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Comparative and International Politics
Edwin E. Moise, Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 304 + xviii pp., US$39.95, ISBN 0 8078 2300 7.
In the black of the night of 4 August 1964, the guns of the American destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy shot at waves or flying fish or even whales, perhaps.
Edwin E. Moise's reconstruction of the controversial Gulf of Tonkin incident may be read as a virtual naval battle in which radar blips were mistaken by twitchy technicians for North Vietnamese torpedo boats. Misled by the Tonkin Spook' (then a novel radar anomaly) and other illusions, men on the destroyers created a phantasmagoria. Their ships radioed messages that they were under enemy attack and that two torpedo boats of the People's Navy had been sunk.
In Washington, the Johnson administration was at first as genuinely mistaken about the torpedo boat attack as the naval personnel in the gulf....