Some who opposed intervention in Vietnam charged that a war without congressional approval was unconstitutional. In early 1964, at Rostow’s urging, the State Department started to draft a joint resolution to authorize the President to take action unilaterally. By June Johnson had become interested. But he soon changed his mind, reckoning it would not be politic to present himself as a warmonger in the campaign against Goldwater.
For a decade the CIA had sent clandestine South Vietnamese teams to the North to plant guerrillas, abduct or assassinate officials, disrupt installations, and so on, much as the Vietcong did in the South. Almost all the operatives were killed or captured. The South Vietnamese paratroopers failed to report for their missions, and officers arrived in drunken stupors. In late 1963 the Joint Chiefs revived and expanded the raids with presidential approval as OPLAN 3 4-A. The North Vietnamese had modern Soviet anti-aircraft missiles and radars around their cities and along the Gulf of Tonkin. To locate the sites, the U.S. ran U-2 overflights and put naval ships with electronic eavesdropping monitors in the gulf. Extremely fast Norwegian patrol boats with South Vietnamese crews, called DeSoto missions, moved into the gulf to activate the radar transmitters.
The first mission sailed on July 30, 1964, when four boats from Danang attacked the radars. On August 2 three North Vietnamese torpedo boats went after the U.S. destroyer Maddox. The skipper, John J. Herrick, radioed the carrier Ticonderoga for air cover. The North Vietnamese launched their torpedoes, two of which missed, and the third proved a dud. Only one machine-gun bullet struck the Maddox, harmlessly. The aircraft sank one boat and crippled the others.
Johnson played down the incident. But the Joint Chiefs demanded retaliation. Another carrier, the Constellation, moved into the South China Sea and a second destroyer, the C. Turner Joy, joined the Maddox.
On August 3 both ships were in Tonkin Gulf as the South Vietnamese boats sped toward the radars. There were summer storms and heavy seas and the visibility was poor. That evening the sonar on the Maddox was erratic and the skilled operator, who doubled as a gunner, was manning a turret. His job was turned over to an inexperienced sailor. During the evening radio signals were intercepted that gave Herrick the “impression” that the North Vietnamese were preparing an attack. He radioed the Ticonderoga for support and eight aircraft arrived, led by Commander James B. Stockdale, an outstanding pilot. His earphones crackled with radio traffic between the destroyers alerting each other to imaginary approaching patrol boats. He wrote later, “The Joy was firing at ‘targets’ the Maddox couldn’t track on radar and the Maddox was dodging ‘torpedoes’ the Joy couldn’t hear on its sonar.” In his first report Herrick counted 22 torpedoes, none of which scored a hit, along with two or three patrol boats, all sunk. As he left the site of the “action,” Herrick began to have doubts. A questioning of crews on both destroyers revealed that no sailor had seen or heard enemy gunfire. The radar blips could have been due to bad weather or the bad judgment of the rookie sonar technician. Stockdale later wrote that he had “the best seat in the house” over the alleged battle for an hour and a half. The debriefing officer asked whether he had seen enemy boats. “Not a one. No boats, no boat wakes, no ricochets off boats, no boat gunfire, no torpedo wakes—nothing but black sea and American firepower.”
Herrick sent his first message at 7:40 p.m. Saigon time on August 4 and it moved up the chain of command to the Pentagon. The North Vietnamese appeared to be preparing an attack on the destroyers. The President was in a breakfast meeting with the congressional Democrats at 9:12 a.m. Washington time when McNamara relayed this news. Johnson informed the leaders. They agreed that, if they struck, he should seek a congressional resolution and retaliate. He asked House Majority Leader Carl Albert to stay. McNamara called to report that the North Vietnamese had attacked, which was not true. Albert heard Johnson say, “They have? Now, I’ll tell you what I want. I not only want those patrol boats that attacked the Maddox destroyed, I want everything at that harbor destroyed; I want the whole works destroyed. I want to give them a real dose.”
Kenny O’Donnell walked out with Johnson immediately afterward and they “agreed as politicians that the President’s leadership was being tested under these circumstances and that he must respond decisively. His opponent was Senator Goldwater and the attack on Lyndon Johnson was going to come from the right and the hawks and he must not allow them to accuse him of vacillating or being an indecisive leader.”
