History and Deceit: "The Gulf of Tonkin Incident" (August, 1964) and American Leaders Betray Public Trust Over Iraq

The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, was the largely fallacious "casus belli" used by President Lyndon Johnson, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk to begin unlimited military operations against North Vietnam and Vietcong forces in the southern regions of that divided nation.

Wikipedia, the helpful reference guide for the Internet , provides some background to the events that occurred this very week 48 years ago:

********************"The Gulf of Tonkin incident, or the USS Maddox incident, are the names given to two separate confrontations, one actual and one now recognized as intentionally fabricated, involving North Vietnam and the United States in the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin. On August 2, 1964, the destroyer USS Maddox, while performing a signals intelligence patrol as part of DESOTO operations, engaged three North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats of the 135th Torpedo Squadron.[1] A sea battle resulted, in which the Maddox expended over two hundred eighty 3-inch and 5-inch shells, and in which four USN F-8 Crusader jet fighter bombers strafed the torpedo boats. One US aircraft was damaged, one 14.5 mm round hit the destroyer, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats were damaged, and four North Vietnamese sailors were killed and six were wounded; there were no U.S. casualties.
The second Tonkin Gulf incident was originally claimed by the U.S. National Security Agency to have occurred on August 4, 1964, as another sea battle, but instead may have involved "Tonkin Ghosts"[6] (false radar images) and not actual NVN torpedo boat attacks."*********************http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident


We now know that President Johnson and his officials lied about the August fourth incident and lied again about the mission of the ships, and in stating that the position of the destroyers "Maddox" and "Turner Joy" were simply patrolling in international waters. (A dubious claim, in light of later revaluations. )

Some suspected this at the time but it wasn't until several years later in a 1970 documentary by the CBS News program "60 Minutes" that reality began to catch up to the chicanery in Washington. The release of the classified "Pentagon Papers" by former US Marine and intelligence analyst, Daniel Ellsberg, also played a major part in opening the eyes of Americans to the deceit.

Many officials after the fact--even Bobby McNamara himself admitted a few years before his death in the Errol Morris documentary "The Fog of War" (2007) that the second and most politically significant attack on August 4 th never occurred.

This was either a "false flag" operation or a mistake that LBJ seized on to thrust America into direct combat operations and ramp up a war that had been previously touted as a war between North and South Vietnam with the Americans in an "advisory" role. The term "advisory" must be considered loosely in light of the fact that there were 15,000 US forces in Vietnam when Lyndon Johnson assumed office at the time of John Kennedy's assassination. It is also clear that, unlike Kennedy, Johnson had zero ability to say "no" to the Pentagon until his own Presidency was at risk in 1968 and the US largely conscript forces has sustained high casualties. With no end in sight and General William Westmoreland braying for 150,000 more troops on top of the over half-million already there, AND that public opinion in his own Democratic Party turning away from him, Johnson chose not to run for re-election.

By the time Lyndon Johnson left office 550,000 American troops were engaged in the war and 20,000 had died. While never officially declared as a war by Congress, as per the Constitutional requirement spelled out directly in the document, a Gulf of Tonkin Resolution giving the President wide powers to wage war was approved on August 9th, 1964. It passed by a wide margin in the Senate. Only two Senators, Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska, voted against this measure.

Another 38,000 thousand Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese would die before this most destructive part of the Vietnam War would finally end almost eleven years after the "USS Maddox Incident".





(below) From the 2007 documentary, "War Made Easy", narrated by Sean Penn: here is a segment devoted to the Maddox incident. It also covers what would happen 39 years later in the run-up to the next major "war of choice" by the US Pentagon chiefs, a willing President, and a gullible major media, against Iraq in 2003. Think we'll get a retraction from the media on that one, ever?

Meet Rep. Allen West (R-FL); the latest GOP Tea Party Troll To Snap His Cap! Uses "Redscare Redux" as Attention-Getting Device

I guess I should have seen the old red scare card from a conservative-radical politician coming. Surely it was coming, right as that Iron Horse, "Old Number 97", a' barreling down the railway tracks with Casey Jones at the helm blowing the horn! The breaks are gone, the nut-jobs are stoking the boiler, the dogs are barking, and any sane conservative left is about to make a jump for the ditch.

This whole election year has been off the wall. It just went spinning off to the 1950's all over again.

First we had the GOP's answer to "Baby Doc" Duvalier, former reactionary leader of Haiti --Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. Ryan has his nefarious but popular plan in the House to balance the budget by eliminating Medicare as we know it and cutting taxes to the well-off and the super rich while pretending to balance the budget. Even though the budget itself in ten years would lose ten trillion dollars in revenue. Yeah, that will work. Yeah...sure. Why didn't I think of that?

