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conditions. The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S. concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans, the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe that the rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal national objective.
The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet the test of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power to guarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans a humbling lesson about the limits of power.
The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the war demonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congress essentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam also destroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, and many officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans were outraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent the fabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation, unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to the domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed the basis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
George C. Herring, America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 19501975, 2nd ed. (1986); Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (1983).
DAVID L. ANDERSON
See also Asia-U.S. Relations; Cold War; Gulf of Tonkin Resolution; Kent State Incident; Kissinger, Henry A.; Tet Offensive.
Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions
The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 and 1799 raised the question of states rights' and nullification. They were drafted in response to the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 but were concerned with a larger and more deep-rooted problem. How was power to be divided between the federal government and the states, and who was to settle disputes between the two?
The first Kentucky Resolution, passed by the state legislature on November 16, 1798, stated that when the federal government exercised power not specifically delegated to it by the Constitution, each state could judge the validity of that action for itself. The Virginia Resolution of December 24, 1798, claimed that the states "have the right and are in duty bound to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil." Several northern states objected that the judiciary, not the states, should be the arbiter of constitutionality. The Kentucky legislature passed a second Resolution on November 22, 1799, arguing that a single state had the power to nullify a federal action it deemed unconstitutional.
Unknown to contemporaries, the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions were drafted, respectively, by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. The doctrines they enunciated were later cited by southern slaveholders in support of their right to secede from the Union. Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that either Jefferson or Madison truly wanted to dismantle the Union. The Resolutions are best understood in the con-
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