The Tonkin Gulf Resolution

AUG 07 1964 · 12:00

USS Maddox (DD-731), the destroyer at the centre of the Gulf of Tonkin incidents, refuels in the South China Sea, 1964. Place: United States Congress, Washington Figures: Lyndon B. Johnson, President · Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense · J. William Fulbright, Senate Foreign Relations chair (the resolution's floor manager, later one of its principal critics) · Wayne Morse (Oregon) and Ernest Gruening (Alaska), the two senators voting no Two Incidents, One Confirmed The USS Maddox, conducting signals-intelligence patrols in the Gulf of Tonkin in support of South Vietnamese commando raids on North Vietnamese coastal installations, engages three North Vietnamese P-4 torpedo boats on 2 August 1964. The exchange is real; one North Vietnamese boat is sunk, the Maddox is undamaged. On 4 August, in heavy weather, the Maddox and the Turner Joy report a second engagement and fire for two hours at radar contacts that the commanders on station, within hours, doubt were ever there. Captain John Herrick cables that review of action makes many recorded contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful. McNamara is briefed on the doubts; Johnson is told. Johnson orders retaliatory air strikes (Operation Pierce Arrow) the same evening and addresses the nation at 11:36 p.m. on 4 August. The resolution is sent to Congress on 5 August, passes the House 416 to 0 on 7 August, and the Senate 88 to 2 the same day. Wayne Morse rises to argue that the executive is asking for an open-ended grant of war power in violation of Article I; he is voted down. All Necessary Measures The operative text authorizes the President to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression, and to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty. No declaration of war is requested; none is voted on. By 1968 there are 549,500 US troops in Vietnam; by 1973, 58,220 American dead and roughly two million Vietnamese (the higher estimates are higher). The resolution is repealed in January 1971 over Nixon's objections; the war continues until April 1975. The constitutional war-declaration power of Article I, the one element of US foreign policy the Founders most explicitly intended to differ from the British monarchical pattern, has, by this maneuver, been delegated to the executive in a single resolution. The War Powers Resolution of 1973, passed over Nixon's veto, attempts to reclaim it and is ignored or evaded by every subsequent administration. American Westphalian sovereignty over its own war-making is, from 1964 forward, executive rather than legislative; the pattern continues to the present, with Aut Video: President Lyndon Johnson's televised address of 4 August 1964 announcing retaliatory strikes against North Vietnam and requesting congressional authorisation, the speech that precedes the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.