McNamara spent a frantic afternoon seeking confirmation of the attack. Herrick, under enormous pressure, gradually became more affirmative. By 4:49 p.m. the Joint Chiefs and McNamara concluded that there was enough evidence to confirm and Johnson was notified. McNamara proposed reinforcements for the destroyers and an air strike at the bases.
The President met with the congressional leadership of both parties that evening and, excepting Mansfield, got approval for both the attack and the resolution. He then spoke to Goldwater, who concurred. The President ordered the Navy to retaliate “against gunboats and certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam.” He made a television statement at 11:36 p.m. on August 4, hardly a time to attract an audience. Ironically, Stockdale was ordered to lead the reprisal. His reaction: “Reprisal for what? … How do I get in touch with the President? He’s going off half-cocked.” As he dropped his bombs on Vinh, Stockdale said to himself, “America has just been locked into the Vietnam War.” Later he would be shot down and would spend almost eight years as a prisoner-of-war, in addition to losing a leg.
On August 4 Abram Chayes, the State Department legal adviser, worked over the resolution which was approved by, of all people, George Ball. The next morning Bundy convened a small group, including Douglass Cater, the new White House adviser on domestic issues, to discuss the resolution. “Isn’t this a little precipitous?” Cater asked. “Do we have all the information?” “The President,” Bundy said, “has decided and that’s what we’re doing.” “Gee, Mac,” Cater said, “I haven’t really thought it through.” Bundy said, “Don’t.”
The President sent the Tonkin Gulf Resolution to Congress on August 5, 1964. The timing was perfect politically. The Republicans had already nominated Goldwater and the Democratic convention would open the following week in Atlantic City. Thus, the GOP was already committed to a hawkish position and members of the party in Congress must vote for the resolution. Most dovish Democrats, of whom there were a fair number, had no alternative but to support their President, who was certain of nomination, rather than open themselves to the charge of deserting him during a military “crisis.”
The heart of the resolution, Section 2, read as follows:
The United States regards as vital to its national interest and to world peace the maintenance of international peace and security in Southeast Asia. Consonant with the Constitution of the United States and the Charter of the United Nations and in accordance with its obligations under the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty, the United States is, therefore, prepared, as the President determines, to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom.
The resolution sped through Congress. The hearings were held on August 6, those before the House Foreign Affairs Committee for 40 minutes, those before the joint Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees for 1 hour and 40 minutes. The House committee was unanimous as was the House itself, 416 to 0. The Senate committees voted 31 to 1, with Morse dissenting. The Senate split 88 to 2, Ernest Gruening of Alaska joining Morse. President Johnson had what Ball called his “blank check.” It was based on what David Wise called “the most crucial and disgraceful episode in the modern history of government lying.”4
Johnson distanced himself from major action on Vietnam prior to his assumption of the presidency on January 20, 1965. “In 1964,” Califano said, “he took the position that he wasn’t going to make major decisions in an electio
n year on war and peace and life and death. He just wasn’t going to do it.” Having spent his professional lifetime as an elected official in a representative government, in his mind election by the people legitimated political power. As an accidental President, he had authority to execute Kennedy’s legacy. But he would not make a fundamental military decision on Vietnam until he had been elected and inaugurated as President himself.
The U.S. had established an air base at Bienhoa 12 miles north of Saigon to train South Vietnamese pilots on B-57 bombers. Before dawn on November 1, 1964, a hundred Vietcong dressed in black peasant pajamas silently invaded the compound to shell the airplanes and buildings. Six B-57s were destroyed, 20 other aircraft were damaged, five Americans and two South Vietnamese were killed, and nearly a hundred were injured. Search parties found no one. All had melted into the friendly countryside.
