Gulf of Tonkin III

Following the first and second parts of my dad's story, here's the third installment:

In Hanoi, he (McNamara) continued his shameful charade of being ignorant about what happened. Here's how I know.

An International Furor

In December of 1967, I wrote a letter to my local newspaper, the New Haven [Connecticut] Register, accusing President Johnson, Defense Secretary 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 August 4, 1964. I identified myself as a former naval officer and said I based my charge on two sources of information: (1) reading the classified radio messages sent at that time by the two allegedly attacked destroyers, USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy, and (2) talking, a few months later, with the chief sonar man (whose name I did not recall) of the Maddox.

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. The letter became, in the words of one book about the Tonkin Gulf events, "a national sensation." Make that “international.”

My letter helped Senator J. William Fulbright (D-Arkansas) 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, and, of course, 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.

John White

to be continued...