Why Leaders Lie - Mearsheimer, John J_.original_ [22]
The behavior of President Lyndon Johnson and his principal foreign policy advisors during the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident in early August 1964 is strikingly similar to Roosevelt’s conduct in the Greer incident.6 The state of affairs in South Vietnam at the time was going from bad to worse for the United States. Johnson hoped to rescue the situation by significantly escalating the fight against North Vietnam, but he recognized that the American public had little enthusiasm for fighting a major war in Southeast Asia. Thus the president concluded that he needed a mandate from Congress that sanctioned the use of massive and sustained force against North Vietnam. An opportunity to get Congress to back any escalatory steps Johnson might make came on August 4, 1964, when Washington received word that North Vietnamese patrol boats had attacked an American destroyer, the USS Maddox, in the Gulf of Tonkin. The president used this incident to ram the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution through Congress on August 7. It effectively gave him carte blanche to wage war against North Vietnam.
The Johnson administration told two lies about what happened in the waters off the coast of North Vietnam. First, the President and his aides purposely gave the impression that there was no doubt that the August 4 attack had actually taken place. Johnson, for example, responded on August 7 to an official protest from the Soviet leader Khrushchev by saying that there was “complete and incontrovertible evidence” that the North Vietnamese had attacked the Maddox.7 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told Senator Bourke Hickenlooper (R-IA) on August 4 that “the evidence was absolutely clear on the attack.”8 The proposed resolution that the administration sent to Capitol Hill on August 5 confidently stated that the North Vietnamese had “deliberately and repeatedly attacked United States naval vessels.”9
In fact, within hours of the reported attack, the commander of the Maddox was reporting that there were good reasons to question whether there actually had been an attack.10 On August 4, according to historian Fredrik Logevall, Johnson put pressure on McNamara “to find verification of the … incident,” surely because he knew that there were doubts about whether the attack had ever occurred.11 The following morning, the president’s national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, told his staff that “the amount of evidence we have today is less than we had yesterday.”12 The next day (August 6), Bundy’s deputy, Walt Rostow, told a luncheon at the State Department that “it seemed unlikely that there had actually been an attack on … August 4.”13 When Bundy heard about Rostow’s remarks, he said that his deputy should be told to “button his lip.”14 In short, it was a falsehood to say or even imply that the United States had no doubts about whether the Maddox had been attacked on August 4.
The second lie concerns the Johnson administration’s claim that the Maddox was on a “routine patrol” in the Gulf of Tonkin and that the alleged attack was “deliberate and unprovoked.”15 In fact, one reason that the Maddox was in those waters was to collect intelligence in support of South Vietnamese forces that were attacking the North Vietnamese coast at the time, and, not surprisingly, almost every top-level American policymaker understood that Hanoi would view the Maddox as a party to those attacks.16 Although the