The USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. (photo: US Navy)
“American Planes Hit North Vietnam After Second Attack on Our Destroyers; Move Taken to Halt New Aggression,” was the Washington Post headline some 53 years ago, on August 5, 1964.
The front page of that day’s New York Times reported: “President Johnson has ordered retaliatory action against gunboats and ‘certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam’ after renewed attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.”
Of course, as historians now acknowledge, there was no “second attack” by North Vietnam—no “renewed attacks against American destroyers.”
But as activist, author and FAIR associate Norman Solomon has described, including in the film War Made Easy, US journalists reported those official claims as absolute truths, ignoring countervailing evidence and opening the floodgates for the bloody Vietnam War and the deaths of over 50,000 Americans and millions of Southeast Asians.
The official story was that North Vietnamese torpedo boats launched an “unprovoked attack” against the US destroyer Maddox, which was on “routine patrol” in the Tonkin Gulf on August 2—and that North Vietnamese PT boats followed up with a “deliberate attack” two days later, firing 22 torpedoes on the Maddox and another destroyer, Turner Joy.
The New York Times (8/8/64) reporting the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.
President Johnson was on television that night, telling Americans that “aggression by terror against the peaceful villagers of South Vietnam has now been joined by open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America,” ordering retaliatory airstrikes representing a momentous escalation of the war, and calling for immediate passage of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which stated, “Congress approves and supports the determination of the president, as commander in chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.”
“It’s like grandmother’s nightshirt. It covers everything,” Johnson quipped.
The House dispensed with hearings and approved in 40 minutes; the Senate took two days, finally voting 88 to 2 to adopt.
But reality was very different from the tale that Johnson and the press told the public.
The Maddox, which fired first in the earlier skirmish, was not on routine patrol; it was engaged in aggressive intelligence-gathering maneuvers—in sync with coordinated attacks on North Vietnam by the South Vietnamese navy and the Laotian air force.
And as for the second reported attack, the spark for the “retaliatory” airstrikes, it simply never happened. Many historians think the Maddox crew mistook their sonar’s pings off their own rudder for North Vietnamese torpedoes; Johnson later “joked” they might’ve been shooting at whales.
But it shouldn’t surprise you to know that there was plenty of intelligence at the time suggesting that no attack had occurred; it was just overlooked and obscured—intentionally by warmongers in the government, but also by a credulous press. Sound familiar?
Johnson’s late-night speech won editorial praise. The president, said the New York Times, “went to the American people last night with the somber facts.” The LA Times urged Americans to “face the fact that the Communists, by their attack on American vessels in international waters, have themselves escalated the hostilities.”
As Tom Wells, author of The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam, recounts, US media
described the air strikes that Johnson launched in response as merely “tit for tat”—when in reality they reflected plans the administration had already drawn up for gradually increasing its overt military pressure against the North.
The distortion was due to media’s “almost exclusive reliance on US government officials as sources of information”—and their “reluctance to question official pronouncements on ‘national security issues.’”
Congress repealed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in January of 1971, but that didn’t mean much, since they continued to finance the war. And elite media, evidently, set about a studious forgetting of what columnist Sydney Schanberg called—30 years later, in the midst of another war—the press corps’ “unquestioning chorus of agreeability when Lyndon Johnson bamboozled us with his fabrication of the Gulf of Tonkin incident.”
Americans, Schanberg said, are “the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth.”
That’s an innocence of course, that we can ill afford—and that journalists, above all, should fight the impulse to indulge.
There’s nothing “innocent” about ignoring or distorting facts, is there?
Perhaps reporters – at least some of them – are “credulous”, but those who control the corpress know the who, what, when, where and why, and actively collude to obscure that reality.
That’s a function of class interest, which doesn’t require clandestine communication among conspirators
It just needs dark souls in service of domination.
Yawn.
This is not a clever or studious reading of all the information. There had been a previous attack of sorts on the USA with torpedo boats so the Navy was looking for similar attacks and we often see what we expect. We were barely 15 years out from WWII so young people today cannot even imagine what sort of memory our military had from fighting Hitler, Japan, and the Soviet Union if you read carefully on other reasons for showing nuclear weapons at the end of the war. We were only 20 years after Pearl Harbor so surprise attacks were extremely sensitive dangers to our Pacific Fleet. You should also have mentioned the old technology being used then as those sailors out there were barely above blind in reading the events. As far as LJB intentionally lying about all this to have a war he wanted, where is your proof of that? The Soviet Union was a real threat back then and our military was rightfully scared and jumpy. Somehow you jump to ‘they are all conspirators’? The evidence doesn’t support that, including all the recent dumps of material. Our military had already drawn up plans for pushing the communists back in that area? No kidding. I’m shocked. All of our foes and all of our allies except the Soviet Union were reduced to ruin following WWII so Americans then had a real sense of protecting the world until everyone else got themselves rebuilt. So pushing back on communist takeovers in Asia made perfect sense. And look at the places we didn’t or lost like Vietnam and North Korea. How did life work out for those people after we quit? They are f*cked. Your article seems to equate our crappy journalism in America with the facts of our efforts in fighting communism. The Soviets were real bad actors in the world then. Do some reading and learn about what the Russians did to German women following the end of WWII. You have taken a very complicated story and reduced it too much. Why were journalists so reluctant to challenge the American military on facts? Why were so many in our military reluctant to slow the process down? You ignore all that and instead imply, by towing the official NVA PR that the events, both events, never happened. Yours is high school level writing on this. Next time you tackle a subject this complicated get some help lest you end up with a product worse than the journalists’ who seem to have originally been the subject of your work.
bull shit, the us was looking to dominate the people of viet nam . the factors that affected the decision were the same as ever, americn greed, racism and hubris and BULLY mentality, along with white mans burden syndrome (we replaced the french as white masters in s. viet Nam, in 1954)
Many of us that read I.F. Stone Weekly at the time new all of this but just as today we know that the DNC had a leak and not a hack the oligarchs that own and run this place continue to push misinformation and misdirection thru their control of our media. It is all about control and wealth transfer.
