The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the Two Senators Who Voted No

On August 7, 1964, the House of Representatives voted 416 to 0 to give President Lyndon Johnson authority to use force in Southeast Asia. The debate there lasted well under an hour. The Senate took a little longer and arrived at almost the same place: 88 votes in favour, 2 against. The two senators who said no had little in common on paper. Wayne Morse of Oregon had been elected as a Republican, quit the party in 1952, sat for a time as an independent and then joined the Democrats. He was a former law school dean with a famously sharp tongue and a habit of long speeches. Ernest Gruening of Alaska was a physician by training, a former journalist and editor, and the territorial governor of Alaska for more than a decade before it became a state. Both were Democrats by 1964. Gruening was 77; Morse was in his sixties. Both would lose their seats in 1968. And both, it turned out, were right about the thing their colleagues were most certain of.

In short: The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed with only two votes against it after the Johnson administration reported two attacks on American destroyers off North Vietnam. The first was real; the second almost certainly never happened, as later declassified studies concluded. The two dissenters warned that Congress was handing the President power to make war without declaring it, and the next decade proved them right.

Two nights in the Gulf

The Gulf of Tonkin is the body of water off the coast of what was then North Vietnam, bordered on the east by China's Hainan Island. In the summer of 1964 the American destroyer USS Maddox was patrolling there, on an intelligence-gathering mission. At the same time, and nearby, South Vietnamese commandos supported by the United States were carrying out covert raids on the North Vietnamese coast under a program known as Operation Plan 34A.

On August 2, North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the Maddox. That engagement was real. The destroyer and American aircraft returned fire and damaged the boats; the Maddox took a single bullet hole. The administration publicly described the attack as unprovoked. It did not tell the public, and told few members of Congress, about the commando raids nearby, which North Vietnam had reason to connect with the destroyer's presence.

Two nights later, on August 4, the Maddox and a second destroyer, the USS Turner Joy, were again in the Gulf. In bad weather and darkness, the ships' crews reported sonar contacts and radar returns that they interpreted as a new attack, and they fired for hours at targets they believed were torpedo boats. Within hours, the task group's commander, Captain John Herrick, sent a message urging caution. He reported that freak weather effects and an overeager sonar operator might account for many of the reports, that no visual sightings had been confirmed, and that a complete evaluation was needed before further action.

That evening in Washington, Johnson went on national television to announce that he had ordered retaliatory air strikes on North Vietnam. He asked Congress for a resolution of support.

The resolution and its few lines

The resolution was short. It said that Congress approved and supported 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. It added that the United States was prepared, as the President determined, 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 requesting assistance in defence of its freedom. It would remain in force until the President decided peace and security in the area were reasonably assured, or until Congress ended it by concurrent resolution.

In the Senate, the resolution was managed by J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a friend of Johnson's. Senators asked Fulbright whether the language would authorize sending large American armies into a land war in Asia. Fulbright said he did not believe the President intended that, and that the purpose was to deter North Vietnam. He also acknowledged, under questioning, that the language was broad enough to allow it.

It was an election year. Johnson was running against Barry Goldwater, who was attacking him as too soft on communism, and Johnson's own campaign promised voters that he did not seek a wider war. A strong, nearly unanimous vote let the President look firm while promising restraint. For most members of Congress, voting against a resolution supporting American sailors under fire felt politically impossible.

What Morse and Gruening said

Morse spoke at length, as he usually did, and his argument was legal and constitutional. He said the resolution was a predated declaration of war, an attempt to give the President power the Constitution reserved for Congress. He questioned whether the destroyers were truly on an innocent patrol, and suggested, correctly as it turned out, that the patrol was connected to the South Vietnamese raids. He predicted that history would condemn the vote.

Gruening's argument was more about the war itself. He had opposed American involvement in Vietnam for months before the Gulf incidents, calling it a conflict the United States had no business in and should not try to win by military escalation. He said that sending American boys to fight and die in a civil war in Southeast Asia was not worth it and would not succeed. He pointed out that the administration had been building toward deeper involvement regardless of what happened in the Gulf.

Neither was a pacifist. Morse had supported many Cold War measures. Gruening had been a reliable New Dealer and supporter of the United Nations. Their objection was not to defending American forces but to giving one man an open-ended authority to decide, alone, when and how far to go to war.

How the blank cheque was cashed

The resolution became the legal foundation for nearly everything that followed. In early 1965 Johnson began a sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam and sent the first American ground combat units. By the end of 1965 there were around 180,000 American troops in South Vietnam; by 1968, more than half a million. The administration cited the Tonkin resolution as authority for the escalation, sometimes describing it as the functional equivalent of a declaration of war.

Many of the senators who had voted for it came to regret it. Fulbright turned into one of the war's most prominent critics. In 1966 his committee held televised hearings on the war, and in 1968 it examined the Tonkin incidents themselves, bringing out the doubts about the second attack that Herrick's cables had raised.

