ZGram - 8/4/2002 - "Tonkin incident might not have occurred"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGrams- Where Truth is Destiny

AUGUST 4, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite

More food for thought about how wars are fabricated:

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Tonkin incident might not have occurred

By Bob Richter

Express-News Austin Bureau

Web Posted : 08/03/2002 12:00 AM

AUSTIN - Thirty-eight years ago Sunday, network television was 
interrupted at 11:36 p.m. EDT so President Lyndon B. Johnson could 
tell the nation that U.S. warships in a place called the Gulf of 
Tonkin had been attacked by North Vietnamese PT boats.

In response to what he described as "open aggression on the open 
seas," Johnson ordered U.S. airstrikes on North Vietnam.

The airstrikes opened the door to a war that would kill 1 million 
Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans and divide the nation along class and 
generational lines.

Over the years, debate has swirled around whether U.S. ships actually 
were attacked that night, or whether, as some skeptics suggest, the 
Johnson administration staged or provoked an event to get 
congressional authority to act against North Vietnam.

Recently released tapes of White House phone conversations indicate 
the attack probably never happened.

The tapes, released by the LBJ Library at the University of Texas at 
Austin, include 51 phone conversations from Aug. 4 and 5, 1964, when 
the Tonkin Gulf incident occurred.

Two days earlier, on Aug. 2, North Vietnamese forces in Russian-made 
"swatow" gunboats had attacked the USS Maddox, a destroyer conducting 
reconnaissance in the gulf.

But from the get-go, many have doubted anything really happened to 
the Maddox and a sister ship, the USS C. Turner Joy on Aug. 4.

Even LBJ seemed skeptical, saying in 1965: "For all I know, our Navy 
was shooting at whales out there."

The released tapes neither prove nor disprove what may have happened 
that night, but they do indicate jittery sailors in a tense area 
thought they were under attack.

"Under attack by three PT boats. Torpedoes in the water. Engaging the 
enemy with my main battery," the Maddox radioed.

Indeed, the destroyers fired 249 5-inch shells, 123 3-inch shells and 
four or five depth charges, according to Navy records.

Many of the taped conversations from that night are between Defense 
Secretary Robert McNamara - who was trying to verify something 
actually happened so he could brief LBJ for his TV bulletin - and 
Adm. U.S. Grant "Oley" Sharp, commander of the U.S. Navy's Pacific 
Fleet.


Sharp was feeding McNamara information from the field and trying to 
get a strike force in the air to retaliate for the alleged attack 
before the president went on television.

"If it's open season on these boys, which I think it is, we'll take 
if from there," Sharp said about noon on Aug. 4.

Later, in a 1:59 p.m. EDT conversation with Air Force Lt. Gen. David 
Burchinal of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Sharp was elusive, saying, 
"many of the reported contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful."

He blamed the reports on "overeager sonarmen" and "freak weather 
effects on radar."

But, asked Burchinal: "You're pretty sure there was a torpedo attack?"

"No doubt about that, I think," Sharp replied.

At 8:39 p.m., with McNamara laying plans for LBJ to go on TV, 
McNamara asked Sharp why the retaliatory strike was delayed.

Bad weather, Sharp said, and an agitated McNamara replied: "The 
president has to make a statement to the people and I am holding him 
back from making it."

Thirty minutes later, at 9:09, Sharp said the launch still was 50 minutes off.

"Oh my God," McNamara said.

And about an hour before he went on television, Johnson spoke by 
telephone with Barry Goldwater, his Republican opponent in that 
year's presidential race.

"Like always, Americans will stick together," the Arizona senator told LBJ.

At 11 p.m., McNamara asked Sharp, who was in Honolulu and getting 
feedback from the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga, if Johnson could 
say "at this moment air action is now in execution" against North 
Vietnam.

Sharp chuckled and replied: "I don't think it would be good, sir," 
noting the retaliatory strike had not yet launched.

Shortly after 11 p.m., the counterstrike was under way and LBJ went 
on the air to tell the American people the "attack" on U.S. ships was 
an "outrage."

"I shall immediately request the Congress to pass a resolution making 
it clear that our government is united in its determination to take 
all necessary measures in support of freedom and in defense of peace 
in Southeast Asia."

But, says James Stockdale, a Navy aviator who responded to the 
"attacks" on the Maddox and Turner Joy, it all was hogwash. Stockdale 
later was shot down and spent eight years in a North Vietnamese 
prisoner of war camp. In 1992, he was presidential candidate Ross 
Perot's running mate.

"I had the best seat in the house to watch that event, and our 
destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets - there were no PT 
boats there. There was nothing but black water and American 
firepower," Stockdale wrote in his 1984 book, "In Love and War."

Congress, however, responded to LBJ's call to arms, giving him a 
veritable blank check to make war.

While the U.S. response, as the tapes seem to bear out, was a mistake 
rather than a charade, there is ample evidence the United States was 
a provocateur in 1964, not an innocent bystander.

The Johnson administration had approved covert land and sea 
operations involving U.S. forces earlier in 1964, the so-called Op 
Plan 34-A.

On Monday, Aug. 3, 1964, the day after the first Tonkin Gulf incident 
where the USS Maddox actually was attacked, Johnson, according to 
White House tape recordings, said:

"There have been some covert operations in that (Tonkin Gulf) area 
that we have been carrying on - blowing up some bridges and things of 
that kind, roads and so forth. So I imagine (the North Vietnamese) 
wanted to put a stop to it."

Later that same day, LBJ, who ironically was about to ask Humphrey to 
be his running mate in the '64 election, complained to their mutual 
friend, James Rowe: "Our friend Hubert is just destroying himself 
with his big mouth," LBJ said, noting the Minnesota liberal told the 
media after an intelligence briefing that U.S. boats were running 
covert operations in the gulf - "exactly what we have been doing."

