The war in Vietnam began in an act of presidential deceit. Lyndon Johnson hustled the country into the conflict at the height of the 1964 presidential campaign, winning congressional consent to bomb Vietnam in retaliation for a naval confrontation with North Vietnamese vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin. That confrontation had been provoked, as Congress would discover only years later, by U.S. and South Vietnamese naval incursions into the North. The bombing, rationalized as an alternative to sending ground troops, made ground troops necessary, once the elections were over, in order to protect the
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