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Edwin E. Moise, Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996. xviii + 304 pp. US$39.95 (cloth).
The story is well-known. During the year and a half after Diem's fall in 1963, the Vietnam war had gone badly for Washington, and President Lyndon Johnson eventually found it necessary to make the decision that he had foreseen in 1961-`whether we commit major United States forces to the area or cut our losses and withdraw'. He chose the former course. Though the decision was made known in stages, each stage was usually triggered by an allegedly provocative act by the enemy.
The first such episode was an attack by North Vietnamese PT-boats on American destroyers cruising in international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin (on 2 August 1964 and again, so it was claimed, on 4 August). The government retaliated by bombing North Vietnamese naval stations and Congress, at the President's request, passed a joint resolution authorising the President `to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States', or `to assist any member or protocol state' (for...