A FEW MINUTES AFTER eleven in the morning, a courier charged into John McNaughton’s suite with a Flash priority cable for McNaughton. The secretary said her boss was down the hall, meeting with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. She told the courier to give the top priority cable to the new assistant. Ellsberg stepped out of his office and took the paper.
With one glance he knew why the courier had been running.
The cable was from Captain Herrick, commodore of the Maddox and Turner Joy. The American destroyers were under attack in the Gulf of Tonkin. Enemy speedboats had fired two torpedoes, both misses. The Americans were blasting back at the smaller craft.
Ten minutes later, the courier hurried in again with a second cable.
“Am under continuous torpedo attack,” Herrick reported.
August 2, 1964. North Vietnamese torpedo boats attack the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin.
Then, a few minutes later: “Torpedoes missed. Another fired at us. Four torpedoes in water.”
The battle was taking place on the other side of the world, in the dark. But Herrick’s Flash messages made Ellsberg feel almost as if he were watching the action unfold.
His instinct was to hit back, and hit hard.
“We’re going to really strike these guys,” Ellsberg said, slamming fist into palm. “You can’t attack an American ship on the high seas, and anybody that does has to pay for it.”
* * *
Down the hall, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was reading the same cables. Given the rising tensions in the Gulf of Tonkin, McNamara had been anticipating trouble. He knew he could handle it.
With his deep, decisive voice, slicked-back hair, and round rimless glasses, McNamara strode the halls of the Pentagon exuding confidence. President John Kennedy, who had appointed him secretary of defense in 1961, called McNamara the smartest man he’d ever met. Formerly a Harvard Business School professor and president of the Ford Motor Company, McNamara had a passion for statistics and organizational charts, and firm faith that no problem was too complex to be solved by the skillful application of logic, intelligence, and American firepower.
He picked up the phone and dialed the president.
“Yes, Bob,” Lyndon Johnson answered.
“Mr. President, we just had word,” McNamara began. “The destroyer is under torpedo attack.”
“Where are these torpedoes coming from?”
“Well, we don’t know, presumably from these unidentified craft,” the secretary explained, referring to the enemy boats in Herrick’s cable.
Johnson wanted to know if American planes from nearby aircraft carriers were in the air supporting the ships.
“Presumably,” McNamara replied. He hadn’t had time to find out. McNamara suggested that he, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy head over to the White House.
“Okay, you get them,” Johnson agreed, “then you come over here.”
* * *
While McNamara crossed the Potomac into Washington, the action in the Gulf of Tonkin continued. As Johnson had hoped, several American planes were already in the air above the Gulf. First on the scene was one of the most experienced fighter pilots in the Navy, forty-year-old Commander James Stockdale.
It was a lousy night for flying, with low clouds and driving rain. Stockdale nosed his Crusader down to just a thousand feet above the water. Lightning flashes lit momentary glimpses of the two American destroyers. Between flashes, the churning white water of the ships’ wakes was clearly visible against the black sea. Stockdale watched the ships swerving to avoid torpedoes. He saw the orange blasts of gunfire from the American ships.
But he couldn’t see any enemy boats.
Stockdale was flying in and out of rain clouds, but he knew his view was much better than the one from the decks of the destroyers, where sailors were looking through rain and the spray from crashing waves. “I had the best seat in the house from which to detect boats,” he later explained, “if there were any.”
And yet the panicky radio reports from the Maddox kept coming. “We think there is a boat closing on us from astern.”
“I have to press in,” Stockdale shouted aloud in the cockpit. “I’ve got to see him, I’ve got to see him!”
He dove even lower, arcing behind the ships and squinting through his gun sight. He fired a rocket at the spot the enemy boats were reported to have been seen. The rocket disappeared into the sea. He was so low now that saltwater spray was splattering his windshield.
“Now calm down and think, Jim,” he told himself. “There’s something wrong out here. Those destroyers are talking about hits, but where are the metal-to-metal sparks? And the boat wakes—where are they? And boat gun flashes?”
Running low on fuel, Stockdale headed back to his carrier, the Ticonderoga.
The moment he walked into the pilot’s ready room on the ship, a group of intelligence officers began firing questions.
The first was: “What in the hell has been going on out there?”
“Damned if I know,” Stockdale said.
“Did you see any boats?”
“Not a one. No boat, no boat wakes, no ricochets off boats, no boat gunfire, no torpedo wakes.”
