This Day in Vietnam War History (Congress Approves Tonkin Gulf Resolution, a ‘Historic Mistake’)

Aug. 7, 1964—When the U.S. Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution with shamefully minimal debate, it did more than just abrogate its constitutional authority to declare war.

It also furnished Lyndon Johnson with carte blanche to widen American participation in the Vietnam War from a limited advisory capacity to a massive ground-troop commitment—eventually resulting in 58,000 lives lost, along with hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians.

The incident that gave LBJ the congressional authorization he jokingly termed “Grandma’s nightshirt” (i.e., “it covers everything”) foreshadowed a pattern that continued through the war of military intelligence twisted to fit preconceived policy or strategic objectives. Like the war itself, the American intelligence operation was conceived in error and carried to term through deception.

The resolution came following a week of heightened tensions and misinterpreted actions by the Communist government in North Vietnam and the U.S. In late July, in assisting the South Vietnamese in warding off North Vietnamese attacks and Vietcong subversions, the U.S. Maddox (pictured) started a reconnaissance patrol off the coast of North Vietnam.

The destroyer was not far from the island of Hon Me on August 2 when torpedo boats advanced towards it. The boats ignored warning shots from the Maddox and continued. Shots were exchanged, with the North Vietnamese vessels withdrawing after sustaining damage.

Two days later, U.S. radio operators misinterpreted a message, concluding that a North Vietnamese military operation was imminent. Actually, Hanoi had warned torpedo boat commanders to be ready for a new raid by South Vietnam.

Later on the 4^th, as the Maddox and a second destroyer, the Turner Joy, found themselves amid thunderstorms and rain squalls. With radar malfunctioning, they fired into the night at what appeared to be oncoming ships.

LBJ, when told a second North Vietnamese attack was probable but not certain, went ahead on the assumption that it had occurred. He even scoffed a few days later about the accuracy of the initial reports: “Hell, those dumb stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish.”

The deception didn’t end there:

*While claiming that the destroyers were within “international waters” when fired upon, the administration didn’t mention that its recognized three-mile limit was far less than North Vietnam’s 12-mile restriction.

* U.S.-backed South Vietnamese commando attacks and intelligence-gathering missions along the North Vietnamese coast, codenamed Operations Plan (OPLAN) 34A, had probably provoked the August 2 attacks on the Maddox.

*The administration engaged in a rush to judgment about the confusing stream of intelligence reports that initially arrived, with some intelligence about the August 2 attack being included in reports about August 4—thereby mistakenly confirming North Vietnam had initiated hostilities on the latter date.

The incident served as a convenient pretext for ordering retaliatory air strikes and for sending to Capitol Hill a resolution—drafted two months earlier by Presidential aide William Bundy—providing the White House with freedom of action in Vietnam.

Polls showed a gain of more than 30% in public support for Johnson’s response—which was seen as firm but calibrated, in contrast to GOP Presidential nominee Barry Goldwater’s charge that the President’s irresolution in the face of Communism had invited the attack.

Both houses of Congress quickly got in line behind the President. The House of Representatives took only 40 minutes before passing the resolution 416-0. The Senate took longer—nine hours—before giving way, too, with its two dissenters easy to overcome and even ignore.

Even aside from his migrating party affiliations (first Republican, then independent, then a Democrat), the first dissenter, Wayne Morse of Oregon, had earned a reputation as a maverick and gadfly, even a crank and obstructionist. Eleven years before, he had conducted what was at the time the longest one-person filibuster in Senate history, and later in the 1950s he had publicly feuded with a Senate colleague from his own state and party. Moreover, his disdain for alcohol and levity alike left him isolated in a chamber that operated like a club.

Nevertheless, Morse already sensed something was amiss with this incident. As noted by Randall Bennett Woods’ biography of Senate foreign policy grandee J. William Fulbright, a Pentagon contact urged Morse to request the logbooks for the Maddox and Turner Joy from Robert McNamara. (The Defense Secretary claimed they were still aboard ship when, in fact, they had already arrived in Washington.)

