"I had the best seat in the house to watch that event, and our destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets - there were no PT boats there. There was nothing but black water and American firepower," Stockdale wrote in his 1984 book, "In Love and War."
Congress, however, responded to LBJ's call to arms, giving him a veritable blank check to make war.
While the U.S. response, as the tapes seem to bear out, was a mistake rather than a charade, there is ample evidence the United States was a provocateur in 1964, not an innocent bystander.
The Johnson administration had approved covert land and sea operations involving U.S. forces earlier in 1964, the so-called Op Plan 34-A.
On Monday, Aug. 3, 1964, the day after the first Tonkin Gulf incident where the USS Maddox actually was attacked, Johnson, according to White House tape recordings, said:
"There have been some covert operations in that (Tonkin Gulf) area that we have been carrying on - blowing up some bridges and things of that kind, roads and so forth. So I imagine (the North Vietnamese) wanted to put a stop to it."
Later that same day, LBJ, who ironically was about to ask Humphrey to be his running mate in the '64 election, complained to their mutual friend, James Rowe: "Our friend Hubert is just destroying himself with his big mouth," LBJ said, noting the Minnesota liberal told the media after an intelligence briefing that U.S. boats were running covert operations in the gulf - "exactly what we have been doing."
Two months before the Tonkin Gulf incident, Undersecretary of State George Ball, a member of Johnson's inner circle and a member of a committee that oversaw the 34-A operations, had drafted, but not submitted, a congressional resolution endorsing "all measures, including the commitment of force," to defend South Vietnam and Laos, should their governments seek help - in effect, the language in the subsequent Tonkin Gulf Resolution.
In a May 24 meeting, the National Security Council suggested the best time to submit such a resolution was after Congress had passed the landmark 1964 civil rights bill, which occurred in July.
Ball later said, according to McNamara in his 1995 mea culpa, "In Retrospect," that "many of the people who were associated with the war ..... were looking for any excuse to initiate bombing. ....."
However, another close LBJ aide, William Bundy, according to the same source, said the Tonkin Gulf incident was not engineered.
While the reasons for it either were unclear or false, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution cleared Congress on Aug. 7, 1964 - 414-0 in the House and 88-2 in the Senate.
History has seemed to coalesce around the belief that the second Tonkin Gulf incident, on Aug. 4, was a mistake, but not a charade.
It was not a "put-up job," claims Professor Edwin Moise, a Vietnam War expert at Clemson University.
As the LBJ Library tapes indicate, the Navy was not ready to launch a retaliatory strike Aug. 4 against North Vietnam, but it would have been if the event had been staged, Moise theorizes.
Professor David Crockett, a presidential scholar at Trinity University, calls the incident an accident, but says the greater problem was that Congress "rolled over" and gave LBJ what he wanted: "a virtual blank check to make war."
The irony, Crockett notes, is that LBJ painted Goldwater as a warmonger in the '64 campaign. A powerful but notorious LBJ TV ad featured a little girl picking daisies followed by the detonation of a nuclear bomb.
"LBJ campaigned that he wouldn't send American boys to die in Asian wars," says Crockett, who is only a year older than the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, "but he was actually doing it" by pushing the resolution through Congress.
Jerry Paull*, a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam vet, has another perspective.
For six months in 1965, he ferried South Vietnamese forces on Norwegian-made PT boats into North Vietnam to conduct raids, kidnaps and psychological operations such as dropping propaganda leaflets.
Although he was a U.S. Marine, Paull says he wore civilian clothes on the missions - in violation of a 1954 Geneva convention - and the PT boats, called "nasties," were painted black and had no markings.
"I have heard and read," Paull says, "that at the time of the Gulf of Tonkin incident that it is suspected that the North Vietnamese mistook the U.S. destroyers for the nasties, and that the whole Gulf of Tonkin incident was a mistake on the North Vietnamese's part."
Paull would later turn against the war, but, he reminds younger Americans, the mid-'60s was an era of idealism, when America's No. 1 foreign policy thrust was to stop the spread of communism.
"War was what I had trained for and what I wanted to do for my country," he recalls.
Cont ...