To the editor:
In his March 10 letter to The Berkshire Edge, Steve Goodman aptly compares the currently proposed Republican budget in the U.S. House of Representatives to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed by Congress in 1964.
I remember well the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution by a vote of 533 to two in August 1964. Only Senators Ernest Gruening (Alaska) and Wayne Morse (Oregon) voted against it.
I was 16 years old, and all I knew about the situation before that vote was what I had learned from what I had read in The New York Times in early August about the alleged events which President Johnson used to justify his urgent request that Congress pass a resolution giving him sweeping war powers in Southeast Asia without an actual congressional declaration of war against North Vietnam. The published information at the time made it clear to me that his explanation of the situation was highly suspect, almost as much as was Colin Powell’s patently absurd allegation—nearly 40 years later—to the United Nations in February 2003 that Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein had the material to manufacture “weapons of mass destruction,” especially nuclear ones.
Historians have established definitively that the story of an unprovoked torpedo assault by the North Vietnamese navy on the U.S. destroyer Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin on August 3 or 4, 1964, was a lie, repeatedly asserted by President Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and that Johnson knew it was a lie. See the detailed Wikipedia article on the subject.
In 1972, as a reporter for the University of Connecticut student newspaper, I spoke with the former Tennessee Senator Albert Gore Sr. (1907–1998, father of former Vice President Albert Gore Jr.) who was on the college lecture circuit after having been defeated for reelection in 1970, after serving in the Senate for 18 years. Senator Gore, whose opposition to the Vietnam War in the 1960s had inspired me, had cast one of the 533 votes for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964. After his lecture, I asked him, “How was it possible for you and all but two of your fellow senators to vote for it when it was so clear to me as a 16-year-old newspaper reader that it was based on a lie?”
He replied that he could not offer an explanation.
John Breasted
Great Barrington
Click here to read The Berkshire Edge’s policy for submitting Letters to the Editor.
