Word: tonkin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Rusk cited two major documents as legal justification for U.S. involvement in Viet Nam. One was the congressionally approved 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution, authorizing the President to take "all necessary measures" to resist aggression in Southeast Asia. The other was the 1954 Southeast Asia Treaty...
...floor-managed the landmark congressional resolution in 1964 by which the President has authority to take "all necessary steps" to resist aggression in Southeast Asia. Fulbright now confesses that he played "a part that I am not at all proud of at the time of the Gulf of Tonkin. That would have been a good time to have precipitated a debate and re-examination of our involvement...
...four hours. Tennessee's Albert Gore questioned whether the Administration had any right to justify its actions in Viet Nam merely by citing the August 1964 joint resolution of Congress passed unanimously in the House and 88 to 2 in the Senate after the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Rusk noted that Gore had a copy of the resolution and asked to borrow it. "Oh, sure," said Gore, pitching a 233-page pamphlet from a high rostrum to the well where Rusk sat, thirty feet away. Gore's aim was off, but when an aide retrieved the pamphlet...
...Senator then cited the attack on U.S. ships in the Tonkin Gulf by three or four North Vietnamese PT boats ("like a 14-year-old boy with a bean shooter attacking Cassius Clay") that spurred U.S. escalation...
Planes & Ships. The U.S. first bombed the north in August 1964 in tit-for-tat retaliation for a torpedo-boat attack on two Seventh Fleet destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf. Regular bombings began last February; since then U.S. and South Vietnamese planes have flown more than 50,000 sorties against the enemy. The 800 planes in use range from the old prop-driven Skyraider, whose fond jockeys insist that it can fly home with nearly as much enemy lead in it as the four tons of bombs it can carry out, to the droop-nosed, brutal-looking...