Vietnam

Secretary of State John Dulles did not support the Geneva Accords because he thought they granted too much power to the Communist Party of Vietnam. Instead, Dulles and President Dwight D. Eisenhower supported the creation of a new southern region. The United States supported this effort of nation building through a series of agreements that created the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). Using SEATO for political cover, the Eisenhower administration helped create a new nation from dust in southern Vietnam. In 1955, with the help of massive amounts of American military, political, and economic aid, the Government of the Republic of Vietnam (GVN) was born. The following year, Ngo Dinh Diem, a firm anti-Communist figure from the South, won a dubious election with US help that made him president of the GVN. .
             Upon taking office Diem claimed that his newly created government was under attack from Communists in the north. Diem argued that the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) wanted to take South Vietnam by force. In late 1957, with American military aid, Diem began to counterattack. He accomplished this counter attack with the help of the CIA to identify those who looked to bring his government down and arrested thousands. Diem passed a series of repressive acts known as Law 10/59 that made it legal to hold someone in jail if he was a suspected Communist without being charged formally. This angered Ho who with the Communist Party of Vietnam desired to reunify the country through political means alone. However after Diem's oppressive attacks on suspected Communists in the South, southern Communists convinced the party to adopt more violent tactics to guarantee Diem's failure. This threat led to further US involvement in the region and with the assassination of American President John F. Kennedy led to president Johnson stepping up the escalation of US involvement. Johnson did this because he felt he had to take a forceful stance on Vietnam so that other Communist countries would not think that the United States lacked resolve.