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President Johnson wanted to make a firm stand against communism after North Vietnam began military actions against South Vietnam. He ignored that many who lived in the south wanted a united country and could not win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people. He used the Gulf of Tonkin incident as an excuse to get congress to give a full military commitment to the war.

Lyndon Johnson did not involve the United States in the Vietnam War. The United States had been involved in the Vietnam War for more the thirteen years at the time he inherited the job of President of the United States when John F Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. The administrations of Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy had all been involved in Southeast Asia before Johnson.

In the last years of the Eisenhower administration the insurgency had grown from a few local Communists committing a few acts of terrorism to a low level insurgency with expatriate South Vietnamese Communist that had moved to N. Vietnam in 1954 being armed and infiltrated back into S. Vietnam. A few American advisors had been deployed to train the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) how to use the weapons the American’s were supplying them. During the Kennedy administration the numbers of insurgencies from the North had grown and the weapons they were armed with had become more sophisticated. The N. Vietnamese had run out of expatriated South Vietnamese communists and the Viet Cong troops (VC) were being supplemented by regular North Vietnamese Army troops (NVA). Kennedy authorized the deployment of more advisers, including the Green Berets to train indigenous peoples living in the boarder region (Hmong) in the hope they would be able to intercept some of the supplies the Communists were sending south. Helicopter companies and fighter-bombers were also deployed to support the ARVN field operations. By 1965 North Vietnam was sending regular NVA units south to confront the ARVN. Johnson authorized the deployment of American ground forces to couture this latest escalation by the North Vietnamese.