THE VIETNAM WAR The Vietnam War was not the United States' bloodiest or most costly conflict, but its effects were deep and long-lasting. Its unpopularity polarized the country; its cost made it difficult to afford President Johnson's ambitious domestic agenda; and its result affected US foreign policy for years to come. Vietnam was a French colony when communist-led rebels defeated French troops at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. At that point, the country was divided between north and south, with communists in charge of the north and non-communists running the south. The two were to be joined peacefully, but elections never happened. Fighting ensued. As part of its strategy to contain communism, the United States aided South Vietnam by sending military advisers. By the end of 1962, the number of American military advisers had reached 11,000 (an increase from the 900 there in 1960), and they were authorized to fight if fired upon. American involvement did not escalate, however, until August 2, 1964 when North Vietnamese patrol boats fired on a US ship in the Gulf of Tonkin. The US Congress then passed, with only two dissenting votes, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which authorized the President to take "all necessary measures" to prevent further attacks. This gave the President formal authority to intervene in Vietnam. By June of 1965, 50,000 American troops had arrived in Vietnam, and by the end of that year, 180,000 Americans were serving there. As American involvement increased abroad, opposition to the war increased at home. In the middle of 1965, the opposition gained a powerful ally when Senator William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, held public hearings about the war and voiced his own opposition to the conflict. In January 1968, during the Vietnamese New Year, Tet, the North Vietnamese launched a large offensive against the South. The fighting was fierce, but the American-backed South scored a crushing military victory. However, the battle was a turning point in American attitudes toward the war as the war's full brutality and moral ambiguity was televised to millions of American homes. Opposition deepened, and protests widened. In March 1968, President Johnson halted the bombing of North Vietnam, and announced he would not seek re-election. Peace negotiations also began between the warring sides, and in 1969, the first American troops began to leave Vietnam. In 1970, the conflict escalated once again as American and South Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia, and American planes bombed Laos. Both sparked renewed anti-war protests. In 1973, a peace agreement was concluded, and by the end of that year, there were very few American troops in Vietnam. A year later, the North attacked the South, and in 1975, Saigon fell. The war was over. More than 55,000 Americans were killed, and more than 1 million Vietnamese civilians lost their lives. The war caused a great rift within American society, raising doubts about America's role in the world, its morality, and its priorities. The way the war was conducted also fed into a growing cynicism about government and other institutions. For John Gardner, the course of the war in Vietnam led him to resign from President Johnson's cabinet. At the time, he never explained why he resigned, and Gardner never spoke out against the war until 1970. Here's the story of Gardner's resignation, told for the first time: "It was November of 1967 when President Johnson told his cabinet that he was planning one or more cabinet dinners at which they could share ideas concerning the presidential election of 1968. How might we make the strongest case for the re-election of Johnson? "As I thought over the major accomplishments of 1965-1967, I believed that a strong case could in fact be made and sometime shortly after the first dinner I wrote a memo to Jos. Califano [special assistant to Johnson] laying out the case, building primarily of course on the segment of the Administration I knew best. "But focusing my mind on what should happen next had a truly disruptive consequence. It dawned on me -- slowly, but powerfully -- that I did not believe that Lyndon Johnson should run for re-election. It was not a half-formed thought; it was a solid conviction. During the second dinner, I was virtually silent. I knew then that I had to resign my post -- and quickly. "Before I did so, I wanted to produce a summary of the Department's achievements during my tenure. Then, in early January, I wrote a very brief letter of resignation and delivered it by hand to the President. He read it and asked me why. I said that in my judgment the course of events had so damaged his capacity to lead that he could not unite the country in the struggles that lay ahead. I did not know that within three months, Martin Luther King, Jr. would be assassinated, and two months after that, Senator Robert Kennedy would meet the same fate. But I was intimately familiar with the urban riots and the campus disorders, and I knew that the nation needed -- desperately -- a steadying hand. I was dead certain that President Johnson could not provide that steadying hand. "I explained this to the President as best I could. It wasn't easy. I gave him great credit for what he had achieved in my Department, but I kept returning to my point. I said that in an election year, a president contemplating re-election deserved the wholehearted backing of his entire team, and that I could not give it. "He spent a half-hour cross-examining me to find out if I had some grievance that he could deal with, but I stuck to my one point. There were other matters on which we might have debated our differences, but I didn't want anything to detract from my main message. "Finally, he sighed and said that he and Lady Bird had discussed seriously whether he should withdraw, and he uttered sentences that he would use in much the same form when he finally announced his withdrawal. In other words, it was not a new thought to him. He was not fumbling for words." John Gardner, Journals