Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 (21 page)

Johnson decided that to deal with the problem on a political level, he would seek a joint congressional resolution “supporting United States policy in Southeast Asia.” Such a resolution would give the administration carte blanche in Indochina, allowing aerial bombardment, intervention in Cambodia and Laos, or any other “tit-for-tat” response that could bring North Vietnam to the negotiating table. It was, in effect, a preemptive declaration of war. William Bundy drafted the resolution, and the administration waited for the right time to submit it to Congress. It did not have to wait long.

On August 1, 1964, the USS
Maddox,
an American destroyer, was patrolling within a range of ten to twenty miles off the North Vietnamese coast, collecting electronic data on North Vietnamese radar signals and ship movements. The ship was also monitoring four South Vietnamese gunboats, which the night before had left Danang and attacked North Vietnamese coastal sites as part of Oplan 34-A. North Vietnamese patrol boats approached the
Maddox.
The
Maddox
opened fire, and the patrol boats launched several torpedoes. Jets from the USS
Ticon-deroga
attacked the North Vietnamese ships, damaging all of them. The next day the
Maddox
was joined by another destroyer, the USS
C. Turner Joy.
President Johnson ordered the ships to continue their patrols.

More South Vietnamese gunboats left Danang for Oplan 34-A attacks. On August 4 the
Maddox
and the
C. Turner Joy
picked up radio traffic from confused and enraged North Vietnamese naval vessels. Tension was running high on both the
Maddox
and the
Turner Joy.
Men on both ships saw blips on the radar they believed represented PT boats, and the sonar man on the
Maddox
reported underwater noises that he thought to be the sounds of incoming torpedoes. Both ships commenced evasive actions and began firing into the dark at the direction of the radar blips, although they made no visual sightings of North Vietnamese patrol boats. Several hours later, Captain John Herrick, head of the DeSoto Mission on board the
Maddox,
concluded that there had probably been no attack, that rough seas and atmospheric conditions could have generated spurious radar blips, and that the evasive movements of the ships had created torpedolike sonar sounds. In a cable to the Pentagon, Herrick reported that conclusion. By the time Herrick sent the cable it was too late. The Pentagon and White House became hornets' nests, and Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, Jr., the commander of American naval forces in the Pacific, confirmed to Robert McNamara that a “bona fide ambush has occurred.” The evidence at the time as to whether an attack had really occurred was contradictory, but the Johnson administration decided nonetheless to retaliate. Late that afternoon, the USS
Ticonderoga
and the USS
Constellation
sent aircraft to attack torpedo boat bases and oil storage facilities in North Vietnam. While the attack was going on, Johnson spoke live over all three television networks: “Aggression by terror against peaceful villages of South Vietnam,” he said, “has now been joined by open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America.” He reassured the country: “We know, although others appear to forget, the risks of spreading conflict. We seek no wider war.”

August 1964—The U.S. Navy destroyer U.S.S.
Maddox
was attacked by torpedoes and gunfire off Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin.
(Courtesy, Library of Congress.
)

 

The next day Johnson met with congressional leaders to explain the air strike and seek their support for the joint resolution William Bundy had drafted. At the meeting Senator Mike Mansfield reminded Johnson of his longstanding opposition to American military involvement in Indochina. Johnson asked Senator William Fulbright, an Arkansas Democrat, to serve as floor manager for the resolution. An old friend and veteran of many Senate battles, Fulbright agreed. Senator George Aiken, a Republican from Vermont, did not like the resolution and told Johnson, “By the time you send it up, there won’t be anything for us to do but support you.” He saw the measure as open-ended permission for Johnson to wage war without a formal declaration. But Johnson gave Mansfield and Aiken what other senators called the “full Johnson”—his arm tightly around their shoulders, his face nose-to-nose with theirs, and his voice pleading, cajoling, begging, whining, promising, and threatening. Before the meeting ended, they agreed to support the resolution.

At a joint session of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, Senator Wayne Morse, the renegade Democrat from Oregon, wanted to know whether the United States had provoked the North Vietnamese patrol boat attack. Robert McNamara assured him that the “navy played absolutely no part in, was not associated with, was not aware of any South Vietnamese actions, if there were any. . . . This is the fact.” It was, of course, a bald-faced lie. On August 7 the administration submitted to Congress the resolution Bundy had written. Its wording was simple and direct, with enormous potential consequences:

The congress . . . supports the determination of the President . . . to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the armed forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression. . . . 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 House of Representatives passed the resolution by voice vote, but a debate developed in the Senate. George McGovern of South Dakota declared that he did not wish his vote for the resolution “to be interpreted as an endorsement of our long-standing and apparently growing military involvement in Vietnam.” Daniel Brewster of Maryland worried that the resolution might “authorize or recommend or approve the landing of American armies in Vietnam or in China.” The strongest opposition came from Morse and Alaska’s Ernest Gruening. Back in 1954, when John Foster Dulles tried to drum up support for the French, Morse had resisted, asking: “What is it we are going to fight for and to defend? I am a Senator and I don’t know.” Before the floor debate someone in the Pentagon tipped Morse off that DeSoto Missions and Oplan 34-A operations had probably inspired the first attack and that the report of a second attack was questionable. Morse argued that the place to settle the issue “is not by way of the proposed predated declaration of war, giving to the President the power to make war without a declaration of war.” Gruening, a liberal Democrat, called the resolution “a predated declaration of war.” In March he had warned on the Senate floor: “All Vietnam is not worth the life of a single American boy. . . . [The United States] is seeking vainly in this remote jungle to shore up self-serving corrupt dynasties or their self-imposed successors, and a people that has demonstrated that it has no will to save itself.” But a chorus of approval drowned Morse and Gruening. The Senate passed the resolution eighty-eight to two. Later that day Morse predicted, “History will record that we have made a great mistake.” When he heard of his congressional victory, Johnson laughed and told an aide that the wording of the resolution “was like Grandma’s nightshirt. It covers everything.”

