During wartime, the Constitution requires the president to lead the nation as commander-in-chief. But what about first ladies? As wives, mothers, and co-equal partners, these “first ladies-in-chief” have found themselves serving as field companion to the commander-in-chief, mother-in-chief to sons on combat duty, steward of national resources, and caretakers to the nation’s wounded. This chapter considers six prominent first ladies during major American conflicts: Martha Washington and the Revolutionary War, Dolley Madison and the War of 1812, Mary Todd Lincoln and the Civil War, Edith Wilson and World War I, Eleanor Roosevelt and World War II, Lady Bird Johnson and Vietnam, and Barbara and Laura Bush during the first and second Gulf Wars. Taken together, they paint the first lady as a vital contributor to the nation’s military efforts who deserve our recognition and respect.

The Cold War conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, fought in the context of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, differed in the nature of surrender. After the first year of the Korean War, the war became a stalemate. However, the fighting ended only with an armistice two years later. The delay resulted in part from an ideological dispute between the belligerents. American negotiators insisted that POWs be allowed to refuse repatriation to the country for which they fought; the Communists insisted on compulsory repatriation. The armistice allowed POWs to choose, and the Communists were internationally embarrassed because large numbers of Chinese and North Koreans refused repatriation. The major American intervention in Vietnam was fought primarily as a guerrilla campaign, with some large-scale battles. The Americans made little headway, and protests against the war expanded. After Nixon won the 1968 presidential election, he first tried carrot and stick means to convince the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese to cease fighting. When these failed, he and Kissinger maneuvered to end the American intervention by any means necessary. The Paris Peace Accords granted nearly all the enemies’ demands so that the United States could withdraw American troops. Withdrawal amounted to utter surrender.

Chapter 5 analyzes the evolving security structures in East Asia since the end of World War II. What counts as security for the countries in the region and beyond, and the policy choices made accordingly, have made East Asian security the way it is today. Evolution shapes every component of international security, specifically the nation, the nature of politics, and epistemology. Conventional security theories such as the security dilemma and alliance apply to East Asia partly because Western practice and theory have become parts of East Asian practice and theoretical thinking. At the same time, East Asia had a much longer history, and was not a blank canvas for outside influence. The mixture of the old and new explains why East Asian security concepts and practices seem partly familiar and partly strange, which is characteristic of East Asian international relations.

Since the end of the Vietnam War, the Communist party-state has sponsored one project after another to commemorate that inspired and frenzied age. Memoirs, shrines, sculptures, paintings, fiction and film, each in its own way, lent awe to the revolution. By the mid-1980s – the high noon of market reforms – people from all walks of life began to lay claim to that past, ushering in something of a “commemorative fever.” This chapter examines how Vietnamese letters and the arts met the call to re-examine the Vietnam War, what forms they took, and how the many highroads to history, official and private, cut across one another.

This chapter offers a synthetic overview of the range of international law issues that arose during the course of the Vietnam War, especially as Americans took over from the French after Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and moved towards massive escalation between 1964 and 1973. The chapter begins with the debate about what law applied to the conflict, which turned on the legal status of South Vietnam. The chapter then asks what claims were possible and plausible when it came to the legality of American intervention in the war. Next, the chapter addresses the different kinds of warfare in which the United States engaged, from its bombing campaigns over North Vietnamese territory and waters to the changing forms of its counterinsurgency in the South and, later, across the Cambodian border. Finally, the chapter concludes by examining the legal legacy of Vietnam: not only how it led to the most significant substantive development of the laws of war since the Geneva Conventions, the First and Second Additional Protocols, but also, and equally importantly, how it ensured that international law would play (for good or ill) a central role in debate over and analysis of all future conflicts.

This chapter explores political developments in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) from the coup against President Ngô Đình Diệm in November 1963 to the consolidation of General Nguyễn Văn Thiệu’s power as president in late 1968. The dominant feature of politics in the RVN during this time was the monopolization of political power by a divided military. But noncommunist civilian groups challenged military rule in the form of street protests, armed rebellion, and constitutional assemblies, forcing the military to accede to elections and the return to constitutional government in 1967. These changes created limited opportunities for competitive politics but also granted a veneer of legitimacy to military rule as Nguyễn Văn Thiệu won election and outmaneuvered his rivals within the armed forces. The chapter addresses the powerful influence that the United States, as well as historic faultlines in Vietnamese noncommunist nationalism such as religion, regionl and differing experiences of colonialism and communism, exercised on RVN politics. The chapter contends that the RVN was both an outpost of the American empire and a site of febrile postcolonial politics.

