Title: Vietnam After the War | Asia Pacific Curriculum
Headings: Vietnam After the War
Vietnam After the War
Overview
Prologue: The End of the “American War”
Introduction: The Challenges of Reconciliation
Background: The Road to War and Partition
Consolidating Political Control
Building a Socialist Economy
Resistance and Escape
Putting Post-War Vietnam in Context
Doi Moi and the “New” New Vietnam
Vietnamese Youth: Writing the Next Chapter
Acknowledgement

Content: Worried that Ngo Dinh Diem was failing to stop the communists from taking over, U.S. President John F. Kennedy supported the South Vietnamese military’s overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. Neither Diem nor Kennedy would survive the year. Diem was assassinated by his own military on November 2, 1963, and Kennedy was killed in Dallas three weeks later. Following Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson became the new U.S. president. In 1965, the United States intervened directly in Vietnam by sending troops to South Vietnam. The Second Indochina War—also known as the American War—had begun; it would not end until the United States withdrew and South Vietnam fell to the communist-run Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1975. Consolidating Political Control
The North and its allies’ defeat of the Republic of Vietnam cleared the way for the long-awaited reunification of the country. Soon after that, the North Vietnamese government took several steps to consolidate its political control over the south. This included eliminating potential rivals, “re-educating” those who were suspected of disloyalty, and preventing other ideologies and beliefs from competing with socialism.