[2 articles]
Records Show Doubts on '64 Vietnam Crisis
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/world/asia/15vietnam.html
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
Published: July 14, 2010
WASHINGTON In an echo of the debates over the discredited
intelligence that helped make the case for the war in Iraq, the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday released more than
1,100 pages of previously classified Vietnam-era transcripts that
show senators of the time sharply questioning whether they had been
deceived by the White House and the Pentagon over the 1964 Gulf of
Tonkin incident.
"If this country has been misled, if this committee, this Congress,
has been misled by pretext into a war in which thousands of young men
have died, and many more thousands have been crippled for life, and
out of which their country has lost prestige, moral position in the
world, the consequences are very great," Senator Albert Gore Sr. of
Tennessee, the father of the future vice president, said in March
1968 in a closed session of the Foreign Relations Committee.
The documents are Volume 20 in a regular series of releases of
historical transcripts from the committee, which conducted most of
its business in executive session during the 1960s, before the Senate
required committee meetings to be public. The documents were edited
by Donald Ritchie, the Senate historian, and cover 1968, when members
of the committee were anguished over Vietnam and in a deteriorating
relationship with the Johnson White House over the war.
Historians said the transcripts, which are filled with venting by the
senators about the Johnson administration and frustrations over their
own ineffectiveness, added little new to the historical record. Even
at the time, there was widespread skepticism about the Gulf of Tonkin
incident, in which the North Vietnamese were said to have attacked
American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964, two days after an earlier clash.
President Lyndon B. Johnson cited the attacks to persuade Congress to
authorize broad military action in Vietnam, but historians in recent
years have concluded that the Aug. 4 attack never happened.
Still, the transcripts show the outrage the senators were expressing
behind closed doors. "In a democracy you cannot expect the people,
whose sons are being killed and who will be killed, to exercise their
judgment if the truth is concealed from them," Senator Frank Church,
Democrat of Idaho, said in an executive session in February 1968.
But the senators also worried that releasing a committee staff
investigation that raised doubts about the Tonkin incident would only
inflame the country more. As Senator Mike Mansfield, Democrat of
Montana, put it, "You will give people who are not interested in
facts a chance to exploit them and to magnify them out of all proportion."
At another point, the committee's chairman, Senator William
Fulbright, Democrat of Arkansas, raised concerns that if the senators
did not take a stand on the war, "We are just a useless appendix on
the governmental structure."
The current chairman of the committee, Senator John Kerry, Democrat
of Massachusetts, said Wednesday in an interview that the transcripts
were especially revealing to him. In February 1968, when some of the
most intense debates of the committee were occurring, Mr. Kerry was
on a ship headed for Vietnam.
The release of documents, he said, "shows these guys wrestling with
the complexity of it when our generation was living it out in a very
personal way."
He continued, "You couldn't have imagined in that room of the Capitol
that policy makers were agonizing over it in that way, and having
that gut kind of conversation."
In the end, however, the senators did not further pursue their
doubts. As Mr. Church said in one session that was focused on the
staff report into the episode, if the committee came up with proof
that an attack never occurred, "we have a case that will discredit
the military in the United States, and discredit and quite possibly
destroy the president."
He added that unless the committee had the evidence to substantiate
the charges, "The big forces in this country that have most of the
influence and run most of the newspapers and are oriented toward the
presidency will lose no opportunity to thoroughly discredit this committee."
Robert J. Hanyok, a retired National Security Agency historian, said
Wednesday in an interview that "there were doubts, but nobody wanted
to follow up on the doubts," perhaps because "they felt they'd gone
too far down the road."
Mr. Hanyok concluded in 2001 that N.S.A. officers had deliberately
falsified intercepted communications in the incident to make it look
like the attack on Aug. 4, 1964, had occurred, although he said they
acted not out of political motives but to cover up earlier errors.
Many historians say that President Johnson might have found reason to
escalate military action against North Vietnam even without the
Tonkin Gulf crisis, and that he apparently had his own doubts.
Historians note that a few days after the supposed attack he told
George W. Ball, the under secretary of state, "Hell, those dumb,
stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish!"
--------
The Tonkin Gulf Incident
http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/thomas-mckelvey-cleaver-crossing.html
By Thomas McKelvey Cleaver
August 4, 2010
Today, August 4, is the 46th anniversary of the attacks on four North
Vietnamese ports by the U.S. Navy, ordered by President Lyndon
Johnson in response to reported attacks during the two days previous
by "North Vietnamese torpedo boats" against two American destroyers
cruising in "international waters," the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy.
It became the causus belli for direct American military involvement
in the Vietnam War, known forever after as the "Tonkin Gulf Incident."
It's an event I can never forget, because I was there, a young sailor
working in the operations office of the Admiral in charge of the two
destroyers. The Seventh Fleet Patrol Force operated extensive
reconnaissance networks, from off Vladivostok and the Soviet Far East
in the Sea of Japan, down the coast of China to Taiwan and on down to
the South China Sea. The initial story, that the two destroyers had
been patrolling in the Gulf of Tonkin, in international waters,
immediately set off alarm bells to me.
That was because I knew, having worked to set up the briefing for the
Admiral the week before, that these two destroyers were operating in
support of something known as a "34-Alpha" operation, and that they
were very close to Hon Me Island, a piece of real estate in the
middle of the Gulf of Tonkin internationally recognized as being part
of North Vietnam. My doubts grew more when I got mail from home the
following week, with newspaper clippings on the event. Not one of the
maps published in the newspapers showed Hon Me Island as even existing.