Morse chose not to make this an issue when he rose to speak. Instead, he denounced the resolution for being unconstitutional:

“I believe that history will record that we have made a great mistake in subverting and circumventing the Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 8 [which gives Congress the power to declare war] thereof by means of this resolution. . . I believe [this resolution] to be a historic mistake. I believe that within the next century, future generations will look with dismay and great disappointment upon a Congress which is now about to make such a historic mistake. Our constitutional rights are no better than the preservation of our procedural guarantees under the Constitution.”

As for 77-year-old Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska, his arguments against the resolution, if they were mentioned at all in the news coverage, were dismissed as unrealistic and not to be taken seriously. His prediction proved as eerily prophetic as Morse’s, however:

“We now are about to authorize the President if he sees fit to move our Armed Forces…not only into South Vietnam, but also into North Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and of course the authorization includes all the rest of the SEATO [Southeast Asia Treaty Organization] nations. That means sending our American boys into combat in a war in which we have no business, which is not our war, into which we have been misguidedly drawn, which is steadily being escalated. This resolution is a further authorization for escalation unlimited. I am opposed to sacrificing a single American boy in this venture. We have lost far too many already.”

Administration and Pentagon assurances to the contrary, U.S. plans for a rapid victory were about to sink into the jungles of Vietnam.

The same pattern of U.S. military authorization framing intelligence in a misleading manner recurred in the run-up to the Iraq War. Although that conflict did not lead to as many American casualties as the Vietnam War, the damage to the Iraqi population—and, ultimately, to US credibility in the region—was worse.

When will U.S. policymakers learn to make sure they are right before the shooting starts? 

Quote of the Day (Ken Burns, on a Myth About the Vietnam War)

“If I were to ask you in a test who was leading North Vietnam during the 1960s and early 1970s before his death, you would all say Ho Chi Minh. You would not be right.”—Documentarian Ken Burns, discussing a basic assumption about Vietnam that is untrue, quoted in Allison Levitsky, “Burns, Ward Show Clips From 2017 Documentary Series ‘Vietnam’,” The Chautauquan Daily, August 7, 2014

The correct answer to the hypothetical test question above is Le Duan, who, for all intents and purposes, ran North Vietnam from January 1959 through this day 45 years ago, when Hanoi Radio announced that Ho Chi Minh (pictured) had just died. 

Don’t feel bad about not knowing that Ho was only a revered elder statesman during that decade—neither did President Lyndon Johnson or Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara until someone told them one and a half years into the American ground war, and a half-dozen years after Le Duan began exerting authority.

In other words, the United States was not adhering to one of the elementary principles of war: Know your enemy.

I can think of few things more dispiriting than that, after nearly 50 years, millions of dollars, and who knows how many violation of civil liberties later, the U.S. effort to compile intelligence on those who mean it harm has failed dismally.

The United States paid for its intelligence failure in Vietnam through 55,000 lives lost. Who knows what the cost of the war on terror (now in yet another phase with the machinations of ISIS) will be in the end?

At the moment, however, I think the American people are well within their rights to demand from the federal government all the money foolishly misspent on “intelligence” in the last 10 years. I am looking forward to other revelations from the Burns documentary series about Vietnam (previewed, 2 1/2 years ahead of time, for lucky Chautauqua Institution visitors such as myself). But it's a shame that it takes a half century for these insights to come to pass, rather than closer to the moment of a nation's decision to spend blood and treasure abroad.

This Day in Literary History (C.P. Snow Decries “2 Cultures”)

May 7, 1959—Physicist, bureaucrat and novelist, C.P. Snow gave rise to an enduring bit of intellectual shorthand about the knowledge and attitudes separating the sciences and the humanities with his lecture, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.”

