Those 'Incidents' in Tonkin Gulf
Baker, Leonard
Those 'Incidents' in Tonkin Gulf Tonkin Gulf, by Eugene G. Wind- chy. Doubleday. 358 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by Leonard Baker One of the most moving experi- ences I had as a Washington re-...
...Was there an attack on August 4? Windchy makes a most convincing case for the theory that there was no attack on the Maddox and another U.S...
...An equal number of astrologers might have done better...
...Since then we all have learned that we were suckered...
...destroyer, Turner Joy, that night, and that they were firing at each other...
...Those 'Incidents' in Tonkin Gulf Tonkin Gulf, by Eugene G. Wind- chy...
...The Johnson Administration sought a Tonkin Gulf confrontation to force a Congressional blank check for war making, and when the officials of that administration thought they had it, they would not let it get away—not by truth or by any other such old-fashioned virtues...
...In discussing which members were wrong and which were right, it is hard to disagree with Windchy's statement: "Most, in fact, were wrong...
...From the very beginning, the story Windchy tells is one of arrogance and neptitude...
...Windchy's account of what was 'happening back in Washington as the news trickled in about the supposed attacks is hair-raising...
...But not even the Penta- gon Papers have shown how badly we were suckered that August in 1964 as has this brilliant reporting account by Eugene G. Windchy, a journalist and former bureaucrat (with the U.S...
...And yet up through the late 1960s the Wash- ington press corps praised him as a demigod who was going to save the country from the militarists...
...And if indeed our destroyers were convoying and collaborat- ing with South Vietnamese ships attacking the coast of North Viet- nam, our posture was far from the one of injured innocence pre- sented to the nation and the world by President Johnson when he or- dered our warplanes to bomb and strafe North Vietnamese instal- lations...
...With all of its poor-mouthing about the Executive stealing power from it, the fact is that on Vietnam Congress all too quickly gave up whatever power it had to in- fluence events...
...What was wrong with our Best Thinkers...
...destroyer Maddox was i spy ship—its mission supposedly a se- cret...
...Who fired the first shot on August 2? The United States at first said the North Vietnamese had...
...No one can reasonably challenge the picture here of Secretary of Defense McNamara as a second-rate accoun- tant who got in over his head...
...But on August 8, 1964, his deputy, Cyrus Vance, had broadcast on Voice of America his understand- ing that the North Vietnamese claimed the twelve-mile limit...
...Senate press gallery...
...It was suckered because it allowed itself to be suckered...
...It is one of the most exhaustive studies of military incom- petence ever detailed...
...Way Back Then "The presence of the American warships so close to the scene of South Vietnamese raids on North Vietnam strikes us as dangerously provocative in an area that has all the characteristics of a tinder- box...
...Rather it was abetted by those understood to be the most brilliant members of our academic community...
...It also is a high- ly readable story...
...But its value, I believe, is far above all that...
...Windchy carefully reports and an- alyzes the details of the August 2 at- tack...
...Reading Windchy's book one {must ask questions, the answers to which are hard to come by but which must be answered if the United States is to survive the Vietnam tragedy and avoid future Vietnams...
...The members of the Senate realized the result of their vote could be war, and they did not wish to make that decision lightly...
...He nterviewed more than a hundred in- dividuals, scoured all the available naterial, hammered at the Pentagon ror additional information to produce in almost minute-by-minute account )f the August 2 and 4 events in the Tonkin Gulf...
...One by one the Senators asked Foreign Relations Committee chairman J. Wil- liam Fulbright if he was certain that the United States had done nothing to provoke what was understood to be the attacks on American ships in in- ternational waters...
...The Senate then approved the resolution, and there was war...
...This book obviously will be a source book on the Tonkin Gulf incidents for years to come...
...Fulbright solemnly assured them that all information available to him pointed to the attacks being unpro- voked...
...Vietnam involvement was not the result of some evil bureaucrats in the pay of the moneymen...
...Fulbright, the other Senators (except Ernest F. Gruening and Wayne Morse), the press corps, all Americans...
...The Maddox was patrolling up to eight miles from the mainland of North Vietnam, which claimed a twelve-mile limit...
...Later it agreed they had not...
...In- formation Service) who has had a dec- ade of experience in the Far East...
...The Progressive September, 1964...
...And on and on...
...James Reston of The New York Times once touted him for President...
...Reviewed by Leonard Baker One of the most moving experi- ences I had as a Washington re- porter in the 1960s was watching the debate on the Tonkin Gulf resolution from the U.S...
...What was wrong with Congress...
...Denying that the Maddox had been sent in as a pigeon to provoke an attack, Secretary of De- fense Robert S. McNamara in 1968 told a Senate committee that the United States knew of no such twelve- mile limit...
...But dozens of Chinese workmen law the electronic spying equipment >eing loaded and the ship's personnel was speculating, so Windchy reports, which laborer would tap out the mes- sage to Peking—"DD 731 just got the box...
...What was wrong with the press corps...
Vol. 35 • November 1971 • No. 11
