[Raw Story] Exclusive: Robert McNamara deceived LBJ on Gulf of Tonkin, documents show - Gareth Porter
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http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/07/08/robert-mcnamara-deceived-lbj-on-gulf-of-tonkin/
[Raw Story] Exclusive: Robert McNamara deceived LBJ on Gulf of Tonkin, documents show
BY GARETH PORTER
Published: July 8, 2009
Updated 15 hours ago
Official government documents reveal new side of defense secretary’s legacy
Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1967, took many secrets with him when he died Monday at 93. But probably no secret was more sensitive politically than the one that would have changed fundamentally the public perception of his role in Vietnam policy had it been become widely known.
The secret was his deliberate deceit of President Lyndon B. Johnson on Aug. 4, 1964 regarding the alleged attack on US warships in the Gulf of Tonkin.
Documents which have been available for decades in the LBJ Library show clearly that McNamara failed to inform Johnson that the U.S. naval task group commander in the Tonkin Gulf, Captain John J. Herrick, had changed his mind about the alleged North Vietnamese torpedo attack on U.S. warships he had reported earlier that day.
By early afternoon Washington time, Herrick had reported to the Commander in Chief Pacific in Honolulu that “freak weather effects” on the ship’s radar had made such an attack questionable. In fact, Herrick was now saying, in a message sent at 1:27 pm Washington time, that no North Vietnamese patrol boats had actually been sighted. Herrick now proposed a “complete evaluation before any further action taken.”
These documents were reviewed by this reporter in researching my book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam.
McNamara later testified that he had read the message after his return to the Pentagon that afternoon. But he did not immediately call Johnson to tell him that the whole premise of his decision at lunch to approve McNamara’s recommendation for retaliatory air strikes against North Vietnam was now highly questionable.
In fact, no call from McNamara to Johnson was recorded until 3:51 pm – 7 minutes after Johnson called him from his private quarters. Had Johnson been accurately informed about the Herrick message, he might have demanded fuller information before proceeding with a broadening of the war. Johnson had fended off proposals from McNamara and other advisers for a policy of bombing the North on four separate occasions since becoming President.
But when McNamara called Pacific Admiral Grant Sharp shortly after speaking with Johnson, it was not to order a full investigation or to seek more detailed information. In fact, McNamara didn’t even bring up the Herrick report. Instead, he seemed determined to obtain a statement from Sharp that would make it unnecessary to wait for further investigation. “There isn’t any possibility there was no attack, is there?” asked McNamara.
Sharp insisted, however, that the commander on the scene was saying “the situation’s in doubt” and suggested that McNamara “hold this execute” – meaning the strike order to CINCPAC and Seventh Fleet — “until we have a definite indication that this happened….” Sharp said he believed he could get a “definite indication” that the event had occurred within two hours.
But McNamara rejected Sharp’s proposal to wait for confirmation of the attack. Instead he said, “[I]t seems to me we ought to go ahead on that basis: get the pilots briefed, get the planes armed, get everything lined up to go. Continue the execute order in effect, but between now and 6 o’clock get a definite fix and you call me directly.”
McNamara didn’t claim that he had authority from Johnson to make that decision.
After the conversation with Sharp, McNamara didn’t call LBJ to report on what Sharp had told him or what they had agreed on, according to White House phone logs. Instead he went ahead on his own to issue the execute order at 4:49 pm.
The next phone call, which came just one minute after that order was sent, did not come from McNamara but from LBJ. That brief phone conversation, which was not recorded, was followed moments later by a call from McNamara to Johnson in which he the Secretary said the story had already been broken by wire services that a meeting at the White House that night would brief congressional leaders about a second attack on U.S. warships.
McNamara urged Johnson to authorize a statement by the Pentagon about the attack. He’d somehow found the time during the previous hour to draft a statement reaffirming the attack, which he read to Johnson. It said two U.S. warships had been attacked by patrol boats, but that the North Vietnamese boats had been “driven off.” It concluded, “We believe several of the patrol boats were sunk. Details won’t be available till daylight.”
Neither McNamara nor Johnson alluded in that conversation to Admiral Sharp’s seeking confirmatory evidence – a matter that would surely have been on LBJ’s mind if McNamara had told him about it.
The record of phone McNamara-Johnson conversations on the afternoon of Aug. 4, 1964 thus shows a President who was blissfully unaware that the original reports of an attack were now in doubt and that the Commander-in-Chief of Pacific forces was still seeking to obtain confirmation of the attack.
