Reference no: EM133568770

Case Study: American involvement in the highly questionable Vietnam quagmire, the nation's longest military conflict, shattered the domestic consensus favoring expansion of domestic human rights and economic opportunities. Women, urban black youth, hispanic farm workers and American Indian activists were frustrated by the change of public focus by a war that government planners woefully miscalculated according to the deliberate disclosure of the "Pentagon Papers", a series of secret discussions within the State and Defense departments. When France finally agreed to terminate its colonial regime in Indochina, bellicose and dogmatic Secretary of State John Foster Dulles became the prime architect of transforming a minor colonial rebellion into a symbol of mistaken global credibility in the bi-lateral global balance of power. American lives and treasure were squandered seeking to sustain a corrupt and incompetent sequence of clearly non-democratic regimes within southern Vietnam. Highly publicized scenes of carnage disturbed and increasingly outraged domestic public opinion and devastated a small, agrarian and predominatly Buddhist nation whose fate was not at all relevant to American national security. Congress finally regained oversight authority and forced presidents Johnson and Nixon to disengage from the tragic confrontation.

Question 1: In retrospect, how did Congress and the American people seek to constrain future imperial presidents from what Oregon Senator Wayne Morse labeled acts of "constructive aggression"?

Question 2: How were the repurcussions of the Indochina conflict graphically reflected in multiple manifestations of cultural expression?