Why was the incident at the Gulf of Tonkin important in 1964?
The Gulf of Tonkin Incident prompted the first large-scale involvement of U.S. armed forces in Vietnam. It was a pair of attacks carried out by naval forces of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) against two American destroyers, the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy. The incident occurred on August 2 and 4, 1964 in the Gulf of Tonkin. The outcome of the incident was the passage by Congress of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted President Lyndon B. Johnson the authority to assist any Southeast Asian country whose government was considered to be jeopardized by “communist aggression”. The resolution served as Johnson’s legal justification for escalating American involvement in the Vietnam War, which lasted until 1975. In 2005, it was revealed in an official NSA declassified reportthat the USS Maddox first fired warning shots on the August 2 incident and that there may not have been North Vietnamese boats at the August 4 incident. The report said [I]t is not simply
