The rush to war. The use of faulty intelligence. A seemingly unending conflict, with few discernible checks on the presidential use of military force.
While these ghosts of Vietnam prefigure elements of America’s wars in South Asia and the Middle East — indeed, around the globe — what’s different about the political climate then and now is that 50 years ago this week, the U.S. Senate decided to do something about it. That effort, though late in coming, serves as a telling reminder to our Congress about its proper role — even its duty — to pronounce on when and why the president can send U.S. forces into harm’s way and in our country’s name.
Eager to claw back some of the power it had relinquished to the executive branch as the United States ratcheted up the war in Vietnam, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC), chaired by Sen. J. William Fulbright (D-Ark.), held a hearing in February 1968 on the Tonkin Gulf incidents — the murky events of August 1964 that resulted in Congress giving President Lyndon B. Johnson a “blank check authorization for further action,” as Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara described it. This authorization opened the door to America’s escalation of the conflict.
In essence, Congress transferred its war powers to the president, sanctioning all levels of military activity without a declaration of war.
This fateful move came after Johnson and his aides received reports that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked a U.S. destroyer, the USS Maddox, on Aug. 2, 1964, and the destroyer Turner Joy and the Maddox again on Aug. 4. To them, it suggested that Hanoi was intensifying its war against South Vietnam and its American patron. Having held his fire after the Aug. 2 attack, Johnson responded to the apparent second incident with airstrikes, the first U.S. bombing of North Vietnam.
Johnson then used the incident to amass sweeping authority for waging war in Southeast Asia. Maintaining that the North Vietnamese raids were “unprovoked,” the administration introduced into Congress the Southeast Asia Resolution — known colloquially as the Tonkin Gulf Resolution — which authorized the president “to take all necessary measure to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent any further aggression.” It fell to Sen. Fulbright to steer the resolution through its nearly unanimous adoption by the Senate.
But questions about what actually happened on Aug. 4, which the Johnson administration knocked down then and thereafter, nagged at Fulbright. Not only were there indications that raids on North Vietnam had provoked the engagements, but there was also suspicion that the August 4 incident had never even occurred. Fulbright’s unease only grew as the president sent American troops abroad — first to the Dominican Republic in April 1965 in an alleged effort to protect U.S. citizens from a Communist coup, and then in considerably greater numbers to Vietnam.
Fulbright’s unease led to action. His investigation of the Dominican episode in the summer and fall of 1965 revealed that Johnson had misled Congress and the public over key facets of the intervention. His exposure of this “credibility gap” added to his suspicion about what had taken place in the Tonkin Gulf, and to growing discomfort with his own role in the legislation that followed.
It also shattered the relationship between these two former Senate colleagues from the South. Johnson regarded Fulbright’s actions as traitorous. His anger deepened in February 1966 when Fulbright held critical, televised hearings on Vietnam, and then peaked as Fulbright warned of an “arrogance of power” infecting the conduct of U.S. foreign relations.
By the summer, with more than 400,000 Americans serving in Vietnam and the administration continuing to invoke the Tonkin Gulf resolution as authority for its escalation, Fulbright’s earlier discomfort turned into deep regret, setting the stage for another confrontation between the senator and the president.
With SFRC aides and anonymous Pentagon tipsters passing disclosures about the events of August 1964 to Fulbright, and no end to the Vietnam War in sight, Fulbright decided to hold a hearing on the Tonkin Gulf. He was hardly alone in wanting a better picture of how and why Johnson had secured congressional approval for an expanded U.S. commitment, especially since it had recently come to light that the administration had drafted the Tonkin Gulf Resolution weeks before the incidents that led to its passage.
The one-day session before the SFRC took place on Feb. 20, 1968 — just three weeks after the onset of the Tet offensive, and with the bloody battle for Hue still raging. Fueling the already tense atmosphere were rumblings that the administration was considering the dispatch of another 200,000 troops to Vietnam. And looming over everything was the New Hampshire presidential primary, roughly two weeks away, in which Johnson faced a challenge from the antiwar Sen. Eugene McCarthy (D-Minn.).
Lasting over seven hours, the hearing centered around claims that the Johnson administration had rushed the country to war, misled Congress and the public about the Tonkin incidents and then covered its tracks when officials, legislators and journalists began to sniff out the truth.
To the charge that sabotage operations against North Vietnam had prompted a reprisal against the Maddox on August 2, 1964, McNamara was defiant, indignant — and dishonest. His denial before the SFRC in 1968 belied his candid remarks to the president four years earlier. Just hours after the first incident had occurred, he told Johnson there was “no question” that the strikes against North Vietnamese installations had precipitated the reprisal attack. In the wake of those initial raids, the presence of the Maddox in the same area “undoubtedly led them to connect the two events.” In fact, it was an open secret among senior officials that those activities were related.
To the even more explosive charge that the Aug. 4 attack on U.S. destroyers had never occurred — a matter of some dispute at the time within intelligence circles, the military and the Johnson administration itself — McNamara was equally and emphatically dismissive. Desperate to bolster his case, he introduced “highly classified intelligence from an unimpeachable source” that allegedly confirmed the existence of the second attack. “We’ve just got to say it,” he told Johnson the day before his testimony, “because it’s the best evidence we have that an attack took place on the fourth.”
While McNamara may well have believed in the accuracy of that source, it has since been revealed that intelligence officials falsified intercepted communications to convey the appearance of a second attack in an effort to conceal earlier errors in reporting.
In all, the hearing was contentious, its participants combative. Neither the senators nor the administration gave ground, and after it came to a close, the drama spilled out of the closed committee room and to the waiting press corps. Although participants had agreed to withhold details of the proceedings, McNamara violated that pledge by criticizing the hearings and providing reporters with a lengthy statement defending the administration.
Fulbright, in turn, let loose. He charged the administration not only with misleading Congress and the public, but with covering up its knowledge of the incidents. The “credibility gap” that Fulbright helped to open in 1965 was now a yawning chasm.
The administration was furious. As McNamara told Johnson the following day, Fulbright’s real objective, as well as that of the senators who now voiced similar misgivings, was “to prove that they were misled, and had they known at the time the facts of the Tonkin Gulf situation, they never would have supported the resolution, and hence, would not, in any way, be responsible for the escalation in military operations out there that has occurred since then.”
Responsible or not, Fulbright regretted his role in passing the resolution “more than anything I have ever done in my life.” He argued that the “resolution, like any contract based on misrepresentation, in my opinion, is null and void.”
Congress did not formally rescind the resolution until 1971, but by then the war had changed. President Richard Nixon was “Vietnamizing” the conflict and bringing American troops home, taking some of the sting out of the antiwar movement.
Yet Congress was clearly reasserting itself — not just in repealing the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, but through efforts to control funding for the war, and ultimately through legislation that sought to delineate the use of war powers. That trajectory owed much to Fulbright’s efforts — essential contributions in striking a balance between executive and legislative control over the use of force abroad.
That balance is now gone.
With the United States now engaged in what observers have described as a “forever war” across multiple theaters, it is time for Congress to reassert itself and conduct rigorous hearings on the scope, rationale and wisdom of these military activities. At the very least, it should revisit the legislation that authorized them more than 15 years ago and establish a positive consensus for their continuation. Endless or not, this war must have the affirmation and support of the American people and their elected representatives. Perhaps this is one lesson of Vietnam we can all agree on.