The first attack on a US destroyer probably happened. The second almost certainly didn't. Congress voted 416-0 to authorize the Vietnam War based on it anyway.
On August 2, 1964, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. The American destroyer was conducting intelligence-gathering patrols in waters near North Vietnam. The attack was real — the Maddox returned fire and the Navy launched air strikes. North Vietnam acknowledged the engagement. President Johnson reported the incident to Congress and the public.
Two days later, on August 4, the Maddox and a second destroyer, the USS Turner Joy, reported a second attack. Radar contacts. Sonar pings. Reports of torpedoes in the water. Sailors thought they saw torpedo wakes in the dark. Johnson went on television that evening to announce American retaliatory air strikes against North Vietnamese naval facilities. He told the American people the United States had been attacked twice.
The second attack almost certainly never happened. The night was stormy and rough. Radar operators were inexperienced. The 'torpedo wakes' were likely wave action. The sonar operator later said he believed he had been tracking the destroyers' own propeller noise. Captain James Stockdale, flying air cover over the ships during the alleged attack, saw nothing — 'not a gunflash, not a boat.' He would later be a POW in Vietnam for seven years and say repeatedly that there had been no second attack.
Internal communications intercepted by the NSA were deliberately misread and selectively reported to give the impression an attack had occurred. The agency's own internal history, declassified decades later, acknowledged that intelligence reports had been 'skewed' to support the narrative of a second attack. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara later admitted: 'I had had no independent verification that an attack had occurred.' He believed the second attack was a false alarm.
On August 7, 1964, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. The Senate voted 88 to 2. The House vote was 416 to 0. The resolution authorized the President to use military force in Southeast Asia without a formal declaration of war. It became the legal foundation for the entire American military commitment in Vietnam — half a million troops, 58,000 American dead, millions of Vietnamese casualties — built on an incident that in its decisive form did not happen.
Only two senators voted against the resolution: Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska. Morse had been told by a Pentagon official that the Maddox had been conducting provocative intelligence operations and was not an innocent victim. His warnings were dismissed as appeasement. He and Gruening were proven right in every particular.
The Pentagon Papers, leaked in 1971, revealed that the Johnson administration had been planning to escalate in Vietnam regardless of the Gulf of Tonkin events — the incident was used as a pretext for a decision already made. The resolution was eventually repealed in 1971. The War Powers Act of 1973 was passed specifically to prevent future presidents from committing troops to combat based on manufactured or ambiguous incidents — a direct response to Tonkin.