The biggest revelation of the Pentagon Papers was perhaps the fact that the attack on a US warship in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 was not aggression by real North Vietnamese forces, but rather a hoax perpetuated by Johnson’s administration designed to give America a reason to move from clandestine involvement to the overt use of force necessary to make a real fight against North Vietnam. The Pentagon Papers led to the famous Supreme Court case, which gave an admirable example of the right of journalists in this country. This whole matter enjoyed wide exposure in the press.
However, 30 years later, many textbooks and encyclopedias report the Gulf of Tonkin incident as an aggressive act by North Vietnamese forces. MSN’s Encarta says:
My textbook on US history in high school reported the Gulf of Tonkin incident the same way. Why have Americans forgotten this example of their own government lying to them. I’m no conspiracy theorist, but I think examples like this are important to keep people engaged politically and able to understand criticisms of an administration’s decisions.
Interesting point, but reading Ellsberg, it seems there was an undisputed daylight attack on August 2. The questionable one may or may not have happened the night of Aug 4th, where the destroyers most likely THOUGHT there were bogies. The President used this HIGHLY questionable incident to escalate the war effort. From this Ellsberg account, which is damning of the process, that quote above is correct.
The politicians should have used Aug 2.
I am patently unfamiliar with the Pentagon Papers, and I may have missed something here. But thanks for pointing this out to me, it will make for interesting and enlightening/depressing reading, I am sure.
I’m sorry, you’re right. I should have paid attention to the date. However, most educational materials around do not explain that the attack of the 4th probably never happened and that Johnson’s use of it was very questionable indeed.
Your answer is right there. James W. Loewen, in his book Lies My Teacher Told Me makes this point pretty strongly: that U.S. history textbooks are generally so poorly written (so as to offend no one) that the history they present has little bearing on reality.
(Some of Loewen’s own interpretations can be challenged for perspective, but his general criticism of history-as-taught-in-the-U.S. is dead on.)
We now have access to many taped conversations held in the Johnson White House, and while they don’t make Lyndon Johnson look like a saint, they also show clearly that:
He was NOT eager to get the U.S. into a large-scale war in Viet Nam.
There was, initially, a great deal of confusion and uncertainty in the LBJ White House after reports of the Tonkin Gulf incident. Johnson and his aides spent a lot of time frantically trying to find out exactly what happened. That is NOT what you’d expect to hear if Johnson and his aides had made up a phony incident, or if they’d been chomping at the bit all along to go to war. Johnson MAY have been wrong in concluding that North Vietnam had attacked our boats, but he did NOT stage the incident in the first place.
However, the way it looks, the CIA who was handing him information was deliberately skewing it in order to make it seem like a clear act of aggression. Johnson himself didn’t lie, but his aides weren’t telling the whole story.
The lesson to be learned here is not so much that that our government might lie to us (although caution here is warranted), but that Congressional blank checks which constitute an abdication of warmaking powers are extremely dangerous.
The Pentagon Papers have very little to say about The Tonkin incident and what they do say completely reinforces the official U.S. position in 1967. Which is to say that the authors of the Pentagon Papers were historians, not military men with access to secret information.