Mcnamara Question Answered Second Tonkin Gulf Attack Didn’t Happen, Giap Insists

When former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara met the enemy’s leading strategist Thursday, he raised a question he’d saved for 30 years: What really happened in the Tonkin Gulf on Aug. 4, 1964?

“Absolutely nothing,” replied retired Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap.

Both sides agree that North Vietnam attacked a U.S. Navy ship in the gulf on Aug. 2 as it cruised close to shore. But it was an alleged second attack two days later that led to the first U.S. bombing raid on the North and propelled America deep into war.

Many U.S. historians have long believed either that the Johnson administration fabricated the second attack to win congressional support for widening the war, or that the White House had only flimsy evidence of a real attack.

McNamara was Johnson’s secretary of defense at the time, but even he admitted Thursday that the administration may have made “serious misjudgments.”

For McNamara, Giap’s word was the clincher.

“It’s a pretty damned good source,” he said after the meeting.

As defense secretary from 1961-68 under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, McNamara was one of the leading proponents of U.S. support for South Vietnam against the Communist North. But he left office convinced the war was doomed to failure, he says, revealing his change of heart in memoirs published this year.

On Friday, the last day of his visit to Vietnam, he came to the former enemy capital not to show atonement for his role in the war but rather to help make the 21st century less bloody than the 20th.

“It’s the bloodiest century in all of human history,” McNamara said. “We will repeat it unless we’ve learned the lesson of this horrible slaughter that some of us have participated in.”

On Thursday, the 85-year-old Giap, wearing his olive green uniform with four gold stars on his shoulder, greeted McNamara with an understatement: “I heard about you long ago.”

McNamara laughed. “I heard about YOU long ago,” he rejoined.

Then they talked for more than an hour, with McNamara frequently leaning forward and jabbing his finger for emphasis as he talked about the lessons of history.

McNamara,79, came to Hanoi for the first time to ask the Vietnamese to take part in a conference of top Vietnam War decision-makers. The New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, which is organizing the gathering, says it would be an opportunity to share archival materials and correct the historical record.

“You lost … 3,200,000 people,” McNamara told Giap. “We lost 58,000.” He said the conference would help “ensure that our nations and other nations learn how to avoid such conflicts in the future.”

Giap and Vietnamese officials have said they will give the conference serious consideration.

McNamara wasted little time in raising a question that clearly had nagged him for decades.

“To this day I don’t know what happened on August 2 and August 4, 1964, in the Tonkin Gulf,” he said to Giap. “I think we may have made two serious misjudgments. … Did what we thought was an attack on August 4, 1964, the so-called second attack - did it occur?”

Giap replied, “On the fourth of August, there was absolutely nothing.”

Reporters were ushered from the room soon after, but McNamara later quoted Giap as saying he believed U.S. surveillance ships were trying to provoke an attack so President Johnson would have an excuse to step up U.S. involvement.

McNamara, speaking later to reporters, disputed that interpretation: “That point that Giap made is absolutely without foundation.”