Behind the Scenes: The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, Explained & Deconstructed.

It’s release day for my newest deep-dive historical YouTube video, my first since late September. (The class on 9/11 came in the gap). It’s called “The Gulf of Tonkin Incident: Explained & Deconstructed,” and it does exactly what it says on the tin, explaining and analyzing the facts of and the context behind one of the most confusing but consequential events in the long bitter road of American involvement in the Vietnam War. I had thought this video would be a somewhat shorter and easier-to-do project than others have been this year, but, as usual, I was wrong. Nevertheless, I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out. I’ve embedded the video below.

The story of the Gulf of Tonkin affair is convoluted. In early August 1964, the White House of President Lyndon B. Johnson announced to the world that naval forces of North Vietnam had attacked two American destroyers, the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy, in the Gulf of Tonkin just off the coast of Southeast Asia. Johnson used these attacks politically to convince the Congress—turns out they were very easily persuaded—to grant him essentially a legal blank check to conduct military operations in Vietnam without much legislative oversight. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was the legal cover for the eventual escalation of the Vietnam War, particularly in 1965. But as it turned out, the original August 1964 attacks in the Gulf were more complicated than met the eye at first. This has been a source of controversy in American and Vietnamese history ever since.