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, in the short run at least, was a stroke of political genius. The president’s standing in public opinion polls soared. More than anything else, the president wanted to be elected that year in his own right, to occupy the White House on his own merits, not on John F. Kennedy's. He wanted to project the image of a wise, thoughtful, and decisive leader, a balance between toughness and moderation. To most Americans, so it seems, the bombing raids on North Vietnam, followed by the president’s stated willingness to go to the negotiating-table, so defined him. Later, when doubts mounted about what had actually happened in the Gulf of Tonkin, Johnson remarked to an associate, “Those dumb stupid sailors were probably shooting at flying fish.”

Three weeks before the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Republicans had nominated Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona for president. In his acceptance speech, Goldwater announced that the nation should no longer “cringe before the bullying of Communism. . . . Failures cement the wall of shame in Berlin. Failures blot the sands of shame at the Bay of Pigs. Failures mark the slow death of freedom in Laos. Failures infest the jungles of Vietnam.” Johnson’s decision to bomb North Vietnam stole Gold-water’s thunder, transforming a foreign policy liability for Johnson into a political asset.

Goldwater was a man of strong opinions and brutal honesty. Convinced that the United States was soft on communism abroad and drifting down the road to socialism at home, he preached against the welfare state, Social Security, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the Laotian settlement of 1962, and any rapprochement with the Soviet Union and China. Johnson understood that Americans had vivid memories of the Great Depression and the New Deal and resented neither the welfare state nor Social Security. He also realized that most Americans feared nuclear weapons and that Goldwater’s saber rattling scared them. In the presidential campaign, Johnson went after Goldwater’s most vulnerable points. Proclaiming the coming of the “Great Society,” the president campaigned for expansion of Social Security and Medicare, creation of job-training programs, a “War on Poverty,” and civil rights legislation. Johnson’s message had wide appeal: Every American deserved to be treated equally and to enjoy basic economic opportunity. Goldwater criticized government spending, large deficits, high taxes, and bureaucratic waste, but most Americans were not interested. On foreign policy, the Democrats ruthlessly attacked Goldwater, portraying Johnson as a wise, temperate leader and Goldwater as an extremist, an “unguided missile.” In a late September rally in Eufaula, Oklahoma, Johnson on Vietnam struck what sounded like just the right course: “We don’t want our American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys. . . . But we are not about to start another war and we’re not about to run away from where we are.” The Johnson campaign produced several nasty television commercials. The “Daisy Girl” spot showed a little girl plucking flower petals and counting them until a deep male voice smothers hers with a missile countdown, followed by detonation and the nuclear mushroom cloud, all of this with a promise that President Lyndon Johnson would not get the country involved in a nuclear war. Goldwater’s slogan “In your heart you know he’s right” the Democrats transformed to “In your heart you know he might.”

But three developments were propelling the United States toward war: the instability of the South Vietnamese government, the increasing aggressiveness of the Vietcong, and the dramatic escalation of North Vietnamese transfers of troops and supplies into South Vietnam.

Nicknamed for his six-foot height, uncommon among Vietnamese, Duong Van ("Big”) Minh was in control of the government after overseeing the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu. He had been trained in the French colonial army and was responsible for crushing the Binh Xuyen in 1955. Minh replaced the Diem government with a Military Revolutionary Council, of which he served as chairman. He repealed Madame Nhu’s morality legislation and released most of Diem’s political prisoners incarcerated at Poulo Condore. His closest associates on the council were Tran Van Don and Le Van Kim. Tran Van Don was born in France in 1917, served with the French army in World War II, and joined the Vietnamese National Army in 1951. He rose to become a commander of I Corps, the northern military district of South Vietnam. Le Van Kim, commandant of the National Military Academy, had spent years in Paris with the French police and came back home to join the Vietnamese National Army. Don and Kim were French citizens, and like Duong Van Minh they were Roman Catholics. From the very beginning, Minh, Don, and Kim faced repeated plots to overthrow them, some coming from their own military subordinates and others from the Buddhist majority. The change in rule was to initiate a series of governments by members of the old elite with French educations, hardly different from Diem, while Buddhist factions struggled for power, hostility between Catholics and Buddhists worsened, and student protest against political and social injustice grew.

On January 29, 1964, after only three months in office, the South Vietnamese government collapsed. Nguyen Khanh, a thirty-six-year-old ARVN officer whose baby fat appearance contrasted to a tiny goatee, carried out a bloodless coup that pleased the Johnson administration. Washington hoped that Khanh’s strong-arm, one-man rule would be more decisive than Minh’s rule by committee and that Khanh’s Buddhist faith would mute the antigovernment movement among the Buddhist clergy. Johnson called Khanh “my American boy.” Cursed with a paranoia matched only by that of Diem, Khanh inclined toward not government but intrigue. More than once he called for a “March to the North,” a farfetched mass popular invasion of North Vietnam. When American bombers attacked North Vietnam after the Gulf of Tonkin incidents, Khanh was euphoric. Anticipating full war, he declared martial law on August 7 and banned freedom of speech, press, and assembly. Two weeks later Khanh issued the infamous Vung Tau Charter, a constitution he wrote overnight declaring himself president and dictator of the Republic of Vietnam. The reaction was swift. Buddhists and students took to the streets protesting Khanh’s government. At one point an enraged mob surrounded Khanh on a Saigon street and forced him to climb up on a tank and shout “Down with dictatorships!” At the end of the month he backed down, losing face and credibility among the people he needed the most—his own generals.