“…you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the falling domino principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences…So, the possible consequences of the loss [of Indochina] are just incalculable to the free world.” President Dwight D. Eisenhower, April 7, 1954, in a statement to the press
In its most basic articulation, the Domino Theory postulated that the fall of one pro-Western nation to communism would lead to the rapid communist subjugation of adjoining Western-bloc nations. Every president from Truman to Nixon, either believed in the Domino Theory or recognized its usefulness as a tool in garnering domestic support for U.S. involvement abroad. The theory’s proponents did not believe it applicable to every region of the world. However, it was considered most pertinent to the East-West confrontation in Indochina. Continue Reading »
Tagged Cambodia, Charles S. Reed, Cochin China, David Brinkley, Domino Theory, Dwight D. Eisenhower, First Indochina War, Indochina, John Foster Dulles, Laos, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Malayan Peninsula, Mekong Delta, Mekong River, Phnom Penh, Robert S. McNamara, South China Sea, Viet Minh, Vietnam
The French named the mountain range that extends through the center of the Indochinese peninsula the Annamese Cordillera. In the nineteenth and early twentienth centuries, French colonists referred to the Vietnamese as Annamese; thus, the reason for the name of the range. The Vietnamese know the range as the Truong Son. The cordillera’s mountains, thick triple-canopy jungles, and flat, grassy plateaus cover portions of Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. The mountain range stretches southward in a roughly 815-mile arch from its origins in Laos to its termination northeast of Saigon. Continue Reading »
Tagged Annamese Cordillera, Ben Hai River, Cua Viet River, Dak To, Ho Chi Minh Campaign 1975, Khe Sanh, Laos, Mekong River, Montagnards, Ngoc Linh, Plateau des Bolovens, Plateau du Darlac, Plateau du Kontum, Plateau du Mnong, Thach Han River, Truong Son, Vietnam
