The United States responds to events in Vietnam as the French War comes to an end and the Geneva Conference brings a flood of regugees to the noncommunist south of Vietnam. The US plays a signficant role in the refugee movement, making a national hero and celebrity of Catholic navy doctor Tom Dooley. The Diem regime is established in South Vietnam and survives a series of crises, leading to a deepened commitment by Washington to his survival. The Eisenhower administration is now firmly committed to the survival of an anticommunist regime in the south. Meanwhile, the Church suffers increasing persecution in North Vietnam. US Catholics develop a special concern for their coreligionists in Vietnam.

With the establishment of the national party convention, the process used to select the delegates to the national convention became of paramount importance. State and local party conventions selected the national convention delegates, but those conventions were often conducted in deeply undemocratic ways, excluding many party voters or using parliamentary rules such as winner-take-all and/or the unit rule to marginalize political minorities in the state. Nevertheless, the Democratic Party expressly endorsed the use of winner-take-all and unit-rule voting in the nomination process, which allowed party bosses to control the composition (and therefore candidate preference) of their state delegation. The Republicans were initially more hostile to boss control, forbidding the unit rule, but they, too, ultimately endorsed winner-take-all delegate selections in 1916. Moreover, both parties routinely seated delegates from states in which the convention process had been run in an undemocratic fashion. Thus, for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the party convention process was run by a small coterie of party bosses, who ultimately chose the party’s nominee.

The politics of Vietnam was born in the early Cold War when Republicans made a concerted effort to undercut the national security advantage that Democrats enjoyed after a decisive victory in World War II. The years after the war are often remembered as a period when politics stopped at the water’s edge. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although there were a number of factors that moved the US military deep into the jungles of Vietnam, including a “domino theory” positing that if one country fell to communism everything around it would follow, partisan politics was a driving force behind this disastrous strategy. The same political logic and prowess that led President Lyndon Johnson to strengthen the legislative coalition behind his Great Society simultaneously pushed him into a hawkish posture in Southeast Asia.

The “two-camp theory” prompted Vietnamese communists to instigate a civil war – the Fourth Civil War for Vietnam – to neutralize domestic rivals immediately after World War II ended. When France initiated its recolonization of Vietnam and the rest of Indochina in fall 1945, Chapter 2 relates, many Vietnamese noncommunist nationalists and other victims of communist attacks and repression opted to collaborate with its armies, for the time being. Thus, the French war in Vietnam became entwined with the Vietnamese Civil War; it also significantly augmented national fracturing and fratricidal violence. French manipulation, a misreading of Vietnamese political realities, and the intensifying state of the Cold War prompted the United States to intrude. By the time of the climactic Battle of Dien Bien Phu, in spring 1954, the United States was footing nearly 80 percent of the French war bill, and Washington policymakers had become obsessed with the evolving situation across the Indochinese Peninsula. The Geneva accords of July 1954 concluded the French War and paused the Vietnamese Civil War by creating two Vietnams separated at the Seventeenth Parallel.