America was already twenty years into its Vietnam commitment when Lyndon Johnson and Kennedy’s “best and brightest” holdovers sought an incident to pull American firepower into the war with at least a glimmer of legitimacy. It came in August 1964 with two brief encounters in the Gulf of Tonkin, the waters off the coast of North Vietnam. On August 2, 1964 two American destroyers engaged three North Vietnamese torpedo boats, resulting in one of the torpedo boat’s sinking. American claims that the North Vietnamese fired first were later disputed. On August 4, 1964, the American destroyers reported a second engagement with North Vietnamese boats. There was never any confirmation that either ship had actually been attacked. (Weeks after this Defense Secretary Robert McNamara expressed to Johnson doubts that the attack had occurred.) But these faulty reports would be exploited as a convenient excuse for the massive escalation of America’s involvement in Vietnam.

In the civil war that was raging between North and South since the French withdrawal from Indochina and the partition of Vietnam in 1954, the United States had committed money, material, advice, and, by the end of 1963, some 15,000 military advisers in support of the anti-Communist Saigon government. The American CIA was also in the thick of things, having helped foster the coup that toppled prime minister Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963 and then acting surprised when Diem was executed by the army officers who overthrew him.

Among the other “advice” the United States provided to its South Vietnamese allies was to teach them commando tactics. In 1964, CIA trained guerrillas from the South began to attack the North for months in covert acts of sabotage. Code named Plan 34-A, these commando raids failed to undermine North Vietnam’s military strength, so the mode of attack was shifted to hit-and-run operations by small torpedo boats. To support these assaults, the U.S. Navy posted warships in the Gulf of Tonkin, loaded with electronic eavesdropping equipment enabling them to monitor North Vietnamese military operations and provide intelligence to the South Vietnamese commandos.

According to Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History,

“Even Johnson privately expressed doubts only a few days after the second attack supposedly took place, confiding to an aide, ‘Hell, those dumb stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish.’”

Without waiting for a review of the situation, he ordered an air strike against North Vietnam in “retaliation” for the “attacks” on the U.S. ships. One bitter result of these air raids was the capture of downed pilot Everett Alvarez, Jr., the first American POW of the Vietnam War. He would remain in Hanoi prisons for eight years.

President Johnson followed up the air strike by calling for passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. This proposal gave the President the authority to “take all necessary measures” to repel attacks against U.S. forces and to “prevent further aggression.” The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed the House unanimously after only forty minutes of debate. In the Senate, there were only two voices in opposition.

Congress, which alone possesses the constitutional authority to declare war, had handed that power over to a man who was not a bit reluctant to use it. One of the senators who voted against the Tonkin Resolution, Oregon’s Wayne Morse, later said, “I believe that history will record that we have made a great mistake in subverting and circumventing the Constitution.” After the vote, Walt Rostow, an adviser to Lyndon Johnson, remarked, “We don’t know what happened, but it had the desired result.”

The 45th anniversary of the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, along with the recent passing of LBJ’s Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, should serve as sobering reminders of this episode and the long, costly war that America was dragged into –largely based on lies and shadowy misinformation that was then elevated to an attack on Americans. Certainly few members of Congress were thinking about Tonkin and Vietnam when the web of lies and misinformation was spun around getting America into Iraq.

You can read more about the Tonkin incident and the Vietnam War in Don’t Know Much About History from which this post is adapted.
Here is my recent post with some suggested readings about the Vietnam era:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kenneth-c-davis/robert-mcnamara-and-vietn_b_226705.html
These are links related to the Gulf of Tonkin incident and recently declassified National Security Administration documents:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/index.htm
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/press20051201.htm

Here is McNamara’s New York Times obituary: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/us/07mcnamara.html?hp

But for many others, especially younger Americans, the Vietnam War has fallen into the “black hole” of American History and is as remote as the Peloponnesian War. For them and anyone else who needs a refresher course on America in Vietnam, here is a short reading list from among the thousands of books written about the war:

Known as the “architect” of America’s Vietnam policy, McNamara embodied the phrase The Best and the Brightest, the title of David Halberstam’s classic account of the group of advisors who surrounded John F. Kennedy and took America into the war. Halberstam did not use, nor intend, the phrase as a compliment.

Vietnam: A History by Stanley Karnow, a companion book to the PBS series mentioned below in the Video section, is an excellent single-volume history of the war.

A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan, an account of a military adviser in Vietnam who became disillusioned with the war, written by one of the journalists who broke the “Pentagon Papers” story.

