Lies and duplicity - From the South China Sea to Ohio in 1964

 

     Lies and duplicity - From the South China Sea to Ohio in 1964

We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.                                                                                                                                                                                           President Lyndon B. Johnson

   

  With this one sentence LBJ may have ensured his victory in the 1964 Presidential election. Spoken at Akron University in Ohio on October 21, 1964, could LBJ have been lying with only 2 weeks till the election?  

      A brief review of America’s involvement in Vietnam could start in 1945 when the Japanese had surrendered. France was eager to re-establish control of its colonial empire in Southeast Asia. At the same time a Vietnamese nationalist and communist known as Ho Chi Minh, had gathered followers and proclaimed Vietnamese independence. Ho Chi Minh asked the U.S. to recognize this declaration but the American government ignored his request. America was concerned about the global spread of communism and the need to help France rebuild. A nasty war between the French and the Viet Minh led to a French defeat. The Geneva Convention was to settle the future of Vietnam. One of its provisions was a temporary partition between the northern part and southern part of Vietnam. This partition was to be only until free elections would decide the direction the Vietnamese wanted to go politically.

     LBJ, unlike JFK, was a reluctant cold war warrior. Always looking to do more domestically he referred to Vietnam as a “bitch”. By the time LBJ became President, America had been covertly helping South Vietnam for well over a decade.http://books.google.com/books/about/Rethinking_Camelot.html?id=ENqiQY5V4ooC

     In 1964 the US Navy was conducting electronic eavesdropping patrols in the South China Sea. That summer the US was also covertly helping South Vietnamese commandos infiltrating North Vietnam by sea. On August 2, 1964 the USS Maddox was on patrol off the coast of North Vietnam when it was attacked by a North Vietnamese patrol boat. Two nights later it reported another similar attack. What to make of these 2 reported attacks? Electronic eavesdropping is done my most navies. Yet assisting in commando insertions is an act of war. That a North Vietnamese patrol boat responded aggressively would make sense. That no such attack occurred two nights later is almost a certainty. Based on these questionable attacks, the US Congress handed LBJ the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, authorizing the use of force in Vietnam.

     On December 1, 2005, the NSA declassified over 140 documents related to the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Agency Historian Robert J. Hanyok’s review of SIGINT confirms what many had suspected since 1964 – there was no second attack.http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=134

       So, was LBJ lying to the American people? Or was the bigger lie sold to the American Congress – the Gulf of Tonkin incident?http://www.fas.org/irp/nsa/spartans/ Either way, 58,000 Americans gave their lives.  Arthur Schlesinger Jr. pointed out “that the future outwits all our certitudes.”   Today the U.S. and Vietnam maintain cordial trade and diplomatic relations.