“It is certainly true,” McGeorge Bundy later said, “that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was seized by the president as a time for him to take his resolution on Vietnam to the Congress. And he made that decision and arranged that broadcast [to the nation] before there was really absolutely clear-cut evidence as to what had happened out there. And I think that was a mistake. … He made a quick decision on an incompletely verified event.”