The political cost to the two dissenters was real. Both lost in 1968. Gruening, at 81, was defeated in the Democratic primary by Mike Gravel, who would himself become an outspoken opponent of the war. Morse lost the general election narrowly to a young Republican, Bob Packwood. Their opposition to the war was not the only issue in either race, but it did not help them with voters who still supported the war or who thought them out of step.

Congress repealed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in January 1971. The Nixon administration did not fight the repeal, taking the position that it did not depend on the resolution for its authority. The war continued for two more years of American combat.

What later disclosures showed

The second attack's doubtfulness was known inside the government from the beginning. It became public in pieces.

The Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department's secret history of the war leaked by Daniel Ellsberg and published by newspapers starting in June 1971, showed that the administration had drafted a congressional resolution months before the August incidents and had planned for wider war while publicly promising restraint. It did not settle the question of the second attack, but it showed that the resolution was a tool the administration had been waiting to use.

In 2005, the National Security Agency declassified a study by one of its own historians, Robert Hanyok, which had concluded that the signals intelligence used to support the August 4 attack had been mishandled. According to the study, intercepts that actually referred to the August 2 engagement or to other matters were presented as evidence of a second attack, and intelligence suggesting no attack was under way was left out. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, in his later years, acknowledged that the second attack probably did not occur.

None of this means that every official was lying. Many sincerely believed an attack had happened in the confusion of that night. What it means is that the decision was rushed, that doubts were set aside rather than resolved, and that Congress was given a selective picture. The two senators who asked the hardest questions were the ones who turned out to be right.

The case for the 88, and what it misses

It is fair to ask what the senators who voted yes were thinking, and to give them their best case.

They believed American forces had been attacked twice, in international waters, without provocation, and that a strong response would deter worse. They had the word of the President, the secretary of defense and the military. Many remembered the lesson of the 1930s, that failing to stand up to aggression early can mean a larger war later. They had been assured by Fulbright that the resolution was about deterrence, not a land war. And in the summer of 1964, almost nobody in American politics expected the war that came.

What that case misses is the one thing Morse and Gruening kept saying. Whatever the President intended in August 1964, the words of the resolution allowed far more, and Congress had no way to take the authority back except by a concurrent resolution the President's allies could block. Congress voted on a crisis and gave away a war. The size of the vote mattered too. A near-unanimous Congress gave the escalation a legitimacy that a closer vote, with real debate, would not have.

That lesson shaped the War Powers Resolution of 1973. It shaped the debate over the open-ended authorization passed after September 11, 2001, and over the 2002 authorization for war in Iraq. Each time, a few members asked what the words would allow, and each time the majority voted for the moment rather than the text.

The people who paid for the vote

It is easy to tell this story as a contest between senators and presidents and to forget who carried its weight.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington lists more than 58,000 Americans who died in the war. Most of them were young; many were drafted. Hundreds of thousands more came home wounded, and many carried injuries that did not show, along with the effects of exposure to the defoliant Agent Orange, which the government took decades to acknowledge fully and compensate. Many returned to a country that did not know how to receive them, and some were blamed for a policy they had no part in making.

The Vietnamese toll was far larger. Estimates of Vietnamese deaths, soldiers and civilians, North and South, run into the millions, and they vary widely depending on the source and method. Cambodia and Laos, pulled into the conflict, suffered enormously too, and unexploded bombs from the war continued to kill and maim people in Laos and Vietnam for decades afterward. Farmers still turn up ordnance in their fields.

Gruening had warned on the Senate floor against sending American boys to die in Vietnam, and the numbers above are what that warning looked like once it came true. The dissenters' argument about constitutional procedure was, underneath, an argument about lives: that a decision carrying this cost should be made openly, by the people's representatives, after real debate, and not inferred from a few lines passed in a hurry.

Why two votes still matter

Dissent in a lopsided vote can look pointless. Morse and Gruening changed nothing on August 7, 1964. They lost their seats four years later. Their names are not on many monuments.

But dissent does something even when it loses. It puts on the record the questions that will need answering later. It tells people outside the chamber who share those doubts that they are not alone. And it makes it harder, years on, for anyone to say that no one could have known. Someone knew enough to ask.

The modern parallels are not exact, and should not be forced. But the pattern of a crisis, a rushed vote, broad language and a promise of restraint repeats often enough that every voter should know it. We follow current debates over military force and congressional authority on our page about the Pentagon and militarism.

What you can do

• Read the text, not the summary. When Congress considers an authorization for the use of force, read the operative sentences yourself and ask what they would allow, not just what their sponsors say they intend. Bills and recent votes are on our Congress page.
• Tell your representatives that sunset clauses matter. Enter your address at find your representatives for the phone numbers and contact forms of your representative and senators, plus their latest votes, and ask them to insist that any war authorization expire unless renewed.
• Support the people who ask hard questions. Veterans' groups, peace organizations and government-accountability nonprofits in many states work on war powers and transparency; find them in our organizations directory.