A dubious threat to US interests. A swift vote in Congress for broad presidential war powers in response. A long, costly and bitterly debated war.
Fifty years ago on Sunday, reacting to reports of a US Navy encounter with enemy warships in the Gulf of Tonkin off Vietnam — reports long since discredited — President Lyndon Johnson signed a resolution passed overwhelmingly by Congress that historians call the crucial catalyst for deep American involvement in the Vietnam War. Many also see it as a cautionary tale that has gone unheeded.
“I think we are probably a bit better informed now, but I don’t think that makes us a lot safer,” says Edwin Moises, author of “Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War.” Every era brings new foreign policy and political challenges, said the Clemson University history professor, “and I think it is utterly unpredictable what kind of misunderstandings may come along.”
“If you ask whether we learned anything, I would say not enough,” says former US Sen Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat who opposed the war in Iraq, long after Tonkin and Vietnam.
In the last five decades, Tonkin has not kept Washington from backing wars, but it has shadowed relations between presidents and Congress. Debates about foreign conflicts, whether in Bosnia, Syria or Iraq, have also been referendums on trust. Is the war really necessary? Is the president telling everything he knows? What should be the parameters, if any, for military action?
Graham was chairman of the intelligence committee when the Senate debated, in the fall of 2002, whether to authorize military action in Iraq. Did Saddam Hussein, as alleged by President George W Bush’s administration, possess weapons of mass destruction? Graham found the case “soft and unreliable” and voted no. But most of his colleagues disagreed. The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were barely a year old, and the midterm election was just a month away, a difficult time to turn away the president or the Pentagon.
The Senate approved the Iraq resolution by 77-23, the House 296-133. A US-led coalition invaded Iraq, opening a conflict that lasted for years. As Graham and others feared, the weapons were not found.
Former Sen. Max Cleland of Georgia, who had been badly wounded in Vietnam, was among those who supported the 2002 legislation. “I can’t believe I volunteered for one war, which turned out to be a massive tragedy for the United States, and I went to the Senate and voted for another war, which turned out to be a massive tragedy,” he says.
“It was right before my re-election, and I felt compelled for my own hide,” explains Cleland, who nonetheless was defeated. “It became the worst vote I made in my life.”
Trust in the White House was high at the time Johnson signed the Tonkin resolution on Aug. 10, 1964. The resolution was submitted and passed within 48 hours.
For months, the US had been conducting clandestine missions, engaging in what historians now consider provocations. On Aug. 2, gunfire was briefly exchanged between the North Vietnamese and the Americans, leading to the sinking of a North Vietnamese boat. According to Stanley Karnow’s respected history, “Vietnam,” Johnson considered pushing for the resolution but decided to hold off because no Americans had been harmed.
Two days later, the commander of the destroyer Maddox, Capt John J Herrick, believed he had picked up radio messages communicating a planned North Vietnamese attack. The Maddox and a second vessel, the Turner Joy, began firing at what they thought were enemy patrol boats launching torpedoes against the Americans.