Then it was Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich taking every word out of Barack Obama, Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi's mouth and twisting it to maybe get the last blockhead voter he can out of some state primary he'll never win. And now we have Allen West, the back-bencher par excellence, coming out with his latest attempt to get someone outside his Florida district to notice him.

80 Communists in the Democratic Congressional Caucus in Washington? This guy needs medication. Seriously.

"JFK" (1992) Opening Credits--Oliver Stone, Director/Music by John Williams

"God help this country when someone sits at this desk who doesn't know as much about the military as I do"--President Dwight D. Eisenhower

"So, let us not be blind to our differences -- but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."--John Kennedy



Sometimes the opening credits or first scene of a film is the best thing you're going to get for your money. Such I believe is true of this bravura opening by Oliver Stone to his Cold War/Assassination Conspiracy opus, "JFK".

This film comes to mind for me because this of news reports and commentary about two major events that happened fifty years ago this week. On was a Farewell Address from the White House on January 17, 1961 of President Dwight Eisenhower. He warned the nation about the moral and spiritual threat that came from an unchecked "Military-Industrial Complex" that was growing and growing and consuming over half of the federal tax revenues at the end of his term. Eisenhower came into office as a hawk on defense but by his Second Term he saw the dangers of a protracted conflict with the Soviet Union in an atomic age. He began to temper his rhetoric about massive defense build-ups, which were becoming self-perpetuating far above the real dangers America faced.

The Military Industrial Complex speech came very late in his Presidency. The new leader, John F. Kennedy, also came in as a hawk and continued the CIA's plans to overthrow Fidel Castro's Cuba and practice brinkmanship with Moscow. As time wore on, and the Cuban Missile Crisis made clear, something other than force and more force in reserve was needed if any world--liberal capitalist or communist--was going to survive. JFK's famous speech at American University reached out to the Soviet Leader, NIkita Khrushchev. to find common humanity and for both empires to draw down jointly from the perils of a third and final world war.

Did JFK's speech create the last straw for some leaders within the government to view him as expendable? Did the "military-industrial complex" dispose of a President the way the Praetorian Guard of the Early Roman Empire disposed of the odd emperor they ceased to support? Did the loss of JFK bring a blank check to the Pentagon to ramp up a land war in Southeast Asia that the late President had expressed reservations about?

Oliver Stone seemed to think so. Many who don't buy his theories nonetheless cannot accept the relatively benign "lone gunman" theory into what happened in Dallas in November of 1963. Suffice to say we won;t ever know the answer in a way that will satisfy the curious. But let us put politics aside and see this opening as a prologue to those events.

Both "Ike" and Kennedy's speeches are excerpted in this opening. It's a masterful montage of narration, flash images, newsreel clips and stirring but ominous music, encapsulating one of the most important times in recent history,and one that still resonates within the American psyche with dreams deferred and queries about tragic events that will never be answered.

Russian Spies in New Jersey?: Boris and Natasha Redux!

      The news that eleven New Jersey Russian Americans from the posh suburbs outside New York City  are now in Federal custody, accused of being sent by Kremlin's SVR, Moscow's foreign intelligence service, brings back visions of Cold War gamesmanship to many. 

It perhaps says something about the odd way my brain has developed from those "Spy vs. Spy" years to recall that when the news was first announced I thought of Boris and Natasha. (pictured left). 

The images from television, movies and books I read about Moscow versus London and Washington in dealing with real-lie espionage agents of course had at least  a semi-serious entertainment value.  Images of Sean Connery as the tough and wise-cracking James Bond, Michael Caine as the intrepid if slightly flawed Harry Palmer,  and, on the lighter side, Don Adams as Maxwell Smart  leap to mind.

Some authors wanted to make a stronger case about the seemliness  of spy-craft itself and the sometimes ambiguous moral traps and personal problems spied had. Sober  portrayals of cold war intrigue were offered up by John LaCarre in his George Smiley novels or Graham Greene in "The Human Factor", where one of his characters defects to Russia out of a personal favor done to him and his lover in South Africa by a KGB agent. Both LaCarre and Greene had served in British Intelligence.    

But the earliest inkling in my memory banks  that NATO nations and our former Friends in the East were having t each other came  from a 1960's cartoon show called "Rocky and Bullwinkle". Rocky was a plucky flying squirrel, and Bullwinkle a dimwitted moose.  They were two friends from Frostbite Falls, Minnesota who were frequently running up against the nefarious and short Boris Badenoff and his Amazonian partner and apparent girl-friend, Natasha Fatale. 

Pictured here with their two-dimensional spymaster, known only as "Fearless Leader"(above) , this pair of idealized Russian spies set a path of ineptitude and total bad luck that made it rather hard for me  and other kids I knew to properly take the  Cold War spy-game with too much seriousness.  

