{"id":805923,"date":"2026-08-07T17:04:12","date_gmt":"2026-08-07T17:04:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/805923\/"},"modified":"2026-08-07T17:04:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T17:04:12","slug":"the-1964-gulf-of-tonkin-resolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/805923\/","title":{"rendered":"The 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cAct in haste, repent at leisure.\u201d \u201cLook before you leap.\u201d \u201cFools rush in where angels fear to tread.\u201d Warnings against acting rashly are frequently offered. They are just as frequently ignored. The results can be tragic. A case in point is the\u202fGulf of Tonkin Resolution. Congress passed it on August 7, 1964, providing the legal basis for the Vietnam War. Congress acted, however, without investigating whether the facts were as President Lyndon B. Johnson and his advisers had presented them. They were not.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

A\u202fsurvey<\/a>\u202fI conducted on behalf of the Council on Foreign Relations with members of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations ranked the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution the ninth-worst foreign policy decision<\/a> in U.S. history.\u202f\u202f <\/p>\n

The Gulf of Tonkin Incident <\/p>\n

The congressional debate on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution came in the wake of two incidents off the coast of North Vietnam. On August 2, the destroyer USS Maddox was attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin. The Maddox drove off the attackers without suffering any significant damage or casualties. No retaliatory strikes were ordered. <\/p>\n

\"\"A photograph taken from the USS Maddox on August 2, 1964, showing a North Vietnamese torpedo boat racing by with what appears to be smoke from the Maddox\u2019s shells in its wake. U.S. Navy Naval History and Heritage Command<\/p>\n

Two days later, the Maddox, which had been joined on patrol by a second destroyer, reported that it had come under attack\u202f<\/a>for a second time.\u202fThis time, Johnson\u202freacted decisively. In a speech delivered after the late local news on the East Coast, he\u202finformed the country\u202f<\/a>of the attacks and of his decision to order\u202fretaliatory airstrikes\u2014the first overt U.S. attack on North Vietnam.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Johnson also asked Congress for swift passage of a resolution endorsing his commitment to confront North Vietnam. The resolution, which administration lawyers had drafted months earlier,\u202fstated<\/a>\u202fthat \u201cCongress approves and supports the determination of the President, as Commander in Chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.\u201d Johnson captured the resolution\u2019s expansive nature when he quipped<\/a>, \u201cIt\u2019s like grandmother\u2019s nightshirt. It covers everything.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"\"Map showing the division of North and South Vietnam, August 1964. U.S. Navy Naval History and Heritage Command<\/p>\n

Congress Acts Quickly <\/p>\n

Johnson got the swift passage he wanted. The House dispensed with holding any hearings. After just forty minutes of discussion on August 6, representatives voted 416 to 0 to approve the resolution. <\/p>\n

Senate action was glacial in comparison. The Senate Armed Services and the Senate Foreign Relations committees convened an emergency hearing on the morning of August 6 to discuss Johnson\u2019s request. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was the star witness. He testified that the\u202fMaddox\u202fhad been conducting routine patrols in international waters and insisted that North Vietnam\u2019s attacks were \u201cunprovoked.\u201d A senator who had been tipped off that there was more to the story asked whether the United States had been assisting any South Vietnamese military operations against North Vietnam that might have prompted the first attack on the\u202fMaddox. McNamara flatly denied the suggestion. <\/p>\n

\"\"Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara testifying before the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees on August 6, 1964. U.S. Naval Institute \"\"The original Senate draft of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution as presented, August 5, 1964. National Archives<\/p>\n

The full Senate took up the resolution on the afternoon of August 6. After eight hours and forty minutes of debate that lasted into the following day, the Senate voted 88 to 2 to adopt the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Johnson signed it into law three days later.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Buyers\u2019 Remorse <\/p>\n

Johnson had pushed for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution because he wanted to avoid what he saw as the mistake that President Harry S. Truman had made in taking the United States to war in Korea without securing congressional authorization. When the fighting turned difficult, many members of Congress, especially Republicans, turned on Truman. Korea suddenly became \u201cMr. Truman\u2019s war.\u201d LBJ believed that if he involved Congress involved in the take-off of his Vietnam policy that he would be protected politically if things went sour. <\/p>\n