Ultimately, National Security Council documents declassified in 2005 (PDF) would reveal that no attack on US warships had taken place.
It “is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night,” they said. “In truth, Hanoi’s navy was engaged in nothing that night but the salvage of two of the boats damaged on August 2.”
Reporter confronted McNamara in 2004
This writer confronted McNamara with that record in a phone conversation with him on Feb. 24, 2004. His response was that telephone calls were not the only way he had to communicate with Johnson and that he could have told Johnson about the military’s unresolved doubts at the National Security Council meeting which took place that night at 6:15 pm.
Unfortunately for McNamara’s alibi, detailed official notes of that Council meeting taken by NSC staffer Bromley Smith, marked “Top Secret Sensitive, For the President’s Eyes Only,” show that McNamara again asserted unequivocally that the attack had indeed taken place.
After USIA Director Carl Rowan asked, “Do we know for a fact that the North Vietnamese provocation took place?” McNamara said, “We will know definitely in the morning.”
When I read those quotes to McNamara over the phone, he suggested that the notes were “not complete.” But McNamara was admitting, in effect, that he did not inform LBJ that afternoon about the Herrick report or about Sharp’s plea to hold off the execute order until confirming evidence had been obtained.
The records of the Tonkin Gulf crisis in the LBJ library also include documentation showing LBJ wanted to get the truth about what McNamara knew and when he knew it.
Even before the Gulf of Tonkin resolution was approved by the Senate Aug. 7, LBJ ordered a full account of the communications between the commanders of U.S. Pacific forces and the Pentagon on Aug. 4 and 5. The requested study was referred to as the “inquiry,” according to a handwritten note on a draft chronology prepared at the Pentagon. It was to be based on the original tapes of all such communications, which were tracked down and transcribed.
McNamara altered transcripts of calls
The clearest evidence that McNamara was afraid of what the inquiry would reveal about his maneuvering on Aug. 4 is that the chronology produced under his personal guidance — where numerous changes were made on previous drafts in McNamara’s own handwriting — deliberately suppressed the most damning words from the transcript of his conversation with Sharp.
Not only did the official Defense Department chronology change the wording of McNamara’s question to Sharp so that it was no longer obviously a leading question, it also failed to mention Sharp’s revelation that Herrick considered the “whole situation” to be “in doubt” and was calling for “daylight recce” — or reconnaissance.
In addition, the McNamara’s chronology portrayed him as agreeing with Sharp that the execute order should be delayed until definite evidence of an attack was obtained. It reports, “McNamara says that even if definite confirmation of an attack is not forthcoming for another 2 hours, an hour would still remain and the execute order could then be issued.”
But McNamara had not said that the executive order could be issued after getting confirmation of an attack. He had said the opposite: “Continue the execute order in effect, but between now and 6 o’clock get a definite fix and you call me directly.” So that crucial sentence was omitted from the chronology.
McNamara did not want LBJ to know that he had rejected Sharp’s proposal to hold the execute order until the situation was clarified and had not even informed him.
There is more evidence in the presidential tapes at the LBJ Library that Johnson believed that McNamara had misinformed him about what had happened in the Tonkin Gulf. Six weeks later, McNamara and then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk went to Johnson with yet another claim that North Vietnamese boats had attacked a U.S. warship in the Tonkin Gulf and again urged a retaliatory bombing of the North.
This time Johnson expressed skepticism and complained about McNamara’s claim of an attack on Aug. 4. “You just came in a few weeks ago and said they’re launching an attack on us – they’re firing at us,” Johnson tells McNamara on the tape recording of the conversation, “and we got through with the firing and concluded maybe they hadn’t fired at all.”
Whether or not Johnson understood the seriousness of McNamara’s deception Aug. 4, he seemed to become even more resistant to McNamara’s views on Vietnam after the incident. That fall, during the presidential election campaign, Johnson began to challenge McNamara for his advocacy of bombing North Vietnam, even referring to his proposal as “your bombing bullshit,” according to accounts given by Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton to Daniel Ellsberg, his then-assistant (who later leaked what would be known as the Pentagon papers).
McNamara’s deception was one of many maneuvers aimed at pulling Johnson into an escalated war in Vietnam. But it is perhaps the only one in which McNamara’s role shifted from tough bureaucratic in-fighting to usurping presidential authority, in effect, on an issue involving the use of military force.
