August 4, 1964: The Gulf of Tonkin Incident

USS Maddox

August 4, 1964, 60 years ago: The Gulf of Tonkin Incident occurs. What happened? That is still in dispute.

On August 2, the destroyer USS Maddox, while performing a signals intelligence patrol, was approached by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats. The Maddox fired warning shots, and the North Vietnamese boats attacked with torpedoes and machine gun fire. In the ensuing engagement, one U.S. aircraft, which had been launched from aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga, was damaged, all of the North Vietnamese torpedo boats were damaged, and four North Vietnamese sailors were killed, with six more wounded. There were no U.S. casualties. According to its report, the Maddox was "unscathed except for a single bullet hole from a Vietnamese machine gun round."

Two days later, on August 4, another destroyer, the USS Turner Joy, joined Maddox on its mission. That evening, the ships opened fire on radar and sonar returns that had been preceded by communications intercepts which U.S. forces claimed meant an attack was imminent. The commander of the Maddox task force, Captain John Herrick, reported that the ships were being attacked by North Vietnamese boats -- when in fact, there were no North Vietnamese boats present.

While Herrick soon reported doubts regarding the task force’s initial perceptions of the attack, the Administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson relied on wrongly interpreted National Security Agency communications intercepts to conclude that the attack was real.

While doubts regarding the perceived second attack have been expressed since 1964, it was not until years later that it was shown conclusively never to have happened. In the 2003 documentary The Fog of War -- the title taken from a German expression for the uncertainty in situational awareness experienced by participants in military operations -- Robert S. McNamara, the U.S. Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, admitted that the August 2 attack on the Maddox happened; but that the August 4 attack, for which LBJ authorized retaliation, never happened.

The outcome of these two confrontations was the passage by the U.S. Congress of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted LBJ the authority to assist any Southeast Asian country whose government was considered to be jeopardized by "Communist aggression." The resolution served as Johnson's legal justification for deploying U.S. conventional forces to South Vietnam, and the commencement of open warfare against North Vietnam.

The Resolution passed the House of Representatives unanimously, 416-0. It passed the Senate by a vote of 88-2. While 10 Senators were not present for the vote, the only ones to vote against it were Ernest Gruening of Alaska and Wayne Morse of Oregon, both Democrats. (Morse, first elected in 1944 as a Republican, became an independent in 1952 because of disgust over McCarthyism, and switched to the Democrats so he could be in the majority and chair committees after the Democratic takeover following in the 1954 elections.)

On the NBC TV series The West Wing, John Spencer played Leo McGarry, White House Chief of Staff, and a U.S. Air Force veteran who had been shot down over North Vietnam in 1970, and barely rescued before he could be taken prisoner. In one 2001 episode, where a military operation has gone badly, he tells President Jed Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen, that if he could go back in time to any moment, it would be to August 4, 1964, to tell Johnson, "Mr. President, don't do it."

But Johnson was running for re-election. All the polls showed he would easily beat the Republican nominee, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. But he was concerned that, if he let the Gulf of Tonkin Incident go, he would be seen as "weak" and "soft on Communism." Instead of saying, "Let them say that, the American people know I'm handling things well," he panicked, and sent America down a path that led to nearly 60,000 deaths in 8 years -- around 36,000 by the time he left office on January 20, 1969 -- taking all his accomplishments, and they were many, some of them changing things tremendously for the better, and giving them the rebuttal, "Yes, but... "

After leaving office, he told historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who was working on his authorized biography, "I knew from the start that, if I left the woman I loved, the Great Society, in order to fight that bitch of a war, then I would lose everything. All my programs. All my hopes. All my dreams." He had blown it, and he knew it.

Greuning and Morse were both defeated for re-election to the Senate in 1968: Gruening by 2,000 votes, Morse by 3,500.

USS Maddox, launched in 1944 during World War II, was the 3rd ship named for Captain William Maddox, U.S. Marine Corps, a hero of the Battle of Santa Clara in the Mexican-American War in 1847. It remained in service until 1972, was sold to Taiwan, and scrapped in 1985. Her Captain, John Herrick, lived until 1997. His brother, Curtis Herrick, was a General in the U.S. Army.

USS Turner Joy, launched in 1958, was named for an Admiral who served as Superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy. Only this 1 ship, as yet, has been named for him. Since 1991, she has been a museum ship berthed at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in the Seattle suburb of Bremerton, Washington. Her commanding officer, Commander Robert C. Barnhart Jr., lived until 2012.