Senate Records Show Doubts on ’64 Vietnam Crisis (Gulf of Tonkin)

[JohnyCanuck]

WASHINGTON — In an echo of the debates over the discredited intelligence that helped make the case for the war in Iraq, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday released more than 1,100 pages of previously classified Vietnam-era transcripts that show senators of the time sharply questioning whether they had been deceived by the White House and the Pentagon over the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident.
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“If this country has been misled, if this committee, this Congress, has been misled by pretext into a war in which thousands of young men have died, and many more thousands have been crippled for life, and out of which their country has lost prestige, moral position in the world, the consequences are very great,” Senator Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee, the father of the future vice president, said in March 1968 in a closed session of the Foreign Relations Committee.

snip

Historians said the transcripts, which are filled with venting by the senators about the Johnson administration and frustrations over their own ineffectiveness, added little new to the historical record. Even at the time, there was widespread skepticism about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which the North Vietnamese were said to have attacked American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964, two days after an earlier clash.

snip

Still, the transcripts show the outrage the senators were expressing behind closed doors. “In a democracy you cannot expect the people, whose sons are being killed and who will be killed, to exercise their judgment if the truth is concealed from them,” Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, said in an executive session in February 1968.

But the senators also worried that releasing a committee staff investigation that raised doubts about the Tonkin incident would only inflame the country more. As Senator Mike Mansfield, Democrat of Montana, put it, “You will give people who are not interested in facts a chance to exploit them and to magnify them out of all proportion.”

At another point, the committee’s chairman, Senator William Fulbright, Democrat of Arkansas, raised concerns that if the senators did not take a stand on the war, “We are just a useless appendix on the governmental structure.” (As the "cheese eating surrender monkeys" would say, "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." /JC)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/world/asia/15vietnam.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

[G_j]

1. Frank Church

nice quote :thumbsup:

[Submariner]

2. We were suckers....I was anyway

As a naive high school senior I bought the Tonkin Gulf attacks on the Maddox and Turner Joy, hook, line and sinker. So I enlisted in the Navy.

In the end it was just another slimy Texas pol lying us into a war. LBJ was a POS responsible for the needless deaths and injury of hundreds of thousands.

[Octafish]

9. +59,976* plus more than several million more human beings caught in the violence.

* per wikipedia

"Just let me get elected and then you can have your war." --Lyndon Johnson, quoted by Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History.

[JohnyCanuck]

3. Didja notice this parargraph?

But the senators also worried that releasing a committee staff investigation that raised doubts about the Tonkin incident would only inflame the country more. As Senator Mike Mansfield, Democrat of Montana, put it, “You will give people who are not interested in facts a chance to exploit them and to magnify them out of all proportion.”

In other words the senators figure its better to keep up a pretense and to keep pushing a lie than to tell Americans the truth when the truth will alert the electorate that their government and military establishment have hoodwinked them and played them for naive and gullible patsies. Wow, what a shock that is.

[Mnemosyne]

4. KnR... n/t

[old mark]

5. Rec. 58,236 Americans died in that pointless war, over a million North Vietnamese,

more than half a million others...

For no reason we can yet find.

mark

US Army 1968-1971

[Ichingcarpenter]

6. LBJ reversed Kennedy's withdrawal 2 days after the assassination

Imagine that just 4 days after his death, LBJ changes the course.

By the spring of 1963, Kennedy had reversed course completely and agreed with
Mansfield:

"The President told Mansfield that he had been having serious second thoughts
about Mansfield's argument and that he now agreed with the Senator's thinking on
the need for a complete military withdrawal from Vietnam.


'But I can't do it until 1965--after I'm reelected,' Kennedy told Mansfield....



Then came the statement on October 2:

"President Kennedy asked McNamara to announce to the press after the meeting the
immediate withdrawal of one thousand soldiers and to say that we would probably
withdraw all American forces from Vietnam by the end of 1965. When McNamara was
leaving the meeting to talk to the White House reporters, the President called
to him, "And tell them that means all of the helicopter pilots, too" (O'Donnell,
p. 17).



Two days before Kennedy was shot, there was a top-level policy conference on
Vietnam in Honolulu, where the issue was not just withdrawal but accelerated
withdrawal, along with substantial cuts in military aid. As Peter Scott notes in
his important but much-ignored essay in the Gravel edition of the Pentagon
Papers, the Honolulu conference agreed to speed up troop withdrawal by six
months and reduce aid by $33 million ("Vietnamization and the Drama of the
Pentagon Papers," Pentagon Papers, Gravel edition,



NSAM 273

President Johnson Commits the U.S. to the Vietnam War




6. Programs of military and economic assistance should be maintained at such levels that their magnitude and effectiveness in the eyes of the Vietnamese Government do not fall below the levels sustained by the United States in the time of the Diem Government. This does not exclude arrangements for economy on the MAP account with respect to accounting for ammunition, or any other readjustments which are possible between MAP and other U.S. defense resources. Special attention should be given to the expansion of the import, distribution, and effective use of fertilizer for the Delta.

(Action: AID and DOD as appropriate.)

7. Planning should include different levels of possible increased activity, and in each instance there should he estimates of such factors as:

A. Resulting damage to North Vietnam;
B. The plausibility of denial;
C. Possible North Vietnamese retaliation;
D. Other international reaction.

[annabanana]

8. (lest anyone think this didn''t matter). . +1. . . .n/t

[Octafish]

10. After Bay of Pigs disaster, JFK knew to never trust the CIA or the Joint Chiefs...

...so, JFK Would NEVER Have Fallen for Phony INTEL!

[Ichingcarpenter]

13. Look who LBJ appointed for the Warren Commission - CIA head Dulles

Who JFK fired..... and who hated Kennedy for it.
Dulles overthrew or assassinated democratic elected govt. all over the world.


How convenient for LBJ to appoint him to oversee the investigation of the Assassination of JFK
Dulles never mentioned CIA plots to kill world leaders in the investigation.

Bush Dulles and the Nazis......
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/randy/swas5.htm

To get back to the OP...... the texan oil millionaires would gain big government contracts if Vietnam was escalated.
The Gulf of Tolkien was just a CIA false flag to get it going which LBJ waited to use until after the 1964 election

Been doing some historical research on LBJ and its not a pretty picture

[Octafish]

14. Whole WC was rightwing. Throw in Dulles and John McCloy and things get absolutely NAZI.

A fact curiously missing from American history and any mention of the Warren Commission

Come to think of it, things in the USA have only gotten more NAZI since then.

[annabanana]

7. Sorry guys.. too little too late.

You should have said something at the time. Every "serious" person who had this information when we were about to commit to killing more soldiers, and said nothing is guilty by omission in every death that resulted.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

11. And, now we have a new bogeyman and another "necessary" war. K&R

[Zorra]

12. "Haven't you heard, it's a battle of words, and most of them are lies?

Generals sat, as the lines on the map, moved from side to side." "Us and Them", by Roger Waters, from "Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd.

Not sure where I learned more about the nature of politics, Pink Floyd or college.

[Hissyspit]

15. Kick nt

[Octafish]

16. National Security Archives at GWU had the Gulf of Tonkin story up to now...

For those interested in learning what they can't get out of Twitter of ABCNNBCBSFixedNutjobNoiseworks:

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/index.htm

[unhappycamper]

17. I'm reading this right now.

Here's a link if you're interested: http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=111_cong_senate_committee_prints&docid=f:34737.pdf

[Uncle Joe]

18. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, JohnyCanuck.