Word: mcnamara
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Unanswered Questions. McNamara, in his final Capitol Hill appearance before moving to the World Bank, did not do much last week to assuage committee members. He aroused their ire on the first point by declaring it was "monstrous" to charge that the Administration had "induced" North Vietnamese attacks on patrolling U.S. destroyers. No one on the committee had flatly made any such allegation, though Wayne Morse did come close by declaring that the U.S. had provoked the North Vietnamese. McNamara then released a highly condensed version of his testimony that was hotly criticized by Chairman J. William Fulbright...
...mission to observe North Vietnamese naval activity in the Gulf of Tonkin. Stopping at Taiwan, she took aboard a "black box," about the size of a moving van, crammed with electronic gear, and about a dozen new men to tend its innards. What was it for? Defense Secretary Robert McNamara insisted at first that the equipment "consisted in essence" of normal radio receivers that gave the ship "added capacity" to detect indications of possible attack. In testimony released at week's end, however, he admitted that, far from being routine, the electronic gear was designed to somehow "trigger" North...
With the new equipment-whatever it was-Maddox took up patrol, with orders never to venture closer than eight miles to the North Vietnamese mainland, or closer than four miles to any Northern islands. How close she did go, in fact, has not been disclosed. McNamara maintains that Hanoi never officially announced its claim to a twelve-mile boundary until Sept. 1, 1964, so that, as far as the U.S. was concerned, Maddox was always within international waters...
Shortly before Maddox arrived on station, South Vietnamese patrol boats (the night of July 30-31) shelled the Northern islands of Hon Me and Hon Nieu, staging points for Northern infiltration to the South. Did Maddox help the Southerners by diverting Northern attention from the attack? McNamara says no, but he acknowledges that the U.S. was aware that the islands would be bombarded...
...about five miles, star shells were fired from Maddox. It was, in McNamara's words, "a very dark, moonless, overcast night"-or, as Maddox Radarman James Stankevitz put it, "darker than the hubs of hell...