The quagmire theory suggests that American leaders had unintentionally and mistakenly led the country into the Vietnam War.
[2] Halberstam, a New York Times reporter who was stationed in Vietnam during the war, worked closely with a secret North Vietnamese agent, Phạm Xuân Ẩn.
The journalists covering the war in Vietnam were crucial because the only other reporting the American people got was from the government.
[4]Schlesinger believed the war to be a "tragedy without villains" and identified nationalism rather than communism as the most influential factor driving US involvement in Vietnam.
Two states emerged from the First Indochina War: the Communist-ruled north and the south, split by the 17th parallel-agreed upon at the Geneva Convention in 1954.
French president Charles de Gaulle warned John F. Kennedy that Vietnam was a "a bottomless military and political swamp.".
[9] In 1963, with the approval of the CIA, South Vietnam president Ngo Dinh Diem was overthrown and killed.
This sparked a tumultuous period in south Vietnamese politics with many leaders taking over and then quickly losing power.
In October 1963, President Kennedy asked the publisher of The New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger, to remove Halberstam from Vietnam.
From this incident came the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, allowing the U.S. to assist southeast Asian countries fearful of communist aggression.