Foreign Relations: Suspicions of a Moonless Night

FOREIGN RELATIONS

Emerging from a closed session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Eugene McCarthy was besieged by reporters. What, they clamored, had Defense Secretary Robert McNamara said about the Gulf of Tonkin? “It was,” deadpanned McCarthy, “a dark and moonless night.” That climactic note, 3½ years after the encounter that overtly set the stage for the all-out U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, was one of the few certitudes about an incident that seems destined to rank in history with such hoary whodunits as the War of Jenkins’ Ear.

That the Senators should care so intensely about these past events is a matter of note. What particularly rankles most members of the Foreign Relations Committee is the suspicion that they were not given all the facts about reported attacks on U.S. destroyers before approving the Golf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave the President broad authority to “prevent further aggression” in Southeast Asia. The Administration claims that resolution to be the “functional equivalent” of a declaration of war on North Viet Nam.

Unanswered Questions. McNamara, in his final Capitol Hill appearance before moving to the World Bank, did not do much last week to assuage committee members. He aroused their ire on the first point by declaring it was “monstrous” to charge that the Administration had “induced” North Vietnamese attacks on patrolling U.S. destroyers. No one on the committee had flatly made any such allegation, though Wayne Morse did come close by declaring that the U.S. had provoked the North Vietnamese. McNamara then released a highly condensed version of his testimony that was hotly criticized by Chairman J. William Fulbright on the grounds that it omitted anything that would damage the Administration’s case. The committee’s threat to publish the entire transcript prompted the Pentagon to release all but 250 censored words at week’s end. Many questions about the incidents of August 1964 still remained unanswered, and many more were raised (see box).

Less Than the Full Facts. Fulbright was not exactly polite in his attacks on the Administration. He was also disingenuous when he complained that a naval officer, still unnamed, had been given a psychiatric test because he doubted the official account of the Aug. 4 attack. A psychiatric test is a standard, if seemingly excessive procedure in the U.S. military when a lower-ranking officer questions the statements of his superiors, and the Navy was not necessarily trying to muzzle its critic in this case.

Fulbright has a strong case, however, when he contends that the Administration, until it was forced to, at least, gave less than the full facts about the occurrences of August 1964. Certainly the Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Fulbright or anyone else, will not be inclined any time soon to accept the Administration’s version of events—as it did when it approved the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. From his isolated position of a year ago, Fulbright is emerging as a leader of the Senate naysayers. The “Southern Barons” are with him because they are fundamentally opposed to presidential power, while the Northern liberals are with him because they oppose the war. It is a formidable combination.