“Have a look at this,” an officer said, handing him copies of Captain Herrick’s cables to Washington. They contained a lot of the same things he’d been hearing over his cockpit radio. But after the first few reports, Herrick’s cables began expressing hints of doubt about whether he was really under attack. The noise his crew was interpreting as that of enemy torpedoes, Herrick suggested, could actually be coming from the American ship’s own propeller. And then, on the last page, Herrick spelled it out:
“Review of action makes many reported contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful. Freak weather effects on radar and overeager sonar men may have accounted for many reports. No actual visual sightings by Maddox. Suggest complete evaluation before any further action taken.”
Stockdale handed back the paper, walked to his stateroom, and hung his flight gear in his locker. After washing his face he looked at himself in the mirror.
“Boy, you look tired,” he thought. “At least you didn’t fly into that water. And at least there’s a commodore up there in the Gulf who has the guts to blow the whistle on a screwup, and take the heat to set the record straight.”
He lay down and switched off his lamp.
“I would have never guessed,” Stockdale would say many years later, “that commodores in charge on the scene of action are sometimes not allowed to blow the whistle on a screwup.”
* * *
It was lunchtime in Washington, D.C. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and CIA Director John McCone gathered with President Johnson in the second floor dining room of the White House.
The men spread maps and reconnaissance photos of North Vietnam on the table. While Johnson leaned over the table to look, McNamara pointed out potential targets for an American air strike, mainly North Vietnamese torpedo boat bases along the coast.
Johnson approved. He wanted the strike launched as soon as possible. McNamara said it could be under way within a few hours.
“All right,” Johnson said. “Let’s go.”
The White House press officer alerted television networks that President Johnson wanted air time that night to make an important statement on Vietnam. McNamara rushed back to the Pentagon, where he was handed Herrick’s “Suggest complete evaluation” cable.
“I wish the hell we had more information about what’s going on out there,” he said.
He hoped to get conclusive answers from Admiral Ulysses Sharp, commander of the Pacific fleet, who was monitoring the situation from his base in Hawaii.
“The latest dope we have, sir, indicates a little doubt on just exactly what went on,” Sharp told McNamara. He thought it possible that mistakes by inexperienced sonar operators could account for the reports of enemy torpedoes.
“There isn’t any possibility there was no attack, is there?” McNamara asked.
August 4, 1964. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara gives a late-night press briefing on events in the Gulf of Tonkin.
“Yes,” Sharp said, “I would say that there is a slight possibility.”
Later that afternoon McNamara drove back to the White House for a National Security Council meeting.
“Do we know for a fact that the North Vietnamese provocation took place?” one advisor asked.
“We will know definitely in the morning,” McNamara replied.
No one suggested waiting.
Retaliation had been ordered, and President Johnson saw no reason to postpone. Privately, he had his doubts about what had really happened in the Gulf of Tonkin. “For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there,” he later confided in an aide.
But on the night of August 4, Johnson expressed no hesitation.
* * *
In the South China Sea, aboard the aircraft carrier USS Constellation, twenty-six-year-old Navy Lieutenant Everett Alvarez zipped up his flight suit. The night before, Alvarez had been one of the pilots looking down on the confusing scene in the Tonkin Gulf. Like Stockdale, he’d come away unconvinced the American destroyers were under attack.
Now, after a few hours of sleep, he was back in his plane. The president’s orders for an air strike on North Vietnam had reached the Constellation. Alvarez was assigned one of the targets.
Pulling on his flight gloves, he noticed he was still wearing his wedding ring. A stark warning issued by survival school instructors flashed through his mind—never wear wedding rings into combat. If a pilot were ever taken prisoner, his captors could use the knowledge that he was married to torment him by inventing stories about his wife.
There was no time to put the ring anywhere. Alvarez climbed up a ladder to the cockpit of his Skyhawk. He put on his helmet and attached his oxygen mask. He tested the radio. Everything was working fine.
“Go get ’em, sir!” a deck crew member shouted. “Good luck.”
The crew attached steel cables to the bottom of the plane. Alvarez pushed the throttle forward and his engines thundered. The steel cables stiffened and strained like a drawn archer’s bow. Alvarez gave the “all clear” signal. The deck officer flashed a thumbs-up to the pilot, then arced his arm in the air, signaling the catapult crewman to hit his button. Alvarez’s Skyhawk catapulted down the deck at two hundred miles per hour, and he was in the air.
Climbing to twenty thousand feet, he rendezvoused with nine other Skyhawks headed for North Vietnam. It was a seventy-minute flight to the target, a small torpedo boat base in the port town of Hon Gai.
“I wasn’t scared,” Alvarez later said of his first combat mission. “Just a little jittery.”
It felt to him like that moment right before a high school track race, when the runners are tensed and waiting for the bang of the starter’s gun.