06/22/09 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing Dr. Gareth Porter.
He's an independent historian and and journalist who writes for Interpress Service.
You can also find some of what he writes at the American Prospect, The Nation, The Huffington Post, and other places around the internet, including, most especially, all of his IPS stuff at original.antiwar.com slash porter.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you?
Thanks very much, Scott.
Always glad to be on your show.
Well, I'm glad to have you here.
I just talked with Dan Ellsberg earlier today, and he told me that you convinced him that at least there's a large possibility or probability that Robert McNamara kept secret from LBJ the fact that the Maddox had not actually been fired upon on August 4th, 1964, in the so-called second incident of the, or second part of the Gulf of Tonkin incident there, that he passed on all the alarmist information, but that then when word came that, oh, sonar man was listening to his own propeller, no big deal, false alarm, that that information actually did not make it to the President, Gareth?
Is that your conclusion?
That is my conclusion, based on a very careful reconstruction of exactly what sort of communications had passed between McNamara and Lyndon Johnson that day.
And, of course, the story which I tell in such detail in my book, Perils of Dominance, the road, Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, is one in which basically Robert F. McNamara was the ringleader, if you will, of the war party within both, well, not both, but the Lyndon Johnson administration during the Kennedy administration.
He'd been actually very close to John F. Kennedy's proposal.
He'd been an instrument of John F. Kennedy's proposal to try to withdraw U.S. forces completely from South Vietnam over three years.
He was very close to John F. Kennedy, to the Kennedy family, and he'd lend himself to that policy.
But once Lyndon Johnson took over after the Kennedy assassination, Robert F. McNamara had no personal loyalty to Lyndon Johnson.
He basically thought about not continuing under LBJ, but he saw this as an opportunity to really dominate policy toward Vietnam for the first time.
Whereas before, of course, he had been an instrument of John F. Kennedy's policy.
We know very clearly from the record that was available, both from the records of conversations between LBJ and McNamara and other meetings and decisions that were made in 1964, that Robert F. McNamara wanted very badly for LBJ to sign on to a policy of attacking North Vietnam, to carry out a bombing strategy against North Vietnam, at least to try to force the North Vietnamese to accept U.S. terms for some sort of settlement.
So that was the motivation.
The opportunity arose because, we now know, of course, the U.S. Navy believed, as you just suggested, that U.S. warships were attacked on August 4th in the Gulf of Tonkin because of the overeager sonar men and so on and so forth.
But very quickly, they began to realize that things had not been what they thought, what it seemed, and they relayed the word back to Washington through the commander in the Pacific, in Hawaii, Admiral Sharp, that they weren't sure what had happened and, in fact, that the White House should not make any decision on the bombing until there had been a reconnaissance by daylight.
So basically, without going through a play-by-play, an hour-by-hour reconstruction, what happened was that Robert F. McNamara was told within a fairly short time after that message was sent to Washington that afternoon that the commanders on the scene were no longer at all certain that there had been an attack and were insisting that there should be a delay in any decision on bombing until they could actually carry out a reconnaissance to find out what had happened, if there had been an attack.
Indeed, Admiral Sharp himself suggested in a conversation with Robert F. McNamara that they should wait until he had, in fact, been able to confirm that there was an attack.
He believed that he could confirm it, but he had not done so, and he suggested to McNamara that they wait to send out a bombing order until he could confirm that.
Interestingly, in that conversation, which we have the full record of, McNamara basically demurred.
Instead of saying that he would call off or delay an order, he said, well, we'll go ahead with the preparation for the strike, and then you let me know as soon as you have confirmation.
So there's circumstantial evidence there to suggest that that was Robert F. McNamara's bent.
Now, the key point, though, in my account is that there's, again, very strong evidence in the record of the conversations that we do have between the phone conversations between LBJ and Robert F. McNamara that LBJ had not been told that there had been a change of mind on the part of the U.S. Command, the commanders on the scene in the Pacific, in the Gulf of Tonkin.
The tenor and the tone and the content of the conversations that he had with LBJ, which, by the way, McNamara had not initiated, but LBJ initiated, suggested very strongly that McNamara had not told him.
And furthermore, I confronted Robert F. McNamara with the evidence that I had gathered.
I called him on the phone and told him that I'd concluded that he had not informed LBJ, indeed, that day about the information that he'd received through the message sent from the commander of the task force, the naval task force.
And then from the conversation with Admiral Sharp, he had not told LBJ about that information, and he denied it.
But it was a very, very weak denial, and he said, I didn't necessarily have to tell LBJ by telephone.
I could have told him that night at the NSC meeting.
