Ike sent career military, officers, often volunteers, after Dien Bien Phu, concerned about another “domino falling”. This was the height of the cold war, remember.
Using that fact to argue that he “started the war” is tenuous at best. We had “advisors” all over our hemisphere and all over the world then.
Lyndon Baines Johnson escalated this proxy conflict between superpowers, fired up the draft and responded each time General Westmoreland requested more troops.
Even Kennedy only sent advisors, the Green Berets were his idea.
This was Johnson’s war. Our troops did their jobs and followed their orders. LBJ and the `rats were the loosers: the same fierce hawks who ginned-up the war, like RFK, then became peaceful, love-dove hippies. We never lost a battle.
That is how I view it.
And the negotiated peace might have stood up as long as the Korean Armistice had the leftist radicals who controlled Congress and the Media allowed us to fulfill our obligations under the treaty to South Vietnam, which they did not.
They completely abrogated our national responsibility and left the South Vietnamese out to dry.
A black mark on our national soul, much the same as Operation Keelhaul negotiated at Yalta and our national treatment of Joseph McCarthy.
Yeah, I think this is the only honest an accurate conclusion any historian can conclude. As noted earlier, Truman had agreements of support with the French and Vietnam. Following the Dien Bien Phu uprising Ike, and the more so Kennedy, sent advisors, but as you correctly point out, we did have advisors everywhere as a result of the historical conditions of the time.
Johnson had a personality dominated by hubris and he truly grafted us into Vietnam and (like Pear Harbor) used the Gulf of Tonkin as the pretext for committing us to the course of war in Indochina.