A consideration of the four-year period that began with Richard Nixon’s ascension to the presidency of the United States in January 1969 and ended with signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973 raises several important questions about the Vietnam War. Could an agreement comparable to the 1973 deal have been secured earlier? If so, who bears responsibility for the delay? What was the impact of the antiwar movement on Nixon’s Vietnam policy? Was the war’s expansion into Laos and Cambodia necessary or criminal? Were the constraints on Nixon’s prosecution of the war evidence of the functioning of democracy or of the weakness of the American system, which jeopardized and discredited US foreign policy? Did international opposition to the war hinder Nixons efforts to achieve “peace with honor” and make full use of the US military to support his diplomatic initiatives? Or, on the contrary, did it prevent escalation and even greater bloodshed by denouncing the “immorality” of the conflict? In short, under what circumstances did the January 1973 peace agreement come about? Three major milestones marked Nixon’s relationship with Vietnam, the rest of Indochina, and Southeast Asia generally between 1969 and 1973. Although Nixon did not have a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam when he took office, he gradually put a strategy in place. In this respect, 1969 was a year of trial and error, of failure and deadlock. Certainly, important processes were underway, such as Vietnamization and secret negotiations, though the latter were, at the time, largely unproductive. Subsequently, Vietnamese communist policymakers would claim that in initiating the phased withdrawal of their forces in 1969, the Americans in fact weakened their bargaining position. Thus, by the turn of the new decade, the United States remained unable to achieve “peace with honor.” To overcome these aporias, Nixon, assisted by National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, tried to move from the local to the global, transposing and adapting his strategy in the broader context of the opening up of China and détente with the Soviet Union, two initiatives that, in Kissingers words, restored Southeast Asia to its true scale: that of a “small peninsula at the end of a huge continent.” But this so-called triangular diplomacy still failed to end the war. Therefore, Nixon redoubled the military pressure on Hanoi in 1972 until reaching a peace agreement that failed to deliver the peace it promised. To what extent was all this a cowardly “decent interval” snatched by the United States, before the inevitable collapse of Saigon, Phnom Penh, and Vientiane? Or was it proof of a real and credible will to maintain the political status quo in the region?

This chapter situates the economic history of the Vietnam War in global context. Beginning in the colonial era, it situates the wars origins in relation to the extractive logic of French colonization. But the United States acted in Indochina for different motivations. Animated by geopolitical fears more than acquisitive purposes, US policymakers pumped economic resources into Vietnam from the early 1950s, wreaking devastation in the process. The war was asymmetric, but the resources Washington committed were sufficient to destabilize the US economy, hastening the end of the postwar boom. For all its might, the United States failed to subdue the communist insurgency in South Vietnam. Instead, Soviet and Chinese resource flows and Hanois highly effective war mobilization sustained the communist war effort against improbable odds. But solutions that proved effective at waging war proved less effective in the production of peacetime growth. After 1975, Vietnam stagnated. A decade of economic failure prompted the Vietnamese Workers Party to mobilize the defeated Souths experience with global capitalism from the mid-1980s as a resource that could inform Vietnams reengagement with the world economy and the United States.

This chapter is focused on the “Secret War” in Laos, which began after the Second Geneva Accords of 1962 were signed, reaffirming Laos’ official neutrality, and ending with the signing of the Vientiane Agreement in 1973, which was designed to lay the groundwork for national reconciliation through establishing a coalition government. However, it instead eventually led to the communist Pathet Lao takeover of the country in mid 1975, and from then little-known but persistent armed conflict between communist forces and anti-communist insurgents continued after 1975. The overall goal of this chapter is to summarize the important circumstances associated with the war in Laos, something that has apparently not been done before. The war in Laos represents a tragedy for Laos and its people, regardless of what side of the political divide one was on. Those from all sides shed blood, and large numbers were displaced due to military conflict and aerial bombardment. The Secret War in Laos stretched for eleven years, between 1962 and 1973, but, as should be clear from this chapter, conflict actually raged, on and off, and to varying degrees in different parts of the country, for over fifty years, beginning in 1945.

