The Cold War Part 4

Cuban Missile CrisisVietnam War

The Cuban Missile Crisis

Part 1 Bay of Pigs1961

Part 2Cuban Missile Crisis

1962

First came the embarrassing incident of the Bay of Pigs invasion

Bay of Pigs Invasion US army with Cuban exiles plan what

would be a failed invasion of Cuba - trying to rid Cuba of the communist leader Fidel

Castro

The world sat in tension for 13 days as there was a show-down between the US and the USSR ...in the country of Cuba

The Vietnam War

Vietnam - What Happened?

•Vietnam was known as IndoChina - a French colony since before World War I

•After WWII it was still a French colony...but there were problems.

•The French were suppose to give it up to the Vietnamese...there were suppose to be free elections.....but there were communist parties involved......

•Northern Vietnamese were communist - Southern Vietnamese were democratic

Vietnam - What Happened?•Things got worse

•Northern Communist Vietnamese were led by a man named Ho Chi Minh - he wanted to get rid of any other country’s influence..... (he had asked Woodrow Wilson back in WWI to allow free elections and rule by the Vietnamese people - he was turned down)

•Southern Vietnamese - the free, democratic ones - were horribly corrupt

•You couldn’t tell them apart by looks

•Things got worse

Vietnam - What Happened?•The elections went badly.

•The French were attacked in 1957

•The UN sent some support personnel

•The US didn’t get too heavily involved - we sent $ (under President Eisenhower)

•Things got worse

•The US sent $ and military advisors to support the democratic Vietnamese in their effort to defeat the communist Vietnamese (under President John F Kennedy)

Vietnam - What Happened?

•Things got worse

•Finally under Pres. Johnson in 1964 the

Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred.

•The boat USS Maddox took a hit from underwater missiles. It was in the international water zone just outside Northern Vietnam.

•It seemed the Northern/Communist Vietnamese had attacked the US

•Things got worse...

Gulf of Tonkin Incident

Vietnam - What Happened?•By 1964 we are sending young men to fight.

•The draft has begun.

•It was young, Southern, black, undereducated men who made up most to the grunts and privates

•College boys could avoid the draft as long as grades were good

•Some men chose to move to Canada

•Things got worse...

Vietnam - What Happened?•This was a TV war

• Images every night were broadcasted on the evening news - everyone sat down to watch the evening news in the 1960s (there were only 3 TV channels)

•America was wondering why it was fighting for other people who didn’t want us there

•Muhammed Ali, “no Vietnamese ever called me nigger”

•The Civil Rights mov’t was tearing America apart - it looked like it would be the 2nd Civil War in America

•Things got worse...

Napalm

Vietnam- What Happened?•The American public

no longer supported the war in Vietnam

•By 1973 Nixon declared a gradual withdrawal - a “Vietnamization” of Vietnam

•Except he lied.

•things got worse

Vietnam- What Happened?•The Paris Peace Accords

were suppose to end the war

•Secretly Nixon ordered the Christmas bombings of Vietnam’s neighbor - Cambodia - because Communists were coming in to support the Communists in Vietnam

•things got worse

Vietnam- What Happened?•students protested at Kent State in

Ohio

Vietnam- What Happened?•Finally the Vietnam war was over

•The results:

•Vietnam became a communist country

•Cambodia fell to a CRUEL communist party called the Pol Pot regime led by the Khmer Rouge

• Millions were killed in the killing fields

•Americans no longer trusted their gov’t

•Solders who fought in the Vietnam war where mocked as “baby killers”