The Joint Chiefs demanded retaliatory air strikes against North Vietnam and Laos. Johnson, who was campaigning, declined to act and remained silent. He did, however, order Mac Bundy to establish the National Security Council Working Group to make a comprehensive study of Vietnam and to propose policy options. Officials just below the secretary level headed teams from Defense, State, the CIA, and the Joint Chiefs—John McNaughton from Defense, William Bundy from State, and Admiral Lloyd Mustin from the chiefs. None had ever heard the cooing of doves. William Bundy and McNaughton wrote the report. The Working Group spent an intensive three weeks on the study and produced three presidential options.
The report is significant both for paving the road to war and for establishing the assumptions on which the Johnson administration acted. There is no doubt whatever that these premises were fully accepted by the principals—Mac Bundy, obviously, McNamara and Rusk, Director of Central Intelligence John A. McCone, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Earle Wheeler. The President accepted their analysis and chose from their policy options. In determining and assessing how the U.S. got into the Vietnam War, therefore, one must start with these assumptions and examine their validity.
The premise of the study was that the preservation of an anti-Communist South Vietnam was the linchpin to the U.S. “overall policy of resisting Communist expansion world-wide.” Both the major Communist powers, the Soviet Union and China, were assumed to seek territorial aggrandizement, in part by taking over movements for national liberation, as in Vietnam. China by proximity was the greater threat in Southeast Asia. The group argued that the fall of South Vietnam would drag along Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines. While they shied away from using Eisenhower’s term “domino theory,” evidently because of differences over its definition, this was what they meant: push one and all would fall. Further, if the U.S. withdrew from or was forced out of Vietnam, that would, they predicted, shake the resolve of the American people and their European allies to resist Communism elsewhere. This would pose an additional threat to South Korea, Taiwan, India, and Iran, and might even cause trouble in Japan. As Admiral Mustin put it, we would be forced to “accept world-wide humiliation.” America’s “national prestige, credibility, and honor” were at stake.
One of the many problems with this geopolitical analysis was that the linchpin was made of loose sand and kept falling apart. South Vietnam was not a nation; the North and South together were the Vietnamese nation. South Vietnam was a great power concoction to deny Ho Chi Minh control over half the country. The prodigious American effort to create what the Working Group called a “viable effective government in SVN based on the broadest possible consensus” had failed. A large part of the population in the South, perhaps a majority, supported the Vietcong and even Buddhist bonzes expressed their opposition to military governments by immolating themselves on the streets of Saigon.
The tyranny of Diem had ended in a military coup and his assassination in November 1963. The junta which followed could not stick together and its leader, General “Big” Minh, preferred to raise orchids and play tennis. General Nguyen Khanh took over by coup in January 1964. In August student and Buddhist demonstrations overthrew him and he was followed by a weak triumvirate—himself, Minh, and Khiem. Riots by Catholics and Buddhists disposed of them. Another coup restored Khanh in September, but he lasted only till November when a civilian, Huong, stepped forward. Khanh overthrew him in January 1965 and installed General Oanh. Maxwell Taylor, the American ambassador, wrote wistfully, “Only the emergence of an exceptional leader could improve the situation, and no George Washington is in sight.”
As the options proposed to the President disclosed, the authors of the study strongly and unanimously favored a sharp escalation in the U.S. military commitment to South Vietnam, particularly the bombing of the North. Their most powerful argument was the ineffectiveness of the Saigon government, and they painted it in the starkest colors. It was, they charged, incapable of governing in either the civilian or military spheres. “Government ministries in Saigon are close to a standstill.” Administration was “plagued by confusion, apathy, and poor morale.” McNaughton thought progress unlikely “despite our best ideas and efforts.” Even with a major U.S. military commitment, South Vietnam “might still come apart.” Was this sorry mess a proper linchpin of American foreign policy?
Because of South Vietnamese weakness, the U.S. had no bargaining power in negotiating a peaceful settlement with Hanoi. Thus, there must be no negotiations until the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese were battered into submission. Likewise, there must be no coalition government because the Communists would quickly assert their dominance. But the prospect of ultimate negotiations, when Hanoi would capitulate to American terms, was a key feature of the options. The group perceived a scenario culminating in an international “Geneva format” setting. At that point both North Vietnam and the U.S. would withdraw from South Vietnam.
