the need to increase taxation, which was politically
unpopular. In the course of 1966 opinion polls
showed that support for him had dropped from 63
to 44 per cent. Why? The reasons are not hard to
find: the black riots in the cities exposing the
shortcomings of the Great Society, the tribula-
tions of an economy beset by rising inflation, the
shadow of the escalating war in Vietnam, and the
president’s apparent loss of interest in social
reform as he grew more absorbed in his efforts to
bring the war to a victorious conclusion. The
‘silent majority’ no doubt still regarded as
unthinkable the possibility that the US might not
win a war, but the revolt against American
involvement in Vietnam began to encourage an
increasingly vociferous opposition, exasperated by
the hollowness of repeated claims that victory was
around the corner.
Meanwhile, the brutality of the war in Vietnam
was vividly portrayed on millions of television
screens: the attacks on poor peasants, the burning
of their huts, the heartlessness of combatants.
Civil rights and Vietnam protests linked up – was
this a black man’s war? In 1967 Martin Luther
King spoke out, ‘This madness must cease.’ How
the Johnson administration came to lose direction
has been chronicled in documents, such as the
leaked Pentagon Papers. In September 1964,
before any substantial US commitment had been
made, Johnson had asked his advisers whether
‘Vietnam was worth all this effort’. His scepticism
was met with the unanimous response that the
loss of South Vietnam would be followed in time
by the loss of all south-east Asia. Johnson’s error
was his failure to question that ‘expert’ judge-
ment; by ‘loss’ in this context was meant the com-
munist domination not only of South Vietnam
but also of Malaya, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia
and Indonesia, possibly even of the Philippines.
Exactly how this could actually occur was never
explained; it was just assumed. So South Vietnam
became the Cold War front-line state of Asia, as
West Germany was in Europe – though the
analogy was a false one. The whole of south-east
Asia did not turn communist and the communists
in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were later to be
locked in struggles among themselves with rival
communist Soviet and Chinese backing. This
nationalist, inter-communist rivalry was not
anticipated or understood in Washington.
In August 1964, in a controversial incident,
North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked an
American destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin; despite
US claims, it is not certain that the destroyer did
not itself provoke hostilities. Two days later there
was allegedly a second attack, though there is
doubt whether it occurred at all. But the signifi-
cance of these incidents was the strong reaction
in the US. With the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution,
Congress granted Johnson the widest discretion
to repel armed attack on US forces and ‘to
prevent further aggression’; the president was
empowered to take all ‘necessary steps, including
the use of armed force’ to assist any nation
covered by the SEATO treaty that asked for assis-
tance ‘in defence of its freedom’. That blanket
authorisation applied to South Vietnam. It meant
the president could practically go to war in
Vietnam without formally declaring war or
seeking congressional support for war. At the
time Congress did not anticipate the conse-
quences of the resolution, nor was American
public opinion much excited by it. Nor, indeed,
did Johnson in 1964 anticipate a large-scale US
war effort. The Tonkin Resolution was simply
intended to give him the discretion to punish the
North Vietnamese, but it was nonetheless
regarded as essential to bring stability to an inde-
pendent and non-communist South Vietnam in
order to counter Khrushchev’s claim to have the
right to support ‘wars of national liberation’.
Secretary McNamara had by now enunciated the
‘domino theory’ in justification for US involve-
ment. Yet in August 1964 Vietnam was still seen
by the public as no more than a minor problem:
the US would need only to flex its muscles for
the communists to back down.
Seven months later, in the early spring of
1965, the punishment of the North Vietnamese
was stepped up as US bombing raids against mil-
itary targets began. This was Operation Rolling
Thunder, which was expected to bring victory
without costly US losses. Airfields in South
Vietnam that served as bases for these raids soon
came under communist land attack. Escalation
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