On the following audio file from The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Johnson can be heard telling McNamara that he had misinformed him about the alleged attack:
Download audio
A pdf file of the McNamara/Sharp transcript can be accessed at this link.
A pdf file of the chronology of events that McNamara prepared for Johnson can be accessed at this link.
Gareth Porter is an investigative journalist and historian who covered the Vietnam War as Saigon Bureau Chief for Dispatch News Service International in 1970-71 and taught international studies at the City College of New York and American University from 1982 to 1990. His book Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, documents US policymaking on Vietnam during the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations. He has a doctorate in Southeast Asian politics from Cornell University, and currently covers diplomatic and military affairs for Inter Press Service.
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Poking a stick at North Vietnam
Most likely they would have just kept poking a stick at North Vietnam until a suitable reaction could provide another excuse to start the military escalation or, if that failed, just gone the full false flag attack route. When the Military Industrial Complex decides time is ripe for another profitable war, no one, not even presidents, will be allowed to get in the way.
30-year Anniversary: Tonkin Gulf Lie Launched Vietnam War
Media Beat (7/27/94)
By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon
Thirty years ago, it all seemed very clear.
"American Planes Hit North Vietnam After Second Attack on Our Destroyers; Move Taken to Halt New Aggression", announced a Washington Post headline on Aug. 5, 1964.
That same day, the front page of the New York Times reported: "President Johnson has ordered retaliatory action against gunboats and 'certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam' after renewed attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin."
But there was no "second attack" by North Vietnam — no "renewed attacks against American destroyers." By reporting official claims as absolute truths, American journalism opened the floodgates for the bloody Vietnam War.
A pattern took hold: continuous government lies passed on by pliant mass media...leading to over 50,000 American deaths and millions of Vietnamese casualties.
The official story was that North Vietnamese torpedo boats launched an "unprovoked attack" against a U.S. destroyer on "routine patrol" in the Tonkin Gulf on Aug. 2 — and that North Vietnamese PT boats followed up with a "deliberate attack" on a pair of U.S. ships two days later.
The truth was very different.
Rather than being on a routine patrol Aug. 2, the U.S. destroyer Maddox was actually engaged in aggressive intelligence-gathering maneuvers — in sync with coordinated attacks on North Vietnam by the South Vietnamese navy and the Laotian air force.
"The day before, two attacks on North Vietnam...had taken place," writes scholar Daniel C. Hallin. Those assaults were "part of a campaign of increasing military pressure on the North that the United States had been pursuing since early 1964."
On the night of Aug. 4, the Pentagon proclaimed that a second attack by North Vietnamese PT boats had occurred earlier that day in the Tonkin Gulf — a report cited by President Johnson as he went on national TV that evening to announce a momentous escalation in the war: air strikes against North Vietnam.
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2261
I like how the above article concludes with this quote from columnist Sydney Schanberg:
"We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth."
They were definitely poking
They were definitely poking a stick, but Johnson is not innocent in this.
See Jim DiEugenio's review of Virtual JFK for a discussion of McNamara and Johnson after the death of JFK:
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One of the most fascinating parts of the book is the discussion of the role of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in Kennedy's administration. When Kennedy sent Rostow and Taylor to Vietnam in the fall of 1961, he seems to have understood what they would come back with. After all, JFK fully comprehended what Rostow was about pretty quickly. What I will discuss next reveals just how wise Kennedy had become and how smart he was at maneuvering the people in his own Cabinet after the Bay of Pigs. Almost concurrently with the trip by Rostow and Taylor, he also sent John Kenneth Galbraith to Vietnam. (p.129) He realized that what Galbraith wrote up would counter the Rostow-Taylor recommendations. It did of course. But Kennedy did not throw this report out for open discussion. He told Galbraith to give it to McNamara only. This becomes crucial in any discussion of Vietnam in the JFK administration. Because as the book notes, after the issuance of NSAM 111, the only person in the Cabinet who seems to understand what Kennedy is headed for is McNamara. And in fact, Howard Jones discovered that Roswell Gilpatric, McNamara's Deputy Secretary, talked about the fact that Kennedy eventually entrusted his boss with putting together a withdrawal plan. He referred to it as "part of a plan the president asked him [McNamara] to develop to unwind this whole thing." (p. 371) This began in earnest in 1962 when McNamara went to the Joint Chiefs and told them to put together a plan for withdrawal. As Jim Douglass wrote in his fine book JFK and the Unspeakable, the Chiefs dragged their feet on this one for a year. Finally at the so-called SecDef conference of May 1963, they presented a plan to the Secretary. He criticized it as being too slow. (pgs 288-291) After telling them to hurry it along, he had a taped conversation with Kennedy and Bundy in October of 1963. He told Kennedy the military mission of the US would be completed by 1965, and if it were not, the South Vietnamese would be ready by then to take it over. Bundy then interjects, "What's the point of doing that?" McNamara replies, "We need a way to get out of Vietnam. This is a way of doing it. And to leave forces there when they're not needed, I think is wasteful and complicates both their problem and ours."
