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 4th, 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?
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