside the Oval Office Home Page, click here.
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February 13, 2008
Getting In and Getting Out:
America's Longest War |
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Evacuating a CIA apartment building near the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, April 29, 1975.
Photo by Hubert Van Es, New York Times [read about here]
LBJ

LBJ listening to report from son-in-law Chuck Robb, after the Tet Offensive, February 1968.
February-July 1965. Escalation
- Early February 1965, attack on Camp Holloway at Pleiku.
- LBJ to advisers: “We have kept our guns over the mantel and our shells in the cupboard for a long time now. I can’t ask our American soldiers out there to continue the fight with one hand tied behind their backs.”
- March 1965, Operation Rolling Thunder.
- March 7, 1965. Bloody Sunday, Selma, Alabama. Marines land in DaNang.
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July 1965 Escalation.

- July 1965, ~75,000 troops in Vietnam.
- End of 1965
- ~185k military personnel; approx. 640 dead.
- August 18, 1965
- August 18, 1965
- August 18, 1965
- November 11, 1965
- January 25, 1966
- January 31, 1966, Rolling Thunder resumed after one-month hiatus.
- February 1, 1966
- End of 1966
- ~385k military personnel; approx. 6,600 killed in action.
- August 1967
- First time, majority of Americans polled, believed that intervention a mistake. 13k dead.
- McNamara and the Stennis Hearings. Air targets. 57.
- Early February, 1968.
- Tet Offensive and the Paradox of Victory
- March 31, 1968.
- LBJ's surprise announcement about the 1968 election.
- By 1968, LBJ to Bill Moyers, “I feel like a hitch-hiker caught in a hailstorm on a Texas highway. I can’t run. I can’t hide. And I can’t make it stop.”
- End of 1968, 536,000 military personnel. 30,610 killed in action.
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Nixon

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1968 election. the Secret Plan. the promise of an "honorable end."
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"Peace with Honor to Southeast Asia."
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1969, the "Madman" Strategy.
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May 1969. Vietnamization plan.
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June 1971, Pentagon Papers.
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January 27, 1973. Cease-fire.
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April 30, 1975, fall of Saigon.
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Richard Nixon and John McCain, 1973
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Bill Clinton and JFK, Boys Nation, June 6, 1963
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For more conversations on Vietnam, click here |
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Materials for this course were developed by the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs. Site design and Flash transcript+audio design by David Coleman. Flash transcript+audio files by David Coleman, Marc Selverstone, Ken Hughes, and the Presidential Recordings Program. Audio courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration and the Presidential Libraries of Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. For more resources on the White House tapes see www.whitehousetapes.org or click here or here.
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