The above ARRB declassified tape was heard and shown on screen in the accompanying film to this book. When played at the conference its effect was startling. (pgs 100, 124) Why? Because mainstream writers like Karnow and Halberstam had always depicted Vietnam as McNamara's War. Plus much of the documentation showing this as false had been concealed from the public. In fact, Goldstein actually asked, "Who is the Robert McNamara on these tapes?" To me the comment by Bundy—"What's the point of doing that?"—is the key. As Gilpatric explained, and Galbraith elucidated, McNamara was appointed by JFK to be his point man on the withdrawal. He was going to drive it home with occasional encouragement from Kennedy. This "back channel" idea was endorsed by James Galbraith, who talked about it with his father. John Kenneth Galbraith told his son that JFK often operated like this. In James Galbraith's words about McNamara at the conference: "Kennedy and he [McNamara] were agreed in advance that this was the course of policy they were going to follow. That was a position they didn't share ... with virtually no one else. They then imposed this, with McNamara playing the role of giving the argument he already knows Kennedy is going to accept, because Kennedy told him to do it." (p. 129) This concept was posthumously endorsed through Bundy. When co-author Goldstein talked to Bundy about why McNamara switched so quickly from endorsing combat troops in November of 1961 to being so dovish a month later, Bundy said there was only one answer to explain the apparent paradox. Kennedy had asked him to do so. (p. 125) In fact, McNamara was so immersed in making the withdrawal plan work that he asked the State Department intelligence group (INR) to give him more optimistic scenarios of what was happening on the ground. (p. 117) According to Newman, this was probably done because once the CIA and Pentagon realized Kennedy was going to withdraw, they began to change their intelligence estimates from rosy to pessimistic. And further, they backdated the revisions to July of 1963. (Newman, JFK and Vietnam, p. 425, 441 Gardner and Gittinger, p. 172) Realizing Kennedy's plan to use the false and rosy estimates to hoist them on their own petard—that is, to withdraw US forces since they were not needed anymore—the CIA and Pentagon began to fight back.
What this all says of course is that, as in the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy understood that his Cabinet and military advisers were not giving him what he wanted fast enough. In October of 1962, he worked secretly through his brother Robert Kennedy, and to a lesser extent with Rusk. This time around he worked with McNamara, and to a lesser extent with Galbraith. With McNamara running interference, NSAM 263, ordering the withdrawal of the first thousand advisers from Vietnam was signed in October of 1963. (It should be added here that the death of the Nhu brothers in November of 1963 had no effect on the withdrawal plan. See page 372) The press release that announced NSAM 263 also stated that this first thousand troop draw down was part of a phased withdrawal of the major part of all US forces. And that withdrawal would be completed by the end of 1965. (p. 300)
Finally, when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Max Taylor wrote his memo on NSAM 263 to the service Chiefs, there was no mention about the withdrawal being contingent upon victory. (pgs 106, 110) This is a myth promulgated by anti-Kennedy polemicist Noam Chomsky. Virtually no one at this conference bought it.