For the Working Group the prospects were extremely grim. The United States, therefore, must take great risks. They did not hesitate to urge President Johnson to assume them:
We cannot guarantee to maintain a non-Communist South Vietnam short of committing ourselves to whatever degree of military action would be required to defeat North Vietnam and probably Communist China militarily. Such a commitment would involve high risks of a major conflict in Asia, which could not be confined to air and naval action but would almost inevitably involve a Korean-style ground action and possibly even the use of nuclear weapons at some point.
In the options it proposed, however, the Working Group did not discuss ground forces, to say nothing of nuclear bombs. They offered the President three choices: Option A would continue present covert military and naval operations, would add bombing reprisals for attacks on U.S. facilities, and would reject negotiations unless the North accepted the American interpretation of the Geneva accords. Option B would continue present operations, add a progressively heavier bombing campaign, and negotiations during the bombing. McNaughton called this a “fast/full squeeze.” Option C was like B except that the onset of negotiations would trigger a halt in the bombing.
George Ball described these choices as an exercise in the “Goldilocks Principle”: A was too soft; B was too hard; and C, the Working Group’s favorite, was “just right.” By the latter part of 1964, Ball, who was under-secretary of state, was the only dove who remained in a high position in the administration and, though very well informed, had no direct responsibility for Vietnam. When Chester Bowles became ambassador to India, Averell Harriman left the far eastern desk to succeed him as undersecretary. William Bundy replaced Harriman. Roger Hilsman and Paul Kattenburg were relieved of responsibility for Vietnam. Rusk pretty much ceded control over Southeast Asian policy to McNamara. In the White House Schlesinger resigned to write a biography of Kennedy. Galbraith returned to Harvard. McGeorge Bundy had been “gatekeeper” for Kennedy as National Security Adviser, presenting the facts and options without expressing his own views. Now with Johnson he made recommendations, which were invariably hawkish.
In late September 1964 Ball became alar
med by the drift to war. “An unmistakable smell of escalation [was] in the air.” While virtually certain that he could not stop the slide, he felt morally obligated to launch a “rear-guard action.” Fully occupied with Cyprus, Europe, and other areas during the day, he dictated into a machine at home late at night. On October 5, 1964, he finished a massive memorandum and on June 29, 1965, as Johnson was about to commit ground troops, he submitted another. Together they presented a devastating analysis of the Working Group report. Mike Mansfield shared Ball’s views and wrote four letters to the President which meticulously expressed his deep misgivings over the prospect of war. In addition, the French government was convinced that an American war in Vietnam would be a grievous error. Foreign Minister Couve de Murville told this to Bundy and Johnson in February 1965. According to Bundy, he believed that “there is not, and cannot be, any workable government in a situation of ‘American occupation.’ “ The U.S., he said, cannot “avoid defeat in South Vietnam,” a potential danger to Europe and so to France.
On one point these critics and the Working Group were in full agreement: the bankruptcy of the government of South Vietnam. “From the point of view of legitimacy, effective representation of the major elements of opinion and social and economic progressiveness,” Ball wrote, “the present government seems even worse than its predecessors.” Mansfield was convinced that this regime was incompetent even for “negotiating a bona fide settlement, let alone for going ahead into North Vietnam.” Diem and “Big” Minh had more legitimacy. “We are now in the process of putting together makeshift regimes in much the same way that the French were compelled to operate in 1952–54.”
The notion that the worldwide struggle between the free nations and the Communist bloc turned on South Vietnam struck the critics as ridiculous. Ball, who had worked on the rebuilding of Europe after World War II, was convinced that the U.S. had a far higher security and economic stake in Europe; among our friends in Asia, South Vietnam was near the bottom of his list. With all this talk about prestige and humiliation, Ball wrote, “we have tended to give the Vietnamese struggle an exaggerated and symbolic significance. (Mea culpa, since I personally participated in this effort).” Mansfield was appalled by the idea that South Vietnam was the linchpin of a world struggle. In his mind it was the outcome of misguided great power policy and he would do everything possible to isolate it. “American interests are served not by United States domination of the Indo-China area at whatever the cost and by total exclusion of Chinese influence, which is, in any event, culturally impossible and, in the long run, economically improbable.”
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