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Tonkin Gulf Resolution

August 7, 1964

1964-08-04_Johnson_Tonkin_resolution_NARA-192484
1964-08-04_Johnson_Tonkin_resolution_NARA-192484
President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, August 10, 1964.(National Archives)

Some weeks before the events in the Gulf of Tonkin, the Johnson administration drafts a resolution that, if enacted, gives the president broad authority to take military action in order to keep South Vietnam independent. Polls in the United States after August 4 suggest strong support for the way Johnson handled the Gulf of Tonkin incidents. One survey shows that 85 percent of Americans approve while only 3 percent disapprove. The administration thus believes the timing is right to place the draft resolution before Congress. Johnson’s cabinet and advisers describe the resolution as a way to prevent any future North Vietnamese aggression or attacks on U.S. forces.

Johnson forwards the resolution to Congress on August 5 and it becomes Joint House and Senate Resolution 189. It states that the president is authorized “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” It further declares that the nation is ready “to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist” South Vietnam “in defense of its freedom.”
 
The resolution becomes known as the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. The Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees and the House Foreign Affairs and Military Affairs Committees hold hearings the next day, August 6. Only three people answer questions before the committees: Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Earle G. Wheeler. They testify that there is no question that the attack of August 4 occurred and cite intercepted radio transmissions, radar and sonar data, and testimony from eyewitnesses as evidence. They also state that the attacks were unprovoked and that the Maddox had been on a routine patrol unconnected to and unaware of any South Vietnamese actions in North Vietnamese waters. Yet they secretly knew that the Maddox had in fact been supporting South Vietnamese covert OPLAN 34A operations.

The committees question the men for less than two hours. Subsequent floor debates are brief, and the resolution is quickly shepherded through both legislative bodies by several politicians close to the president, including Senators J. William Fulbright (D-AR) and Michael J. Mansfield (D-MT). The Tonkin Gulf Resolution passes in the House of Representatives by a vote of 414-0 and in the Senate by a vote of 88-2 on August 7. The only two dissenting votes come from Senators Wayne Morse (D-OR) and Ernest Gruening (D-AK). President Johnson signs the resolution into law on August 10.1

1Edwin E. Moise, Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press), 225–28; Ezra Y. Siff, Why the Senate Slept: The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the Beginning of America’s Vietnam War (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1999), xv–xvi, 1–57; John Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945–1975 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2009), 98–100; Anthony Short, The Origins of the Vietnam War (London and New York: Longman 1989), 299–317; Richard W. Stewart, Deepening Involvement, 1945–1965, The U.S. Army Campaigns of the Vietnam War (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, 2012), 60; David L. Anderson, The Columbia Guide to the Vietnam War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 122–23; Tucker, ed., Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War, 695, 980–81. Text of the resolution can be found in Mike Gravel, The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam, vol. 3 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 722. Also at: “Tonkin Gulf Resolution,” Public Law 88-408, 88th Congress, August 7, 1964, General Records of the United States Government, Record Group 11, National Archives; Lawrence S. Kaplan, Ronald D. Landa, and Edward J. Drea, The McNamara Ascendancy, 1961–1965, History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Volume V (Washington, D.C.: Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2006), 522–523 notes that McNamara assured Congress that the attacks on the United States were unprovoked in order to protect the secrecy of U.S. control of OPLAN 34A. The day before McNamara’s testimony, the operations were suspended temporarily.