American corporations have taken their manufacturing jobs to Vietnam where the workers are mistreated badly, so they got screwed capitalism. The USA used the fear of Communism to protect American business interests in Central and South America and get rid of anyone who threatens those interests and looked at how bad that turned out for America. According to the common people in South and Central America, the USA was a bad actor in that region since the late 19th century.
Yeah and if LBJ had pulled us out of Vietnam, then he would not have been complaining about how that war was preventing him from carrying out his Great Society Program. We could have lick poverty in our own country by the end of the 1960s and probably could have a single payer system like Europe had.
@Pat Martin:
Because fighting the North Vietnamese (really the Vietnamese) was like fighting Hitler and the Japanese Navy.
Your claims read a lot like those made about Saddam Hussein, both in 1990 and in 2002.
The Gulf of Tonkin incident, as reported by the likes of the New York Times in August 1964 was fake news. But it sure had very real results. (At least Saddam Hussein did invade Kuwait in August 1990, though mid-August he did offer to withdraw–that real news barely made the papers in the USA.)
the truth be told””…the north was winning..the war!..so we needed to to find an excuse the (ala gulf of Tonkin) to massive bomb the hell out of ‘Hanoi’ to extend the war!! and kill thousands of women and children..thinking ‘able to send in thousands of American troops and.Drop thousands (500 lb bombs ).. at that point are so desperate a situation.Eisenhower, kennedy,Johnson, Nixon..showing no mercy!. The American Generals and the Pentagon and the American Media selling everyday were “winning”..on and.on!..at the death 0f 50,000 American boys and 50,000 wounded and Millions of..Vietnamese..it was called Indochina.by the French colonial rulers..so in the late 50`s EISENHOWER had sent in Mercenaries ‘secretly’ to help fight against the Vietnamese peoples revolution to take back there country… that was the ”real start of the war”not the Gulf of Tonkin…by the way Vietnam was one of ”Poorest countries on this planet and they Kick us out””…and , note we did it all over again in Irag..
Because the press is still subservient to the deep state of the. Ilitsry industrial state, we don’t learn from these mistakes. Ms. Jackson did excellent research and writing.
Thanks.
AND YET IN Hanoi THERE IS A MUSEUM WHICH HAS AN EXHIBIT LAUDING AND PRAISING THE CREWS OF THE PATROL BOATS THAT ATTACKED THESE U.S. DESTROYERS. THE NORTH VIETNAMESE SAID IT HAPPENED. APPARENTLY IT SERVED THEIR PURPOSES TO CLAIM THE ATTACK HAPPENED, JUST AS IT SERVED OURS, IN SPITE OF THE EVIDENCE TO THE CONTRARY.
Sad to say, but most Americans don’t know that we were the “enemy”. The People of Vietnam had been fighting for their independence from colonial powers like the Chinese, the French, the Japanese, the French (again), and finally the Americans. I still have the audio tape of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations investigating the origins of the American war in Vietnam- they interviewed an American OSS officer who was attached to the Viet Minh during WWII, and he said that Ho Chi Minh greatly admired the USA and had liken himself as the Vietnamese George Washington. But as the officer continued to say, Ho didn’t believe that a great power like the USA could ever be interested in such a small insignificant country like Vietnam. And today we celebrate the warriors without understanding the war?
Archimedes Patti was the OSS officer- Wikipedia has a good article on this American patriot who believed in the Right of Self-Determination for all peoples. Archimedes Patti knew that this war was a wrong war for the USA. The teaching moment here is that the leadership (Congress and the President) should listen to their people in the field. This blunder was repeated in Bush’s invasion of Iraq when VP Cheney and Scooter intentionally altered intelligence and fabricated lies about “weapons of mass destruction”. Vietnam was a stupid blunder, Iraq was (and still is) genocide.
Looking back on Vietnam, I am forced to concede it was wholly unnecessary. A despicable lie to keep us in perpetual state of war. The United States isn’t a country run by the humane, but by the greedy and bloodthirsty. Human beings are of little consequence.
I must say..The United States is GUILTY of all the worlds invasions! since WW2′ korea,Vietnam,Irag Laos afghan,Granada,Cuba , thats not including the secret invasions the mercenaries( blackwater group) in Libya,Yemman Sirya do…but you notice the American media is very much selling that all those so called todays Dictators are always’ the Madmen the crazies etc..by the American Media how many countries did these Madmen invade?,,how many Humans were killed on this Planet by the American invasions huh!?.. and now you know what im getting at..the threat of the so called Madman( ala’ American Press) ! .of . North Korea ”Kim” themadman tell me what country did he invade ‘South Korea / North Korea’ there CIvil War a corrupt SK dictator which was planted by the American govt.! so we sacrifice Thousands of young boys an killed millions of North and south Koreans..WHY??,,sound familiar? ”Vietnam”‘ and the Answer is the real Madman is in our White House Today!
yep we never learn be it Grenada, Nicaragua, Haiti, Venezuela, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Russian conspiracy theories. the more we watch and read the less you know and it only takes a few token lefties to help legitimize it as we see with Syria, Russia and Venezuela such as Democracy Now, Vice, Mother Jones, The Nation, Jacobin, and the now deceased Christopher Hitchen.