| Term | Definition |
| Credibility Gap | After The Media Found Out About The Tet Offensive Doubts In The War Occured |
| Dien Bien Phu | French Military base in Vietnam, Viet Minh overtook result; US steps in, Geneva, Ho Chi Minh withdraws troops N of 17th parallel |
| Domino Theory | A belief that if one nation in the Southeast Asia fell to communism that thre rest of Southeast Asia would too, just like dominos |
| General Westmoreland | the commander of U.S forces in vietnam, described the offensive as a Vietcong defeat. |
| Guerilla War | guerilla means small war; war tactics |
| Ho Chih Minh Trail | Network of Jungle paths from North Vietnam through Laos and cambodia and into South Vietnam, served as the major supply route of the vietcong. |
| Gulf of Tonkin Resolution | allowed the president to take all necassay measures to repel armed attack or prevent further aggression |
| Hawks | Americans that supported the Vietnam War |
| Doves | Americans that opposed the Vietnam War |
| Henry Kissinger | United States diplomat who served under President Nixon and President Ford (born in 1923) |
| Ho Chi Minh | 1950s and 60s; communist leader of North Vietnam; used geurilla warfare to fight anti-comunist, American-funded attacks under the Truman Doctrine; brilliant strategy drew out war and made it unwinnable |
| Kent State Shooting | Incident in which National Guard troops fired at a group of students during an antiwar protest at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four people. |
| Ngo Dinh Diem | South Vietnam non-Communist leader |
| Pentagon Papers | A 7,000-page top-secret United States government report on the history of the internal planning and policy-making process within the government itself concerning the Vietnam War. |
| Vietminh | Vietnamese group of nationalist in the 1940s to drive the Japanese out of the war |
| Students for Democratic Society | student that protested the Vietnam war |
| Tet Offensive | 1968; National Liberation Front and North Vietnamese forces launched a huge attack on the Vietnamese New Year (Tet), which was defeated after a month of fighting and many thousands of casualties; major defeat for communism, but Americans reacted sharply, with declining approval of LBJ and more anti-war sentiment |
| Vietcong | the guerrilla soldiers of the Communist faction in Vietnam, also know as the National Liberation Front |
| Vietnamization | policy by Nixon about gradually turning over all the fighting in the Vietnam War to the South Vietnamese Army |
| War Powers Act | Passed by congrss in 1973; the president is limited in the deployment of troops overses to a sixty day period in peactime (which can be extended for an extra thirty days to permit withdrawl) Unless congress explicity gives its approval for a longr period |
| Agent Orange | a herbicide used in the Vietnam War to defoliate forest areas |