Gulf of Tonkin Resolution Authorized the Vietnam War. The Second Attack Never Happened.

On August 2, 1964, North Vietnamese torpedo boats really did attack the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. Two days later, in a rain squall, jittery sonar men reported a second attack that never happened. Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara knew the evidence was thin and used it anyway. Congress voted 504 to 2 to authorize a war that killed 58,220 Americans, and the two senators who voted no lost their seats.

On the afternoon of August 2, 1964, the destroyer USS Maddox was steaming in international waters about 28 miles off the North Vietnamese coast. Three North Vietnamese torpedo boats approached at high speed. The Maddox fired warning shots. The boats launched torpedoes and opened fire with machine guns. F-8 Crusaders from the carrier USS Ticonderoga joined the fight. When it was over, four North Vietnamese sailors were dead, six wounded, and the Maddox had a single bullet hole in its superstructure. No Americans were killed.

The skirmish was real. It was also provoked. The Maddox was not on a "routine patrol," as the Defense Department told the press that day. It was on a DESOTO patrol, a signals-intelligence mission run by the National Security Agency, and its route along the coast had been coordinated with OPLAN 34A, a covert program of South Vietnamese commando raids against North Vietnamese coastal targets, conceived and overseen by the Pentagon. Two nights before the Maddox arrived, South Vietnamese boats had shelled the islands of Hon Me and Hon Ngu. The North Vietnamese made the logical connection: the American warship was directing the raids.

Two days later, on the night of August 4, the Maddox and a second destroyer, the Turner Joy, reported a new attack. The weather was foul, thunderstorms reducing visibility, both ships' radars partly inoperative. For about two hours the crews fired at radar blips and maneuvered against torpedoes that were not there. Captain John Herrick, the task force commander, cabled within hours that "many reported contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful" and urged "complete evaluation before any further action." Navy pilot James Stockdale, flying overhead with, as he put it, the best seat in the house for detecting boats, saw nothing. No boats.

An NSA historian later confirmed, in a study declassified in 2005, that the North Vietnamese navy was doing nothing that night but salvaging two boats damaged on August 2. The key intelligence that the administration presented as proof of a second battle was a mistranslation: "we sacrificed two comrades," a reference to casualties from the August 2 clash, was rendered as "we sacrificed two ships," implying a fresh engagement.

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told Congress on August 6 that "our Navy played absolutely no part in, was not associated with, was not aware of, any South Vietnamese actions." That was a lie. On a White House tape declassified in December 2005, McNamara had told Johnson the morning after the August 2 attack that the 34A raids "undoubtedly" led the North Vietnamese to connect the two events. CIA Director John McCone told the president the same thing at a National Security Council meeting: "The North Vietnamese are reacting defensively to our attacks on their offshore islands."

Johnson himself seems to have known. A few days after the resolution passed, he told Under Secretary of State George Ball, "Hell, those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish".

On August 7, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed the House 416 to 0 and the Senate 88 to 2. The two dissenters, Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska, warned that Congress was handing the president a blank check for war. Morse called it "a historic mistake" and predicted his colleagues would live to regret it. He was right on both counts. Both men lost their next elections.

The resolution gave Johnson the legal authority to send over 500,000 American troops to Vietnam without a declaration of war. The war that followed killed 58,220 Americans. The resolution was not repealed until 1971.

The strangest coda came four decades later. When the NSA prepared to release the Hanyok study in 2005, senior agency officials tried to block it, the New York Times reported, because they were "fearful that [declassification] might prompt uncomfortable comparisons with the flawed intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq." The parallels were already obvious to everyone except, perhaps, the officials still guarding the secret. In both cases, an administration sought authority for war based on intelligence it controlled. Congress complied with almost no debate. The intelligence turned out to be wrong. The difference was that in the Gulf of Tonkin, the administration knew it was wrong at the time.

Also on this day

• 216 BC. Hannibal annihilated a Roman army at Cannae, killing as many as 70,000 men in a single afternoon through a double envelopment that every commander since has dreamed of repeating. Rome responded by refusing to fight him, and won the war.

• 1876. Wild Bill Hickok was shot in the back of the head during a poker game in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, holding what became known as the dead man's hand. No contemporary source recorded his cards. The legend traces to a barber's letter published 50 years later.

• 1934. With the death of President Paul von Hindenburg, Adolf Hitler merged the offices of chancellor and president under the title Führer. The German army swore allegiance to Hitler personally that same day. There were no longer any legal limits on his power.

• 1990. Iraq invaded Kuwait with 100,000 soldiers and 700 tanks, triggering the crisis that became the Gulf War. The UN Security Council condemned the invasion the same day. A US-led coalition expelled Iraqi forces the following February.