Gulf of Tonkin Resolution

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution or the Southeast Asia Resolution, Pub. L. 88–408, 78 Stat. 384, enacted August 10, 1964, was a joint resolution that the United States Congress passed on August 7, 1964, in response to the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

It is of historic significance because it gave U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson authorization, without a formal declaration of war by Congress, to use conventional military force in Southeast Asia. Specifically, the resolution authorized the president to do whatever necessary in order to assist "any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty." This included involving armed forces.

It was opposed in the Senate only by Senators Wayne Morse (D-OR) and Ernest Gruening (D-AK). Senator Gruening objected to "sending our American boys into combat in a war in which we have no business, which is not our war, into which we have been misguidedly drawn, which is steadily being escalated." The Johnson administration subsequently relied upon the resolution to begin its rapid escalation of U.S. military involvement in South Vietnam and open warfare between North Vietnam and the United States.

In March 1956, the North Vietnamese leadership approved tentative measures to revive the southern insurgency in December 1956. A communist-led uprising began against Diem's government in April 1957. The North Vietnamese Communist Party approved a "people's war" on the South at a session in January 1959, and on July 28, North Vietnamese forces invaded Laos to maintain and upgrade the Ho Chi Minh trail, in support of insurgents in the south. In September 1960, COSVN, North Vietnam's southern headquarters, gave an order for a full scale coordinated uprising by the Viet Cong in South Vietnam against the government and 1/3 of the population was soon living in areas of communist control. About 40,000 communist soldiers infiltrated from North Vietnam into the south from 1961 to 1963.

Throughout 1963, the administration of U.S. president John F. Kennedy was concerned that the South Vietnamese regime of Ngo Dinh Diem was losing the war to the North Vietnamese directed Viet Cong. Such concerns were intensified after Diem was overthrown and killed in a CIA-supported coup on 2 November 1963. On 19 December 1963, the Defense Secretary Robert McNamara visited Saigon and reported to President Lyndon B. Johnson that the situation was "very disturbing" as "current trends, unless reversed in the next two or three months, will lead to neutralization at best or more likely to a Communist-controlled state." McNamara further reported that the Viet Cong were winning the war as they controlled "larger percentages of the population, greater amounts of territory and have destroyed or occupied more strategic hamlets than expected." About the Revolutionary Command Council as the South Vietnamese military junta called itself, McNamara was scathing, saying "there is no organized government in South Vietnam" as the junta was "indecisive and drifting" with the generals being "so preoccupied with essentially political affairs" that they had no time for the war.

In response to McNamara's report, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended the United States intervene in the war, with the Air Force's commander, General Curtis LeMay, calling for a strategic bombing campaign against North Vietnam, saying "we are swatting flies when we should be going after the manure pile." Using less earthy language than LeMay, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Maxwell D. Taylor in a report to Johnson called South Vietnam "pivotal" to the United States's "worldwide confrontation with Communism" and predicated that to allow South Vietnam to fall to the Viet Cong would be such a blow to American "durability, resolution and trustworthiness" that all of Asia might very well be lost to Communism. Taylor also argued that to see South Vietnam fall to the Viet Cong would so damage "our image" in Africa and Latin America that both of those regions might also be lost to Communism as well. Given these stakes with Taylor claiming the entire Third World would be lost to Communism if South Vietnam went Communist, he argued for drastic measures, saying the United States should be taking "increasing bolder" measures with the United States to start bombing North Vietnam. The journalist Stanley Karnow wrote Taylor had offered up an "inflated" version of the "domino theory" with the entire Third World potentially lost to Communism if South Vietnam became the first "domino" to fall.

Though Johnson was planning as president to focus on domestic affairs such as civil rights for Afro-Americans together with social legislation to improve the lot of the poor, he was very afraid that to "lose" South Vietnam would cause him to be branded as "soft on Communism", the dreaded accusation that could end the career of any American politician at the time. Rather than the primat der aussenpolitik (primacy of foreign policy) reason of the "domino theory", Johnson was more motivated by the primat der innenpolitik (primacy of domestic policy) reason of the fear that if South Vietnam was "lost", it would generate a right-wing backlash similar to the one generated by the "loss of China" in 1949, which allowed Senator Joseph McCarthy to achieve national prominence. The fear that a new McCarthy-type Republican politician would emerge and derail his domestic reforms was Johnson's primary reason for refusing to accept the possibility of South Vietnam being "lost". Johnson's determination to not "lose" South Vietnam extended to rejecting a peace plan put forward by the French president Charles de Gaulle who favored having South Vietnam becoming neutral in the Cold War in order to provide Americans with an honorable way to disengage from Vietnam. Though not keen on fighting a war in Vietnam, Johnson told Taylor and the other chiefs of staff at a Christmas Eve party in 1963: "Just let me get elected, and then you can have your war". The instability of South Vietnamese politics suggested it was impossible for the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam-i.e. the South Vietnamese Army) to focus on the war. Johnson stated at a meeting in the Oval Office that he was fed up with "this coup shit", and shortly thereafter another coup took place in Saigon as General Nguyễn Khánh overthrew General Dương Văn Minh on 30 January 1964.

Though the United States had long denounced the North Vietnamese government for trying to overthrow the South Vietnamese government, accusing Hanoi of "aggression", South Vietnam, with American support, had also been trying to overthrow the North Vietnamese government. Starting in 1961, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had been training squads of South Vietnamese volunteers and infiltrating them into North Vietnam with the aim of starting an anti-Communist guerrilla war with a lack of success. For an example, of the 80 teams that were infiltrated into North Vietnam in 1963, all were captured, causing one CIA agent to later say: "I didn't mind butchering the enemy, but we were butchering our own allies". In January 1964, Johnson gave his approval for a plan to step up the pace and intensity of the covert war against North Vietnam, which was code-named Operation 34A. Johnson had hopes that Operation 34A might at best lead to the overthrow of North Vietnam's Communist government and at worse might so weaken North Vietnam as to end the war in South Vietnam. As part of Operation 34A, starting on 1 February 1964, South Vietnamese commandos began to conduct maritime raids on coastal North Vietnam under American naval operational command.