Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
May 30 - June 23, 2025
Hanoi did claim a twelve-mile limit but did not make it public until September 1964, a month after the attack.
The more serious question concerns the supposed innocence of the Maddox’s presence in the gulf, and the related issue of whether the attack on the destroyer was unprovoked. Here the administration’s case is shaky indeed. The
Then there is the issue of the alleged second attack, on 4 August. Whether it in fact occurred has long been a source of controversy, but the appearance of a major study by historian Edwin Moise almost certainly has settled the issue: no attack on American ships occurred that day.
According to National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, Johnson decided early in the day—possibly even before the shooting started, when all he had were reports that an attack on the destroyers might be imminent—to use the incident as a means to get a congressional resolution passed.
only Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield voiced opposition to retaliation. (“The Communists won’t be forced down,” he said, and any attempt to do so would cost “a lot of lives.”)
It was a tough spot for members of Congress to be in, a point not lost on a clearly dubious George Aiken, Republican senator from Vermont.
Johnson then reassured the country: “We know, although others appear to forget, the risks of spreading conflict. We seek no wider war.”
“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.”
Concludes historian John Prados: “A two-destroyer force to sail in close proximity to the North Vietnamese coast for ninety-six hours? Rationalize as you may, it was taunting Hanoi to do so.”
The timing was perfect for another reason: the Democratic Convention was scheduled for mid August, and officials knew that the party’s members of Congress would feel espedally duty-bound to support a resolution brought up mere days before that celebratory event.
“The only plausible explanation of the incident,” he cabled London, “seems to be that it was a deliberate attempt by the Americans to provoke the North Vietnamese into hostile reaction
Ultimately, the question of whether the United States deliberately planned its operations in the Gulf of Tonkin as a means of provoking North Vietnam to retaliate remains elusive, especially with respect to the first incident, on 2 August. For the historian, there is insufficient evidence to suggest that the whole affair, from beginning to end, was staged for the purpose of justifying an American retaliation. But there is compelling circumstantial evidence that, at the very least, government officials entered the month of Au gust hoping desperately for a pretext that would allow a show of U.S.
...more
Fulbright urged them to think of the resolution as a moderate measure “calculated to prevent the spread of war.”
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.
But the fact is that legislators, with the notable exception of Morse, did not ask the hard questions, despite opportunities to do so and despite the capacious language of the resolution.
Moreover, when subsequent investigations showed that the administration’s case for retaliation in the Tonkin Gulf had been considerably less than airtight, legislators correctly concluded that they had been deceived, and Johnson’s “credibility gap” with the press and public was exacerbated.
Leaders in Hanoi appear to have drawn two principal lessons from the developments. First, the American air strikes were dramatic proof of their vulnerability to U.S. military power. In internal directives Hanoi officials cautioned that “our initial experiences in fighting were inadequate,” and they redeployed their defense units and tightened discipline. Second, northern leaders, who knew that there occurred no DRV attacks on U.S. ships on 4 August, viewed the “retaliatory” bombings and the congressional resolution as demonstrations of Johnson’s determination to maintain the American presence
...more
Within forty-eight hours of the bombing raids, three dozen MIG aircraft had been flown in from China to be stationed at Phuc Yen airfield near Hanoi.
By mid September, U Thant thus had what he wanted: explicit North Vietnamese agreement to take part in talks with the United States.
Thant expected a swift administration response, but none came. Several weeks went by.
On the other hand, these men swiftly discovered that the U.S. air strikes had done little or nothing to bolster Khanh’s government. In that respect, the flexing of American muscle in the gulf had actually been spectacularly unsuccessful in accomplishing its most important purpose: boosting the morale in South Vietnam and thereby solidifying the political foundation of the Saigon government.
both Taylor and Bundy placed considerable emphasis on the growing international clamor for a great-power conference on Laos and the need to work against it.
Low South Vietnamese morale had been a central American concern in June and July, before Tonkin Gulf; it remained no less a preoccupation afterward.
To independent observers, this reality foretold gigantic, perhaps insurmountable, problems in any defense of South Vietnam (running through the whole body of New York Times reporting of the war in the last half of August is the haunting question: how can a successful war be fought in the vacuum of a society that no longer seems to care about winning?); to the top figures in the Johnson administration, it necessitated merely a redoubled effort.
On the other hand, that same governmental weakness precluded a drastically enlarged war effort, because the inevitable reverberations of such an enlargement might cause the complete collapse of central authority in Saigon.
But what if “limited pressures” proved insufficient? In that case, Bundy inevitably advised, the administration should move to “more serious pressures” that involved “systematic military action” against North Vietnam. Following Taylor’s suggestion, Bundy posited 1 January 1965 as a good contingency date (“D day”) for initiating such action.
It was a highly important document, produced in response to Johnson’s request for a summary of options on Vietnam, and the main topic of discussion at a top-level, off-the-record meeting at the White House on 14 August.
Ten days is a short time, and yet so severe was the political turmoil in South Vietnam that Americans in Saigon feared that a pause of that length might cause a complete governmental and military collapse.
