Eartha Kitt Was Blacklisted by the CIA for Calling Out the Vietnam War

government would participate in formal peace talks in Paris. 3 In May of that year, Johnson announced that the U.S. By 1968, over 500,000 forces were serving in Vietnam.

In 1965, President Johnson ordered Operation Rolling Thunder, a systematic bombing campaign of North Vietnam and authorized American troops to begin an offensive campaign. More importantly, Johnson and many of his advisors feared a widespread communist plot in the larger context of the United States’ Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Johnson, felt compelled to defend the new South Vietnamese government against Vietnamese Communists.

Historians and former government officials that served in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations debate whether the president would have increased military involvement or withdrawn military personnel. Kennedy was assassinated just three weeks after the fall of the South Vietnamese government, so his intentions for the future of Vietnam remain a mystery. involvement in Vietnam dated back to the Dwight Eisenhower administration, the escalation of the war during the 1960s and 1970s dominated national politics, tarnished the United States’ reputation abroad, and cost 58,000 Americans and over 3 million Vietnamese their lives. On November 1, 1963, a group of military officials overthrew the South Vietnamese government and assassinated President Ngo Dinh Diem after he refused to resign-all with the tacit approval of the John F.

Eartha Kitt Was Blacklisted by the CIA for Calling Out the Vietnam War