------------------------------------------
One of the most fascinating parts of the book is the discussion of the role of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in Kennedy's administration. When Kennedy sent Rostow and Taylor to Vietnam in the fall of 1961, he seems to have understood what they would come back with. After all, JFK fully comprehended what Rostow was about pretty quickly. What I will discuss next reveals just how wise Kennedy had become and how smart he was at maneuvering the people in his own Cabinet after the Bay of Pigs. Almost concurrently with the trip by Rostow and Taylor, he also sent John Kenneth Galbraith to Vietnam. (p.129) He realized that what Galbraith wrote up would counter the Rostow-Taylor recommendations. It did of course. But Kennedy did not throw this report out for open discussion. He told Galbraith to give it to McNamara only. This becomes crucial in any discussion of Vietnam in the JFK administration. Because as the book notes, after the issuance of NSAM 111, the only person in the Cabinet who seems to understand what Kennedy is headed for is McNamara. And in fact, Howard Jones discovered that Roswell Gilpatric, McNamara's Deputy Secretary, talked about the fact that Kennedy eventually entrusted his boss with putting together a withdrawal plan. He referred to it as "part of a plan the president asked him [McNamara] to develop to unwind this whole thing." (p. 371) This began in earnest in 1962 when McNamara went to the Joint Chiefs and told them to put together a plan for withdrawal. As Jim Douglass wrote in his fine book JFK and the Unspeakable, the Chiefs dragged their feet on this one for a year. Finally at the so-called SecDef conference of May 1963, they presented a plan to the Secretary. He criticized it as being too slow. (pgs 288-291) After telling them to hurry it along, he had a taped conversation with Kennedy and Bundy in October of 1963. He told Kennedy the military mission of the US would be completed by 1965, and if it were not, the South Vietnamese would be ready by then to take it over. Bundy then interjects, "What's the point of doing that?" McNamara replies, "We need a way to get out of Vietnam. This is a way of doing it. And to leave forces there when they're not needed, I think is wasteful and complicates both their problem and ours."
The above ARRB declassified tape was heard and shown on screen in the accompanying film to this book. When played at the conference its effect was startling. (pgs 100, 124) Why? Because mainstream writers like Karnow and Halberstam had always depicted Vietnam as McNamara's War. Plus much of the documentation showing this as false had been concealed from the public. In fact, Goldstein actually asked, "Who is the Robert McNamara on these tapes?" To me the comment by Bundy—"What's the point of doing that?"—is the key. As Gilpatric explained, and Galbraith elucidated, McNamara was appointed by JFK to be his point man on the withdrawal. He was going to drive it home with occasional encouragement from Kennedy. This "back channel" idea was endorsed by James Galbraith, who talked about it with his father. John Kenneth Galbraith told his son that JFK often operated like this. In James Galbraith's words about McNamara at the conference: "Kennedy and he [McNamara] were agreed in advance that this was the course of policy they were going to follow. That was a position they didn't share ... with virtually no one else. They then imposed this, with McNamara playing the role of giving the argument he already knows Kennedy is going to accept, because Kennedy told him to do it." (p. 129) This concept was posthumously endorsed through Bundy. When co-author Goldstein talked to Bundy about why McNamara switched so quickly from endorsing combat troops in November of 1961 to being so dovish a month later, Bundy said there was only one answer to explain the apparent paradox. Kennedy had asked him to do so. (p. 125) In fact, McNamara was so immersed in making the withdrawal plan work that he asked the State Department intelligence group (INR) to give him more optimistic scenarios of what was happening on the ground. (p. 117) According to Newman, this was probably done because once the CIA and Pentagon realized Kennedy was going to withdraw, they began to change their intelligence estimates from rosy to pessimistic. And further, they backdated the revisions to July of 1963. (Newman, JFK and Vietnam, p. 425, 441 Gardner and Gittinger, p. 172) Realizing Kennedy's plan to use the false and rosy estimates to hoist them on their own petard—that is, to withdraw US forces since they were not needed anymore—the CIA and Pentagon began to fight back.
What this all says of course is that, as in the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy understood that his Cabinet and military advisers were not giving him what he wanted fast enough. In October of 1962, he worked secretly through his brother Robert Kennedy, and to a lesser extent with Rusk. This time around he worked with McNamara, and to a lesser extent with Galbraith. With McNamara running interference, NSAM 263, ordering the withdrawal of the first thousand advisers from Vietnam was signed in October of 1963. (It should be added here that the death of the Nhu brothers in November of 1963 had no effect on the withdrawal plan. See page 372) The press release that announced NSAM 263 also stated that this first thousand troop draw down was part of a phased withdrawal of the major part of all US forces. And that withdrawal would be completed by the end of 1965. (p. 300)
Finally, when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Max Taylor wrote his memo on NSAM 263 to the service Chiefs, there was no mention about the withdrawal being contingent upon victory. (pgs 106, 110) This is a myth promulgated by anti-Kennedy polemicist Noam Chomsky. Virtually no one at this conference bought it.
http://ctka.net/reviews/virtual_jfk_2.html