Gulf of Tonkin VII: Coverup or conspiracy?
This is the sixth installment of a continuing piece about my dad's experience. For the previous installments, click here to see part I, part II, part III, part IV, part V and part VI.
Coverup or Conspiracy? part 1
Why do I say "clearly known"? Schaperjahn told me “and he agreed to let me tape record our conversation” that when the investigation got underway, he was in the Portsmouth, Virginia, Naval Hospital. An admiral called him from the Pentagon 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 Defense Department had used a cloak of silence about my error in naming Schaperjahn's ship to stonewall the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
To reinforce that cloak of silence, Schaperjahn was immediately transferred to a ship in the Black Sea and was virtually 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 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 sonarman.
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 Register editorial statement about me being a contender for "most naive man" was dead wrong and would better apply to the editorial's own position since:
(1) the Navy did indeed conceal Chief Schaperjahn, through sins of both omission (the list of names) and commission (the immediate transfer), and
(2) an admission by North Vietnam was never made because, as I originally claimed, no attack on our destroyers occurred.
John White
to be continued...
3 comments:
The NSA archives were relesed just a few years ago on this. The archives showed that low level managers at DoD made the mistakes and covered them up. The archives made it clear that LBJ and his administration were never apprised of the problems. The LBJ folks erred in not asking deeper questions for whatever reasons but the release showed LBJ and his folks weren't lying.
Just yesterday I met with an investigative reporter who's writing a book on the Gulf of Tonkin. During a three-hour conversation he showed me enormous amounts of evidence that McNamara and Johnson knew what was going on because they planned to provoke it. The writer has interviews with eyewitnesses to the event who flew over, photographing everything and then forwarding everything DIRECTLY to the White House and the Pentagon, not via the NSA, at high priority. There was no NSA filter in what went to them.
My suspicion: the NSA historian was employed by McNamara to polish up his image before he leaves the earth. He's 90 or so. He tried to polish his image in his book some years ago; he tried to polish it in a documentary which aired on TV a few years later; and he tried to do it via an interview with General Giap in Vietnam about the same time by asking him "What really happened in the Gulf of Tonkin on August 4?" as if he were truly ignorant about the situation. The North Vietnamese had published a statement about 1968 saying they had no torpedo boats in the alleged event and that it was all staged by the U.S. So McNamara knew the answer even before he asked the question. Bottom line: McNamara, LBJ and their inner circle were indeed lying, and the NSA archivist is probably in the secret employ of the deceptive Mr. McNamara.
John White
THe NSA is part of the DoD and therefor part of the Pentagon. There's no question that the GoT incident didn't happen but the suggestion that Mcnamara and Johnson lied about it doesn't fly.
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