Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War

In 1996, Edwin E. Moïse published a landmark study of the Tonkin Gulf incidents of August 1964. Those incidents spurred President Lyndon B. Johnson to order the first set of aerial attacks on North Vietnam, thereby significantly escalating the ongoing Vietnam War and the involvement in it of the United States. The 1996 volume established beyond any reasonable doubt that, on 2 August 1964, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the USS Maddox, a naval destroyer engaged in a reconnaissance mission just off the North Vietnamese coast. The ship's mission, he emphasized, was directly connected to a highly classified operational plan known as OPLAN 34A, which authorized covert raids against North Vietnamese territory by South Vietnamese commandos. The plan had been approved by Johnson earlier that year and fully supported and directed by U.S. military personnel. Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara did not reveal to the...