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The First Domino: Eisenhower, The Military, And America's Intervention In Vietnam

James R. Arnold
Reviewed by By Gaddis Smith
Spring 1992
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James R. Arnold
Morrow
1991
444 pp.
$25.00

President Eisenhower is often praised as the leader who kept the United States out of a combat role in Vietnam. Admitted. But Arnold shows how Eisenhower made the decisions, especially in the "watershed year" 1955 after Dien Bien Phu, which led to the American war under Kennedy and Johnson. Eisenhower did not oppose American military involvement in principle; rather his prudence told him conditions in the 1950s were not right.

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