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McNamara and the Gulf of Tonkin

12 December 2005

John White

"McNamara learns 2nd Tonkin Gulf Attack Never Happened," read the Associated Press headlined account of former Defence Secretary Robert McNamara's visit to Hanoi in early November 1995. Upon meeting Vietnam's retired military strategist and war hero, 85 year-old Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, McNamara asked what really happened in the Gulf of Tonkin on the 4th August 1964. "Absolutely nothing," replied Giap.

The Washington Post, in a follow-up interview, said McNamara was now absolutely sure the 4th August attack never happened. But it was precisely that non-event which McNamara reported as fact to President Lyndon Johnson, who in turn reported it to Congress on the 5th August stampeding it into passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which allowed Johnson to escalate the U.S. presence in Vietnam into full-scale war.

Earlier in the year, McNamara had concluded his book In Retrospect with the lesson of Vietnam. Speaking in the first person plural, he listed 11 major causes for “our disaster” there. I suggest there is a twelfth lesson he should have noted: “We lied to Congress about the events in the Gulf of Tonkin on the 4th August and then covered up our mistake.” In Hanoi, he continued his shameful charade of being ignorant about what happened. Here's how I know.

In 1967, I wrote a letter to my local newspaper, the New Haven Register (Connecticut), accusing President Johnson, McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff of giving false information to Congress in their report about American destroyers being attacked in the Gulf on the 4th August 1964. I identified myself as a naval officer and said I based my charge on two sources of information: 1) reading the classified radio messages sent by the destroyers USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy at that time, and 2) talking, a few months later, with the chief sonar man of the Maddox (whose name I didn't recall).

My letter got international attention. I was covered by everything from the wire services, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CBS Evening News and TV crews from Japan and the Netherlands to local media, radio interviews across the country, and a documentary film, In the Year of the Pig. Even the Soviet Military Review got into the act, saying I had “confessed” to a frame-up in Vietnam.

My letter helped Senator J. William Fulbright to launch the Senate Foreign Relations Committee into a full-scale investigation of the Tonkin events. He brought me to Washington to testify, and was soon locking horns with the Administration. However, the radio messages were classified and therefore not publicly disclosed in full. Furthermore, the man I claimed to have spoken with was never found by the Senate investigators. My veracity and my sanity were questioned by some people, not to mention my patriotism. I, myself, even wondered initially, when I met such resistance and denial from official quarters, whether I'd somehow fantasized the whole thing.

My intention in going public was to help end the war. It was a matter of conscience for me. While I was in Vietnam, I'd felt the U.S. was right to be defending democracy. But after leaving naval service in 1965, I began to have doubts as I learned things contrary to the military mindset and what my fellow officers and I had been told boy a Vietnamese general who briefed us in Da Nang, where our ship, the USS Pine Island (AV-12), had gone in response to the Tonkin events to set up a seaplane base.

The U.S. government's position is that there have never been American nuclear weapons in Vietnam. McNamara reiterated that in 1995 when promoting his book on Roger Aisles' CNBC-TV programme. But that position is not true, strictly speaking. While my ship was anchored in Da Nang Harbour in August 1964, I had responsibility for 40-plus atomic depth bombs in the ship's nuclear weapons storage area. We were anchored there for about two weeks. Our mission was to provide naval operations support and, if ordered, to load those atomic depth bombs onto seaplanes whose target would be enemy submarines.

In time I came to feel I'd been conned and America had no moral right to be in Vietnam. As the body count mounted in an action I regarded as militarily and morally wrong, I thought I could help the antiwar effort and my country by undercutting the basis on which the war was conducted, namely, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Johnson had a draft of the resolution in his back pocket, so to speak, when he addressed Congress on the 5th August 1964, and stampeded it into authorizing a legal instrument which allowed him to “take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent and further aggression.”

As the political scene heated up around the Senate investigation, an editorial entitled “Is John White's Sonar man listening?” appeared in the Register. It stated, “If this mysterious chief sonar man does indeed exist, surely he would have come forward or had been produced by now. We're certain that even if the Navy wanted to, it couldn't keep such a key witness concealed…

We wonder whether White even wants to believe the destroyers were attacked when he remarks, “I think that an admission by North Vietnam would be the most conclusive evidence [that an attack took place].” The title for “most naïve man” has another strong contender. The matter – and my public shaming – rested there for two decades.