Snow is a figure from an age and environment utterly alien to 21st-century American culture. We’re used to novelists who spend years—decades, even—on a single work of elephantine proportions, meant to corral the Great American Novelist. Think Harold Brodkey. Think Norman Mailer with Harlot’s Ghost, a 1,000-plus-page behemoth ending with the most frightening phrase in the English language: “To Be Continued.”

In contrast, Snow was the kind of workhorse who leaves an astonishing amount of work that leaves one envious, especially when considering his very active life in politics. Unfortunately, little of his fiction is read or remembered years after his death.

Twenty years ago, inspired by a “Masterpiece Theatre” mini-series, I spent much of several months on my way to work listening to audiotapes of Snow’s entire 11-novel Strangers and Brothers sequence. After so much time, it’s hard to recall much of this staggering narrative of his alter ego, Lewis Eliot, from youth to late middle age. Two of the novels, however, I would recommend: The Masters, an unusually insightful dissection of academic politics, and The Light and the Dark, a poignant character study of Eliot’s manic-depressive intellectual friend Roy Calvert.

Ironically, it’s not so much entire novels as a pair of phrases he popularized that have lingered in the collective intellectual consciousness. One was “corridors of power,” taken from the title of a 1964 novel. The other, the subject of today’s post, is “the two cultures,” a seemingly rarefied topic that sparked a surprisingly personal controversy in Snow’s lifetime and that continues to be debated to this day by academics.

What surprises me about this lecture is not so much the stark distinction between science and the humanities but the perhaps overly optimistic faith of Snow in science and development as positive goods. Though a member of the Labour Party (he served briefly in Harold Wilson’s cabinet as parliamentary secretary to the minister of technology), he sounds here, in hailing industrialization as the engine of upward mobility, like nobody so much as the American Federalist Alexander Hamilton, another boy from humble circumstances who rose, by dint of education, to the top of his circle.

A society that stifles such promise—as, Snow believed, the Britain of his time was doing, by steering bright students with an aptitude toward the sciences into the humanities instead—wills itself to irreversible decline and fall. Here, for instance, he likens Britain to an earlier seaside power—and as I read it, I couldn’t help seeing parallels to a republic far closer to home:

“Like us, [the Venetians] had once been fabulously lucky. They had become rich, as we did, by accident… They knew, just as clearly as we know, that the current of history had begun to flow against them. Many of them gave their minds to working out ways to keep going. It would have meant breaking the pattern into which they had crystallised. They were fond of the pattern, just as we are fond of ours. They never found the will to break it."

In one sense, Snow was far from being a soothsayer. The gap between rich and poor would provide another battleground for the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., and whichever superpower was most convincing about its ability to bridge this gap would win the Cold War, he believed.

And then, this kicker: “This disparity between the rich and the poor has been noticed . . . most acutely and not unnaturally, by the poor,” Snow explains, adding: “It won’t last for long. Whatever else in the world we know survives to the year 2000, that won’t.”

As we know now, he couldn’t be more painfully, sadly wrong about this.

Ironically enough, reading his description of who would lead the Third World out of hopelessness, the technocrat who comes to mind is Robert McNamara. Yes, the same man who, after misleading the American public about his feelings about the Vietnam War he led, was hustled out of his old job by Lyndon Johnson and into 13 years at the World Bank. There, with his customary energy and bullying, he preached with evangelical fervor the necessity of saving Africans from want—all the while saddling them with massive debt and pursuing construction policies that imperiled the environment.

In the course of his lecture, Snow shifted from a fairly evenhanded discussion of the two sides’ shared responsibility for these intellectual divisions to a more partisan one in favor of scientists, whom he hailed for having “the future in their bones.” At least one humanist, F.R. Leavis, launched such an ad hominem attack on the quality of Snow’s novels that his publisher nervously asked Trilling if he wanted any changes in the work before publication. Fortunately, Snow did not answer in kind.