In 1964 the war in Vietnam wasn’t going well for the Americans. After having sent an ever increasing number of troops to support the government of the catholic elite headed van Nguyen Van Thieu, the primary result in the battle against the nationalists of the Vietcong was an increasing number of casualties. The successes by the Vietcong were for a large part due to the support of the local population, but their also was considerable support from the North Vietnamese. The solution was, the think tanks had concluded, to take the war to North Vietnam, by means of aerial bombardment. This needed a casus belli, since officially the United States and North Vietnam, a sovereign country, were not at war.
Then up came the matter of the Maddox and the Turner Joy. These were destroyers on patrol in the Gulf of Tonkin close to North Vietnam while South Vietnamese ships making attacks nearby. The Maddox had earlier made these patrols providing cover on its own, and come under attack when the North Vietnamese tried to defend against the South Vietnamese vessels. The Turner Joy joined in during the second patrol, when at some instance, in the night, one the American vessels reported to have come under attack by North Vietnamese vessels, after which it opened fire, as did the other one. Though no details of the attackers could be detected, nor any results of the fire fight, this second incident was the reason the Americans were waiting for, stating that the two attacks were unprovoked, and after passing a resolution in the ever belligerent American congress, and the bombardment of North Vietnam started.
From the start, even at the American side there were doubts about this story. The doubts were not very much later confirmed when it turned out that no Vietnamese warships had been in the neighbourhood, and that probably the two American vessels had been firing at each other, a version now even supported by American Navy historians. In public, however, the lie was upheld, and the war in Vietnam got to ever greater heights in intensity.
This lie cost the live of hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions, of Vietnamese. It also contributed to the end of the career of President Johnson, who rightly saw the war in Vietnam as partly his responsibility, and also saw he had been wrong in continuing it. He declined to run for a further turn as American president, one of the few to do this voluntarily. He died early, to most accounts caused by the mental suffering of having been forced to make these decisions.
Sources 1, 2, 3.
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