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.