  Parody like this, intended for both children and adults, only went to prove to me that the threats of international communism that had spread like wildfire in the America of the 1950's had been so overplayed that by the next decade it was clear the public wanted relief from such paranoia about "Reds under every bed" .  

That the "heroes" of the espionage stories in the Rocky and Bullwinkle saga were none other than a rodent and a large cow-like dufus with antlers only heightened the sense that some politicians in Washington had gone too far in trying to make people stop thinking and  just be afraid.  This was one man's  (Jay Ward, the producer) parody  against blacklisting and the politics of red hysteria under men like Senator Joe Mc Carthy, Richard Nixon and others.

But now we live in a post-modern world where irony can pop up anywhere.  The irony of Russian agents being sent to an America to gather information while posing as ordinary upscale citizens seems not only unnecessary   (what do the Russians  need to know about us? That Wall Street mortgage and hedge fund shell-gamers and con-men decimated  the economy? That we can't get out of Afghanistan just as they couldn't? That our environment takes a backseat to our desire for natural resources? ) but daft. 

Here's the "new Natasha", Titian-tress-ed beauty  Anna Chapman, on a news-spot featuring a  You Tube video she made before her arrest along with her husband and others..

Richard Nixon, The Early Smears

 

 

Richard Nixon began his political career after he was discharged from the US Navy in 1946.  He impressed a group of small businessmen, farmers, fruit orchard owners and sundry other Republican contributors--called The Committee of 100--to run as a GOP stalwart against a five-term Democrat, Jerry Voorhis.   

Few expected him to win, even among his backers, and Nixon at first received very few contributions for his efforts. Voorhis himself didn't take Nixon seriously, according to Stephen Ambrose in his 1987 book "Nixon: The Education of a Politican".  The incumbent spent much of the campaign in Washington, solidifying his image as a hard-working legislator.  

That was a huge mistake by Voorhis.  "Tricky Dick"--as Nixon  came to be known in a later campaign--was not one to be underestimated.  He began to smear Voorhies as a Communist sympathsizer.  He did it by trying to tie Voorhies to the CIO Labor Union, which did have some Communists among their ranks.  The problem was the CIO hadn't endorsed Congressman Voorhis.   Only one small local branch of a local CIO had issued a recommendation on a mimeopgraphed sheet of paper for its rank-and-file to vote for Voorhis.  Nixon and his team took this small handbill paper endorsemdent by one small segment of the CIO and turned it into a big lie that the whole union, and especially the Communist elements, had endorsed the Democrat. 

That same year,the  Communist Party newspaper "People's World", had denounced Voorhis as "against unity with Communists under any circumstances".  In truth, the incumbent was simply a liberal/progressive type, a mainstream New Deal Democrat friendly with working-class interests.  He had even introduced a bill in the the House of Representitives in 1940 calling for all Communists to register with the national government!

Meanwhile, in the state of Wisconsin, another Republican was having similar success in wresting a Senate seat from Robert LaFollette, Jr..  The candidate's name--Joseph McCarthy.     

To quote StephenAmbrose (Nixon, Volume I, 1987, page, 129)

 "...both Voorhis and (Senator) Robert LaFollette, Jr had become anathema to the Communist Party, because they  had denounced Russian aggression in Eastern Europe. But the truth mattered not one bit to either Joe McCarthy or Nixon."  

This  was 1946 and FDR was dead and the war was over and the GOP was desperate and the country was used to stories of spies and cloak and dagger espionage generated by radio shows and Hollywood films. If the Nazis wren't a threat anymore, go to the next best thing.  A new villiany must  be found. And it wasn't like Russia's interests in Eastern Europe were exactly in accord with the other former Allies.  

  By the time Voorhis got back to his district, he was under attack from every right-of-center newspaper in Orange County and Pasadena with ads placed by the Nixon campaign and the Committee of 100.  He also performed poorly in four debates against the young challenger.  Nixon was a formidible debater and kept Voorhis on the defensive with the outlandish CIO endorsement claim.  Voorhis responded with long ponderous appeals; Nixon just shot back with more headline grabbing attacks--"The Los Angeles Times", the paper run by arch-conservative, anti-union Owen Chandler, endorsed Nixon and no doubt kept the headlines a'grabbing.   Nixon won the election and continued his tactics for most of his career, first getting an important seat on the House Un-American Activities Committee.  He can be glimpsed below briefly near the beginning of a documentary on the HUAC witchhunts that started in Hollywood in October, 1947.  

One can't help wondering if the history of the USA would have been different if Nixon's earliest opponent had taken him as a serious contender.  Nixon did get his comeuppance with the Watergate imbloglio--but not after almost thirty years as a major force on the national and world stage.