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February 13, 2008

Getting In and Getting Out:

America's Longest War

 

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.
 
July 1965 Escalation.

 

 
 
Nixon

 

 

 

 

 

Richard Nixon and John McCain, 1973

 

Bill Clinton and JFK, Boys Nation, June 6, 1963

   
 

 

 

For more conversations on Vietnam, click here

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.