In 1987 I located the missing chief Sonar man. He is Joseph E. Schaperjahn, retired and living in Richmond, Virginia. In a telephone conversation, he confirmed that he was the man I spoke with; he also reiterated that he informed his commanding officer during the Tonkin events that there were no torpedoes being fired at the ships, and that the images on the sonar scope were “knuckles” in the water, i.e. large subsurface swirls formed by the violent motion of a ship's rudder at high speed which give a sonar return that appears as a solid object. And, most importantly, he said, he was told during the event that the ship's command didn't want to hear negative reports; the same thing was said to him in a debriefing afterward in the Philippines. (That left him with the uneasy feeling there may have been a kind of script from higher authority played out that night in the Gulf of Tonkin to give the semblance of unprovoked attack.)

Now it's clear why “John White's sonar man” was never found. It hinges on the fact that I made a simple mistake by saying he was on the Maddox when he was actually on the Turner Joy. That error was due to faulty memory, nearly three years after my brief chance meeting with him in the Long Beach Naval Shipyard in March 1965, after we'd returned from WestPac duty. Since the Turner Joy's roster was not requested by the Senate investigators, the Navy Department never pointed out the fact – clearly known to it – that I'd misidentified Schaperjahn's ship.

Why do I say “clearly known”? Schaperjahn told me that when the investigation got underway, he was in the Portsmouth, Virginia Naval Hospital. An admiral called him from Washington to ask whether he knew me. Schaperjahn's recollection of my name was not clear at the time, so he answered no. That closed the conversation, but he was left with the distinct feeling that if he'd said yes, there would have been a lot of flak coming at him. Later on, he realized he did indeed know me because of our brief meeting, but by then the investigation was over. The Defence Department had used a cloak of silence about my error in naming Schaerjahn's ship to stonewall the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

To reinforce that cloak of silence, incidentally, Schaperjahn was immediately transferred to a ship in the Black Sea and was incommunicado during the Gulf of Tonkin hearings. At the time, he was just two months short of retirement. It is customary for such a senior person with so little time left in the service to be stationed ashore prior to discharge. Schaperjahn's urgent reassignment was totally out of the ordinary and later led him to think that it was directly connected to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's search for John White's missing sonar man.

So in the interest of setting the public record straight, I offer this footnote to the history of the war in Vietnam. I also point out that the editorial statement about me being a contender for “most naïve man” was dead wrong and would best apply to the editorial's own position since 1) the Navy did indeed conceal Chief Schaperjahn, albeit through a sin of omission rather than commission, and 2) an admission by North Vietnam was never made because, as I originally claimed, no attack on our destroyers occurred.

In fact, North Vietnam strongly denied ever firing torpedoes at the destroyers – Giap reiterated that to McNamara in Hanoi – and said in their official 1965 statement that the alleged attack was “deliberately staged by the United States to have a pretext for carrying out its criminal designs against the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam.” Furthermore, the now declassified radio messages have been made public. Captain John Herrick, commodore of the two ship patrol, radioed this message to the Commander in Chief of the Pacific at 12.30am on the 5th August 1964: “Review of action makes many reported contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful…” He also stated, “It was echo of our outgoing sonar beam hitting the rudders, which were then full over, and reflected back into the receiver. Most of the Maddox's, if not all the Maddox's, reports were probably false.”

Twenty-two years after I'd come forward, with more than a bit of apprehension about being charged with treason for revealing secret information, I was pleased to have my story completed and to feel “cleared” of the “crime” of speaking out against what I saw as governmental deception. That deception was real and, as we now know, ultimately led to the tragic loss of more than 58,000 Americans, billions of dollars of material, and a clear sense of national unity and purpose. It was far worse for Vietnam and South East Asia, of course. McNamara now acknowledges that, but he only admits errors of judgment, not deception and cover up. Shame on him!

As for me, I never felt unpatriotic about what I did, although I was considered so by some people. I challenged a government policy because I felt it was contrary to the best interests of our nation and our armed forces. Patriotism requires close citizen scrutiny of government, especially where the commitment of American lives is involved, and if you have to take some heat for that, so be it.

I think the words of Senator Fulbright best sum up the situation. When I informed him, for his possible interest, that I'd finally solved the mystery of my missing sonar man, he wrote to me, “The President and the Secretary of Defence used the alleged attack to pressure the Congress to give them the authority they sought, to give legitimacy to actions which were an evasion of the Constitution's provision on declaring war. They probably knew the attack was misrepresented to the Congress and the public, but it is difficult to prove. It was a very sad and tragic mistake by the President and did great harm to the country and the President.”

That about says it all.

Ed. note: John White is an author in the fields of consciousness research and higher human development. His 15 books include The Meeting of Science and Spirit, What is Enlightenment?, A practical guide to Death and Dying, and, for children, The Christmas Mice. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Saturday Review, Reader's Digest, Science of Mind, Esquire, Omni, Woman's Day and Science Digest. He lives in Cheshire, Connecticut.

This article was originally published in Behind The Lines magazine. VietnamGear.com has reproduced this article with the kind permission of Gary Linderer.

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