This chapter examines the built environment of the Vietnam War and its relationship to soldier morale for American, Army of the Republic of Vietnam, and revolutionary forces. In the early 1960s, American officials relied on improvisation and adaptation to create spaces from which to manage nation-building initiatives. With the shift to combat operations in the mid-1960s, the United States increasingly relied on new construction, building hundreds of bases from which to project violence into the countryside. The American standard of living in many of these spaces, coupled with the indiscriminate violence of search-and-destroy, both exposed and exacerbated South Vietnamese poverty, driving Southern support for the insurgency. At the same time, Vietnamese revolutionaries emphasized austerity as an exemplar of traditional values, casting opposition to the insurgency as distinctly un-Vietnamese. US investment in South Vietnam was simultaneously too much and not enough – too much military hardware, material abundance, and violence to defend South Vietnam without altering it irrevocably, but not enough to defeat the revolution altogether.

The new dynamics on the border epitomize how the escalation of the Vietnam War and the Cultural Revolution compounded the already wobbly state building campaign at the border. During the decade from 1965 to 1975, the war and the chaotic sociopolitical movement militarized the Sino-Vietnamese border and made this far-off region more relevant to the decision-making in Beijing and Hanoi about their internal power struggles and national security policies. Yet, these developments also shifted state-society relations on the political periphery in favor of a more porous boundary. Thus, the extension and contraction of state power took place simultaneously. Both Chinese and Vietnamese authorities launched ambitious infrastructure projects in the border area to facilitate the transportation of aid to Vietnam and mobilized the local society against the possible expansion of the war. The Sino-Vietnamese land and maritime border region, as well as the transportation lines running through it, became spaces of frequent interactions between the Chinese and Vietnamese officials regarding the provision of aid and the coordination of border defenses. The efficiency of these interactions, however, was increasingly susceptible to the decline of the Sino-Vietnamese partnership following the Tết Offensive and the start of negotiations between Hanoi and Washington in 1968.

This chapter examines the origins and consequences of national security institutions in the United States during the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations. It explains the political logic shaping continuity and change in institutional design. The limited threat of bureaucratic punishment during Eisenhower and Kennedy prompted both to maintain integrated institutions through most of their presidencies. In contrast, fears that bureaucratic leaks would derail passage of his transformative social and economic legislation led Lyndon Johnson to adopt fragmented institutions. These fragmented institutions came at a cost: They degraded the quality of information that the bureaucracy provided. As a result, Johnson based the most consequential foreign policy choice of his presidency – the escalation in Vietnam – on incomplete and biased information. The analysis suggests that the costliest American foreign policy miscalculation of the Cold War was in part a tragic consequence of how Johnson resolved the trade-off between good information and political security.

Chapter five analyses the period between 1914 and 1989. Several sociological theories frame this period as one of rational planning, certain knowledge and control. Such beliefs were certainly prominent but they were related to uncertainty: The First World War ended in the fall of empires and social upheaval. Intellectual and political reactions were threefold: art emphasized a fractured world, social sciences accommodated uncertainty and political ideologies claimed to banish uncertainty and offered total control. Totalitarian states blended promises of certainty and determinism with a world of omnipresent threats and dangers. The Second World War was heavily influenced by their conviction that they had uncovered the hidden laws of history. After 1945, the advent of thermonuclear weapons caused widespread existential uncertainty. I interpret the strategy of deterrence as a pragmatic expression of minimal communication in an unpredictable world. The experience of insecurity and a breakdown of international society also spurred scientific ontologies of certainty. Modernization theory and Marxism dominated post-war social science and created the strategies that reaped tragedy in Vietnam.

Bonds’s setting of the Du Bois Credo continues and extends the series of musical appeals for racial justice that had led to The Montgomery Variations, just as the revised version of Credo published at the head of his first autobiography, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, in 1920 extends the ideas that had led to the original 1904 version of Du Bois’s text. This chapter frames both the Du Bois Credo and Bonds’s musical setting thereof as articulations of the themes and issues of the works’ respective biographical contexts and, taken together, a dyadic lens into their creators’ perspectives on the societal upheavals of the most turbulent years of the twentieth century. Then, after demonstrating why, and how, the Credo was effectively silenced during Margaret Bonds’s lifetime despite its obvious importance, timeliness, and musical genius – including conversation with the publisher who insisted that the work could not be published unless its text were altered – the chapter closes by exploring the work’s first posthumous performances and documenting the ringing endorsement of Shirley Graham Du Bois, widow of the poet, for this “work of art that is eternal.”