Morse did not go down without a fight. For three days, on 5, 6, and 7 August, he railed against the resolution and challenged the administration’s account of what actually happened in the Gulf of Tonkin. He predicted that Johnson would use the resolution as a functional declaration of war. Read today, Morse’s lengthy diatribes are uncanny in their accuracy, more so than he himself could have known at the time. Had they been delivered by someone else, anyone else, they might have influenced more members of the august body to reconsider their position. But Morse was not influential.