Two months before the Tonkin Gulf incident, Undersecretary of State 
George Ball, a member of Johnson's inner circle and a member of a 
committee that oversaw the 34-A operations, had drafted, but not 
submitted, a congressional resolution endorsing "all measures, 
including the commitment of force," to defend South Vietnam and Laos, 
should their governments seek help - in effect, the language in the 
subsequent Tonkin Gulf Resolution.

In a May 24 meeting, the National Security Council suggested the best 
time to submit such a resolution was after Congress had passed the 
landmark 1964 civil rights bill, which occurred in July.

Ball later said, according to McNamara in his 1995 mea culpa, "In 
Retrospect," that "many of the people who were associated with the 
war ..... were looking for any excuse to initiate bombing. ....."

However, another close LBJ aide, William Bundy, according to the same 
source, said the Tonkin Gulf incident was not engineered.

While the reasons for it either were unclear or false, the Tonkin 
Gulf Resolution cleared Congress on Aug. 7, 1964 - 414-0 in the House 
and 88-2 in the Senate.

History has seemed to coalesce around the belief that the second 
Tonkin Gulf incident, on Aug. 4, was a mistake, but not a charade.

It was not a "put-up job," claims Professor Edwin Moise, a Vietnam 
War expert at Clemson University.

As the LBJ Library tapes indicate, the Navy was not ready to launch a 
retaliatory strike Aug. 4 against North Vietnam, but it would have 
been if the event had been staged, Moise theorizes.

Professor David Crockett, a presidential scholar at Trinity 
University, calls the incident an accident, but says the greater 
problem was that Congress "rolled over" and gave LBJ what he wanted: 
"a virtual blank check to make war."

The irony, Crockett notes, is that LBJ painted Goldwater as a 
warmonger in the '64 campaign. A powerful but notorious LBJ TV ad 
featured a little girl picking daisies followed by the detonation of 
a nuclear bomb.

"LBJ campaigned that he wouldn't send American boys to die in Asian 
wars," says Crockett, who is only a year older than the Tonkin Gulf 
Resolution, "but he was actually doing it" by pushing the resolution 
through Congress.

Jerry Paull*, a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam vet, has another perspective.

For six months in 1965, he ferried South Vietnamese forces on 
Norwegian-made PT boats into North Vietnam to conduct raids, kidnaps 
and psychological operations such as dropping propaganda leaflets.

Although he was a U.S. Marine, Paull says he wore civilian clothes on 
the missions - in violation of a 1954 Geneva convention - and the PT 
boats, called "nasties," were painted black and had no markings.

"I have heard and read," Paull says, "that at the time of the Gulf of 
Tonkin incident that it is suspected that the North Vietnamese 
mistook the U.S. destroyers for the nasties, and that the whole Gulf 
of Tonkin incident was a mistake on the North Vietnamese's part."

Paull would later turn against the war, but, he reminds younger 
Americans, the mid-'60s was an era of idealism, when America's No. 1 
foreign policy thrust was to stop the spread of communism.

"War was what I had trained for and what I wanted to do for my 
country," he recalls.

"At that time, there was a common saying in the Marine Corps: 'It's 
not much of a war, but it's the only war we have.'."

A year later, though, while waiting at an air strip at Chu Lai to 
head into the field, a newsman asked Paull if he'd noticed a change 
in attitude among the Marines between 1965 and 1966.

"I said, 'Yes, the idea of being carried home on a shield was not as 
glorious as it had been in 1965. Death is final.'."

"The hard realities of war were realized."

Bob Blackburn, a former college professor who had to give up teaching 
because of Vietnam-induced post traumatic stress disorder, served two 
tours with the Marines in Vietnam and fought in another turning point 
in the war, the 1968 Tet offensive.

The North Texas resident says he was bitter toward Johnson then, but 
now simply refers to LBJ as a "tragic figure" who got himself into a 
situation he couldn't politic his way out of.

"He could never realize why (North Vietnamese leader) Ho Chi Minh 
wasn't like a Republican senator who could be bought. He'd have built 
a TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) for (Ho) if he'd just quit 
fighting," says Blackburn, who has a doctorate in American political 
history with an emphasis on Vietnam.

George Christian, who was LBJ's press secretary from 1966 to 1969 and 
wrote LBJ's resignation speech in 1968, confirms that.

"There was never a better legislative president," Christian recalls. 
"He was a master at working the system and he made honest efforts to 
try to reach an honest end to the war.

".' Why can't Ho Chi Minh see that?'." Christian recalls Johnson 
often lamenting.

Vietnam had a "corrosive" effect on the president, Christian says, 
but it wasn't the main reason LBJ resigned.

"It was his health; he was worried about having a stroke and being 
incapacitated.

"I thought the country was ungovernable," Christian says now. "I 
wanted him to go home. Mrs. Johnson wanted him to go home. He wanted 
to go home."

A lot of Americans never came home, and those who did often weren't 
welcomed home as conquering heroes, as their fathers and grandfathers 
had been.

Still, coming home whole was no less joyous.

Blackburn, for example, was picked up by a helicopter in the field in 
Vietnam on May 2, 1968, and was discharged from the Corps 12 days 
later at El Toro Naval Air Station, Calif.

He used the money he saved in Vietnam to buy himself a sports car, 
and as he drove away from the base, en route back home to Texas, 
Blackburn removed his uniform and, piece by piece, threw it into the 
wind from his convertible.

"There wasn't a sign between El Toro and Needles that didn't have a 
piece of my clothing on it," he says.

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