And indeed, in the last half of August it appeared that South Vietnam’s ten-year history might be swiftly careening to an end.
Though the North Vietnamese did not retaliate against the air strikes, Khanh nevertheless imposed stricter censorship, severely curtailed civil liberties, and introduced a new constitution as a means of ousting Duong Van Minh from his largely ceremonial post as chief of state.
Buddhist militants and their student allies led massive demonstrations against
On 25 August, after promising further liberalizing measures, Khanh suddenly resigned. Two days later, after no one had stepped forward to fill the vacuum, a triumvirate composed of Khanh, Minh, and Tran Thien Khiem assumed power and withdrew the controversial constitution. Two days after that, Khanh apparently suffered a mental and physical “breakdown” and abruptly left Saigon, whereupon Nguyen Xuen Oanh, a Harvard-educated economist, was named acting premier to lead a caretaker government for the next two months. Five days, three government shakeups: the worst turmoil in the era of Ngo Dinh
...more
Khanh, though initially noncommittal,. returned to Saigon on 3 September, resumed his position as premier, dissolved the triumvirate, and reappointed Minh as chief of state. American officials had what they wanted, but they saw little reason to cheer.
Throughout that time, Thompson had been a strong supporter of the American advisory effort, a believer in the notion that victory would ultimately come and that South Vietnam would survive as an independent, noncommunist entity. No longer. Thompson had changed his mind. He had come to the conclusion that the situation in South Vietnam was all but hopeless and that it was foolish to pretend otherwise.
Given that Beijing and Hanoi hoped to prevent an Americanized war and that neither had ruled out attending a reconvened Geneva conference, a face-saving agreement for the United States ought to be possible to arrange.
“Because negotiations on Viet- Nam are unmentionable, but may nevertheless be urgently needed, I think it would be wrong for us to assist in creating fresh obstacles to a Conference on Laos.”
It adopted a hands-off stance that neither put “fresh obstacles” in the way of a Laos conference nor helped facilitate one. This policy of noninvolvement was potentially decisive, because the talks quickly became dominated by a behind-the-scenes struggle between Washington and Paris for the ear of Souvanna Phouma.
The Economist of London, in general sympathetic to the American effort, called U.S. policy bankrupt and said that Lyndon Johnson faced a stark choice: to begin negotiations, “which would essentially be a disengagement operation,” or to massively escalate the American commitment “to a miserably bad military situation.”
the administration said it had to go on as long as there remained “a hope of success.” Even if that hope, stated in percentage terms, descended to 20 percent? 10 percent? 5 percent? Presumably yes.
Almost to a man, they viewed as the central question not whether to escalate, but how far and fast to proceed.
McNaughton recommended that active consideration be given to a significant U.S. troop presence in the South, and he outlined a specific series of provocative actions the United States might simultaneously take against the North, culminating in a sustained air war.
Robert McNamara remained opposed to the dispatch of any American troops. Dean Rusk, too, believed such action to be premature.
Taylor sent Rusk another mission report, which he hoped would be a “basic document in our coming discussions.” The cable, labeled top secret, is surely one of the most remarkable ever written by an American envoy in Vietnam: We must accept the fact that an effective government, much beyond the capacity of that which has existed over the past several months, is unlikely to survive. We now have a better feel for the quality of our ally and for what we can expect from him in terms of ability to govern. Only the emergence of an exceptional leader could improve the situation and no George
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
If we leave Vietnam with our tail between our legs, the consequences of this defeat in the rest of Asia, Africa, and Latin America would be disastrous.
When Johnson asked if anyone doubted that Vietnam was worth all this effort, all emphatically said that it was. The war, they agreed, must be vigorously prosecuted.
The September 1964 policy discussions loom large in the history of American decision making on Vietnam. This is not because of the specific decisions that resulted—existing policy would be essentially maintained until the South Vietnamese political picture improved—but because the most important figures in that derision making had reached a general consensus that a dramatically increased American involvement would at some point be necessary.
“There are those who say you ought to go North and drop bombs to try to wipe out the supply lines,” Johnson said at Eufala, Oklahoma, on 25 September. “We don’t want our American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys. … To get involved with 700 million people and get tied down in a land war in Asia.” Four days later, in a speech in Tokyo, William Bundy left a different impression: “Expansion of the war outside South Vietnam, while not a course we want or seek, could be forced on us by the pressures of the Communists.” Columnist Arthur Krock in the New York Times commented: “Political
...more
the overall message of the piece was clear: vote for Johnson if you want to avoid an American war in Vietnam.
Though outside observers in Saigon, in particular the British, shook their heads at the staunch American backing of Khanh, U.S. officials had begun to entertain the idea that he might have to go. The cause of this shift in American thinking was Khanh’s accommodationist policies toward the Buddhists, policies that grew stronger as September progressed.
What did the Buddhists want? This was the critical question for American intelligence officers in the autumn of 1964, as it had been a year earlier. The answer proved more elusive than ever, perhaps in part because Buddhists themselves were uncertain.