A month later, we were in Subic Bay, the Philippines, and I was on
liberty in Olongapo. I walked into a bar and there sitting at the bar
was a sailor I had met a year previously, when he and I went through
fire fighting training in San Diego while awaiting transportation to
Japan to join our units.
The last time I had seen him, he was a Fire Control Technician 3rd
Class, a petty officer. Now he wore Seaman's stripes on his sleeve.
We talked, and things finally got around to how he'd "lost his crow."
He told me he'd been court-martialed. That didn't surprise me, it
happened all the time, if a Captain was upset about some kid coming
back off liberty late and wanted to make an example of him. "What
for?" I asked. "Disobedience of a direct order," he replied. That
wasn't some late-liberty offense.
"What was the order?"
"Open fire."
And then he told me the story.
He was crew aboard the USS Maddox. During the second night, when the
two destroyers were reported under attack by several torpedo boats,
he was in charge of the fire control tower, responsible for operating
the main armament of six five-inch cannons. When ordered to "open
fire," he refused and told his captain that the only target out there
was the other destroyer, the Turner Joy. The order was repeated and
he refused again. It was repeated a third time and he refused again.
A Chief Petty Officer was sent to arrest him. By the time he was
brought to the bridge, the event was over, with the captain of the
Turner Joy having established by radio that the torpedo boats had
"disappeared." Still, my friend had refused the order, and was given
a general court-martial, where he lost his rank. I'll never forget
the last thing he said: "That whole story is bullshit. Nothing
happened out there."
A year later I was out of the Navy and people would ask me why I was
opposed to the war, and I would tell them that story. They'd say
"where's your proof?" and I would have to admit it was somewhere in
some sub-basement of the Pentagon, wrapped in a Top Secret clearance.
And so not many believed me, it was just too much to take in, that
the war was started on such a lie.
Yet, over the years, the story did come out in bits and pieces.
In 1966, an officer I knew who had been part of the Admiral's staff
gave an interview to a newspaper in New York, where he told of how he
had interviewed the Chief Sonarman on the Maddox, and that he'd been
told there were never any sounds of torpedo boats in the water -- a
distinctive sound that is unmistakable for anything else.
In 1968, Professor Peter Dale Scott of UC Berkeley interviewed the
former Assistant Gunnery Officer of the USS Turner Joy, who related
how he had convinced his captain not to open fire that night, because
the only target out there was the USS Maddox.
One can only imagine how history would read, had one of those two men
been less conscientious in doing his job and had opened fire as
ordered. As my friend had told me, "We were so close I'd have blown
them out of the water with the first salvo."
I remember in 1970, when Sixty Minutes ran the first story that told
the truth about Tonkin Gulf, revealing that "34-Alpha" operations
were code for South Vietnamese commando raids on targets in North
Vietnam. The report went on to say that the available evidence looked
like the two ships had been where they were to support the raid.
I sat down at my typewriter that night, and wrote the program,
telling them what I knew. A week later, Joe Werschba, one of the
legendary "Murrow's Boys" at CBS, called me and told me they had
proof my letter was accurate, because he had shown it to a senator in
Washington on the Armed Services Committee who confirmed the main points.
And then in 1971 -- 39 years ago last month -- came the publication
of the Pentagon Papers, and the true story of Tonkin Gulf was out
there in all its detail. Several people I knew apologized to me for
having doubted me over the years. I didn't have any trouble with
their doubt. I had wanted to doubt what I knew myself, because the
implications were enormous:
My government lied and millions of people died.
I date my personal political "revolution" to this day, 46 years ago.
The day I found that the country I had grown up believing in, that 10
generations of my ancestors had fought and died for at times and in
places that made us who we were, that that country didn't exist.
America has a long history of being lied into wars.
The War of 1812 was far less about "freedom of the seas" and far more
about an attempt to grab Canada.
In 1846, Abraham Lincoln stood up in the House of Representatives and
demanded that President Polk "point on a map" to the spot where
American blood was shed on American soil -- Polk couldn't do it
because Taylor's cavalrymen weren't in Texas -- which wasn't part of
American territory to begin with -- they were in territory recognized
as part of Mexico, and America was off on its first grand imperial
adventure, "liberating" half the territory of Mexico.
In 1876, President Grant decided it was easier to declare war on the
Sioux under the pretext they were "killing whites" than to enforce a
treaty and expel the thieving miners from the Black Hills of South Dakota.
In 1898, an accidental explosion on a poorly-maintained American ship
was taken by William Randolph Hearst and turned into "a splendid
little war" that expanded the empire by taking the Philippines and
eventually involving us in our first genocidal Asian war, the
Philippine Insurrection, which resulted in the deaths of 20 percent
of the population of the country over five years, including the
near-total annihilation of the population of Panay Island, an event
celebrated by the commander of the troops responsible for killing
40,000 Filipinos as "leaving the island a howling wilderness," which
prompted Mark Twain to write the famous "War Prayer" in response to the news.
It took a lot for me to finally understand there is a difference
between loving one's country and supporting the government. It's not
surprising at all that most of my fellow citizens can't bring
themselves to see the lies and do something about them.
.
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