The Pentagon Papers is the widely used name for a top secret history of US involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967, commissioned by Robert McNamara. The papers were leaked to the New York Times and published on the paper’s front page in 1971, precipitating a major First Amendment case when the government tried to suppress publication of the documents. There are several editions of the Pentagon Papers available in book form. They can also be accessed online at http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon/pent1.html

We Were Soldiers Once and Young: Ia Drang–the Battle that Changed the War in Vietnam by Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (Ret.) and Joseph L. Galloway, a compelling wartime memoir of a battlefield commander (and made into a film starring Mel Gibson).

Four Hours in My Lai by Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim, is an investigation of the most notorious atrocity of the Vietnam era, in which American troops methodically killed hundreds of Vietnamese villagers.

I would also recommend several books that capture some of the “atmospherics” of the era:

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien.

A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo, a memoir of a Marine lieutenant.

Dispatches by Micheal Herr, correspondent for Esquire magazine.

When Heaven and Earth Changed Places by Le Ly Hayslip and Jay Wurts, for a perspective on the world of war through the eyes of a Vietnamese woman (also made into a film which I have not seen).

Video Resources:

Robert McNamara was also the central figure in Errol Morris’s Academy Award-winning documentary The Fog of War

http://www.sonyclassics.com/fogofwar/

PBS “The American Experience” also produced a classic documentary on the war, Vietnam: A Television History.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/vietnam/

June 6, 1968 Robert F. Kennedy , Jr. died early in the morning on this date in Los Angeles. He was shot the night before, just after claiming victory in the California Democratic Presidential primary. Gunman Sirhan B. Sirhan was caught immediately after the shooting, Kennedy was 42 years old at the time of his death and had he not been killed, might have won the 1968 Democratic nomination for President. Instead, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, with the backing of Democratic party power brokers, won the nomination but was defeated by Richard M. Nixon in the 1968 general election. (Link to original NY Times article about Robert Kennedy’s assassination.)

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0605.html#article

The younger brother brother of President John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, as he was known, had been JFK’s Attorney General and close adviser. He remained as Attorney General under Lyndon Johnson for several months. He then resigned and successfully ran for the Senate from New York. Within a few years, Bobby Kennedy had become a vocal opponent of the war in Vietnam, and early in 1968, announced he would run for President.

Lyndon Johnson had already announced that he would not run for re-election. In California, Kennedy defeated  Senator Eugene McCarthy, who was also an antiwar candidate and had challenged President Johnson, almost defeating him in the New Hampshire primary. Supporters of McCarthy claimed that Kennedy was an opportunist, fracturing the antiwar forces.

Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, who entered the race only after Johnson’s stunning decision not to run, was not entered in some early primaries because he had announced his candidacy so late. With the backing of organized labor and party regulars, Humphrey eventually won the Democratic nomination at the stormy Democratic convention in Chicago.

(Link to PBS American Experience documentary on Robert F. Kennedy)

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/rfk/index.html

In his run for the Presidency, Robert F. Kennedy championed racial and economic justice, an end to the war in Vietnam and a new vision of social improvement in America. Robert F. Kennedy is buried in Arlington Cemetery. Among his most famous quotes is this line (paraphrased from George Bernard Shaw):

“There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why… I dream of things that never were and ask why not.”

June 6 marks another important historical anniversary. On June 6, 1944, now known as D-Day,  the Allied invasion of Normandy, France began. Here’s a quick quiz about D-Day excerpted from Don’t Know Much About Anything

Steven Spielberg’s World War II epic, Saving Private Ryan, brought the brutal reality of combat home to millions, but many moviegoers did not know which battle the film depicted, or when and why it happened. The assault, code-named Operation Overlord, occurred June 6, 1944, against Hitler’s Germany. In the largest amphibian assault in history, Allied armies crossed the English Channel to land on five beaches in Normandy in northern France. The invasion force involved 700 ships, 4,000 landing craft, 10,000 planes, and some 176,000 Allied troops. How much do you know about D-Day?

True or False?
1. The allied invasion force included troops from all NATO members.
2. The D-Day invasion marked the first Allied assault on the European mainland.
3. The allied forces were commanded by Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower.
4. Following D-Day, the war against Germany continued for almost a year.

Answers
1. False. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was not formed until 1949. Most of the troops participating were American, British, and Canadian.
2. False. The Allies began to retake Europe by invading Italy in 1943.
3. True. As Supreme Commander of the Allied forces, Eisenhower had ultimate responsibility for the invasion.
3. True. The German army did not formally surrender until May 7, 1945. May 8, 1945 was declared V.E. (Victory in Europe) Day.