MOVING TOWARD CONFLICT

America's involvement in Vietnam began in 1950, during the French and Indochina war, the name given to France's attempt to reestablish its rule in Vietnam after World War II. Seeking to strengthen its ties with France and to help fight the spread of communism, the United States provided the French with massive economic and military support. From the late 1800s until World War II, France ruled most of Indochina, including Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. French colonists, who built plantations on peasant land and extracted rice and rubber for their own profit, encountered growing unrest among the Vietnamese peasant. French rulers reacted harshly by restricting freedom of speech and assembly and by jailing many many Vietnamese nationalists. The Indochinese Communist Party, founded in 1930, staged a number of revolts under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh. In 1940 the Japanese took control of Vietnam. The next year, Ho Chi Minh returned home and helped form the Vietminh, an organization whose goal it was to win Vietnam's independence from foreign rule. French troops moved back into Vietnam by the end of 1945, eventually regaining control of the cities and the country's southern half. In 1950 the United States entered the Vietnam struggle. During World War II, the United states had forged an alliance with Ho Chi Minh, supplying him with aid to resist the Japanese. But by 1950, the United States had come to view its one-time ally as a communist aggressor. Entering the White House in 1953, President Eisenhower continued the policy of supplying aid to the French war effort. By this time, the United States had settled for a stalemate with the communists in Korea, which only stiffened America's resolve to halt the spread of communism elsewhere. During a news conference in 1954, Eisenhower explained the domino theory, in which he likened the countries on the brink of communism to a row of dominoes waiting to fall one after the other. Despite the massive aid by the United States, the French could not retake Vietnam. They were forced to surrender in May of 1954, when the Vietminh overran the French outpost at Dien Bien Phu, in northwestern Vietnam. 1957, a Communist opposition group in the South, known as Vietcong, had begun attacks on the Diem government, assasinating thousands of South Vietnamese government officials.