Word: tonkins
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Emerging from a closed session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Eugene McCarthy was besieged by reporters. What, they clamored, had Defense Secretary Robert McNamara said about the Gulf of Tonkin? "It was," deadpanned McCarthy, "a dark and moonless night." That climactic note, 3½ years after the encounter that overtly set the stage for the all-out U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, was one of the few certitudes about an incident that seems destined to rank in history with such hoary whodunits as the War of Jenkins...
That the Senators should care so intensely about these past events is a matter of note. What particularly rankles most members of the Foreign Relations Committee is the suspicion that they were not given all the facts about reported attacks on U.S. destroyers before approving the Golf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave the President broad authority to "prevent further aggression" in Southeast Asia. The Administration claims that resolution to be the "functional equivalent" of a declaration of war on North Viet...
...least, gave less than the full facts about the occurrences of August 1964. Certainly the Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Fulbright or anyone else, will not be inclined any time soon to accept the Administration's version of events-as it did when it approved the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. From his isolated position of a year ago, Fulbright is emerging as a leader of the Senate naysayers. The "Southern Barons" are with him because they are fundamentally opposed to presidential power, while the Northern liberals are with him because they oppose the war. It is a formidable combination...
WHAT really happened in the Tonkin Gulf during the early days of August 1964 is a question that historians may ponder for decades. All the details will probably never be established. For present-day Americans, the knowable facts are of more than academic interest, since the events of those days set off a chain reaction, beginning with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in Congress, which has sent more than a million U.S. troops to battle in South Viet Nam. The following account is based on the Defense Department's official report-much of which was secret until last week...
JOHNSON has reason to be jittery over what debate on the larger questions of the war may uncover. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee opened a sore wound for the Administration last week with its hearing on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which is the closest thing the President has to a legal excuse for waging war on North Vietnam. It is hard to prove that the United States ship provoked the attacks that led to he step-up of our involvement, but it is clear that the Administration was dishonestly selective in what it chose to reveal to Congress...