That bet did not pay off. Many lawmakers came to regret their vote on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution as U.S. intervention in Vietnam escalated, American casualties rose, and evidence mounted that the Johnson administration had misled Congress about what had happened to the Maddox. The attack on August 2 had not been a cut-and-dried case of unprovoked North Vietnamese aggression. Not only had the U.S. military orchestrated an operation in which South Vietnamese commandoes had attacked nearby North Vietnamese military installations, McNamara had told Johnson<\/a>\u202fthat \u201cthere\u2019s no question\u201d that it triggered the initial attack on the Maddox. <\/p>\n

\"\"The signed version of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, August 10, 1964. National Archives<\/p>\n

The administration also had good reason at the time to doubt that the second attack had occurred\u2014and it is clear now that it didn\u2019t<\/a>. The captain of the Maddox had sent conflicting messages during the firefight about what had happened, and a Navy fighter jet sent to aid the Maddox saw only the two U.S. destroyers. The following day neither the Maddox nor its companion destroyer found any debris or wreckage from North Vietnamese vessels.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Vietnam eventually became \u201cMr. Johnson\u2019s war.\u201d In January 1971, Congress\u202frepealed\u202fthe Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. The move did nothing to stop the war. President Richard Nixon\u202finsisted that he had other legal authority to wage it, and Congress continued to appropriate funds to finance it. U.S. combat troops remained in South Vietnam for\u202fanother two years.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Repent at Leisure <\/p>\n

Some of the lawmakers who regretted their vote on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution later contended that they did not know at the time that they were voting for war. Democratic Senator\u202fJ. William Fulbright\u202fof Arkansas, who managed the Senate floor debate on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution as chair of the Foreign Relations Committee,\u202fwrote in 1979<\/a>: \u201cI surely did not anticipate\u201d that the resolution \u201cwould be invoked as legal sanction for a full-scale war,\u201d and as a result, it \u201cmust stand as the only instance in the nation\u2019s history in which Congress authorized war without knowing that it was doing so.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"\"Senator Wayne Morse (D-OR) speaks on the Senate floor against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, August 7, 1964. U.S. Senate Historical Office<\/p>\n

The text of the Senate debate, however, suggests otherwise. The senators\u2014at least the ones who went to the floor\u2014returned repeatedly to the question of whether the resolution empowered the president to use military force in Southeast Asia as he saw fit. They agreed that it did. An exchange Fulbright had with Republican Senator John Sherman Cooper\u202fof Kentucky is indicative<\/a>: <\/p>\n

Mr. Cooper:\u202fThen, looking ahead, if the President decided that it was necessary to use such force as could lead into war, we will give that authority by this resolution? <\/p>\n

Mr. Fulbright:\u202fThat is the way I would interpret it.<\/p>\n

The two senators who voted against the resolution,\u202fDemocrat Ernest Gruenig\u202fof Alaska and\u202fRepublican Wayne Morse of Oregon, both warned their colleagues that they were approving an\u202fundated declaration of war. Morse went as far as to predict<\/a>: <\/p>\n

With the next century, future generations will look with dismay and great disappointment upon a Congress which is now about to make such a historic mistake.<\/p>\n

The fact that events proved Gruenig and Morse right did little to help either senator politically. They both lost their bids for re-election.<\/p>\n

Oscar Berry and Jack Patton assisted in the preparation of this article.<\/p>\n

The United States celebrates its 250th\u202fanniversary in 2026. To mark that milestone, I am resurfacing essays I have written over the years about major events in U.S. foreign policy. A version of this essay\u202fwas\u202fpublished on August 7, 2014<\/a>.\u202f\u202f <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cAct in haste, repent at leisure.\u201d \u201cLook before you leap.\u201d \u201cFools rush in where angels fear to tread.\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":805924,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-805923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/805923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=805923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/805923\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/805924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=805923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=805923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=805923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}