Now, that's a very interesting admission, because we know from the record of that NSC meeting taken by a National Security Council staffer for the president's eyes only that McNamara, far from having backed away from his claim that U.S. ships had been attacked, reiterated that very, very strongly, and basically did not provide any additional evidence that there had been such an attack, and basically left LBJ with no choice but to go ahead and confirm a decision that had already been made.
Couldn't that just be plausible deniability and all that, where, you know, they talk out in the hallway, wink-wink, hey, we all know that it was a false alarm, but we're going to go ahead like it wasn't, for the record?
Well, I mean, of course, it's possible that that's the case if there was no other evidence to the effect that McNamara did not tell him.
But what is absent is any indication from the record that we do have that McNamara did inform LBJ.
There's simply nothing on the record to suggest that, and again, as I suggested, the conversation that he did have with him has no suggestion that LBJ had indicated that he wanted to find out more about what happened.
He wanted more information.
Now, you know, this should be understood in the context of a second, or I should say third, Gulf of Tonkin incident that took place in September of 1964, and one in which, again, McNamara, and this time Secretary of State Dean Rusk, tried to persuade Lyndon Johnson to retaliate against North Vietnam on the basis that U.S. commanders believed they may have been attacked by a North Vietnamese boat.
And this time LBJ simply refused and said, you know, I want to get the evidence that this actually happened.
And there's also, you know, indications before the Gulf of Tonkin incident that LBJ was very reluctant to get into a war situation with North Vietnam, but he wanted to move in the other direction.
He was being urged by his advisors, even after the incident in the second, to go ahead with bombing or, you know, punishment of North Vietnam, and he refused to do it.
Well, now, so the operation, or the so-called incident, the third incident that took place in September, LBJ's insistence on a real investigation, the real facts of that, you think that indicates that he knew or suspected, at least by then, that he'd been had on the second incident?
Absolutely.
There's more to the story, and that is that I document the fact that LBJ ordered McGeorge Bundy to carry out an investigation of all the communications between the command in Hawaii, relaying messages from the task force commander in the Gulf of Tonkin, and the Department of Defense.
He wanted all of those communications.
And this was not...
Bundy was the National Security Advisor at the time.
That's right.
He was National Security Advisor.
This was not for the purpose of, you know, preparing propaganda to support the bombing of North Vietnam.
Nothing like that was ever used.
It was, from everything we can tell, it was for the purpose of LBJ satisfying himself about what really went on, and with the premise that LBJ strongly suspected that he'd been had.
Well, he must have known he was lying when he announced that the second incident, even though it, you know, if we assume that he was deceived into believing that the second incident was legitimate, he knew he was lying when he said that it was completely unprovoked, and in international waters, and all these things, and really it was provoked, and the reason they were in international waters is because they just hightailed it out of there.
But he undoubtedly had some knowledge of the fact the United States had been carrying out those raids on North Vietnamese islands and other targets on the coast.
No doubt about that.
There was some doubt about whether he was informed about the exact schedule and knew that there was a coincidence between the raid that was carried out, if I remember correctly, the morning of the 4th, and the presence of the US warships in the vicinity.
I'm not sure that that's the case.
But there's another, just one more point to this story, and that is that after McNamara and Rusk unsuccessfully tried to get LBJ to go along with the idea of retaliation, and they at first backed off, and sort of went along with that, then the next day they tried again to get him to change his mind.
This was on the third incident, in September.
I believe the date is September 18th, 1964.
They tried again the next day, and this time, and this I got directly from hearing the tape from the LBJ library.
LBJ says to Robert S. McNamara on the tape, you came to me the last time around and claimed that US ships were under fire, and it turned out when things finally cleared, that that was not the case.
I found that to be very damning evidence about what actually transpired between LBJ and Robert S. McNamara.
Interesting.
Now, has anybody else ever made a big deal out of these conclusions of yours, or is this popular?
No, it's been ignored, of course.
It's been ignored in the literature as far as I know.
There was one other author who wrote a book on John F. Kennedy's policy toward Vietnam.
I'm sorry, Kennedy and Johnson's policy.
This was American Tragedy by David Kaiser, the historian David Kaiser.
He does allude to the fact that there was no evidence that McNamara informed LBJ about the information that he obtained.
It was in a footnote and he didn't follow up on it.
There was no analysis of that.
So I'm the only one who has ever tried to make a more detailed case that that's exactly what happened.
I forget, is McNamara dead now?
No, McNamara is still very much alive.
Well, maybe you should stop by his house on a Saturday afternoon and interview him about all this.
If there weren't so many other problems that I'm interested in following, I would be tempted to try to do something like that, but I have too little time to devote to that sort of thing.
Well, I'll tell you what.
You come up with the phone number and I'll go ahead and interview him on the show.
Well, I'd be glad to help you on that if you want to try.
Yeah, right, like he would come on.
All right.
Well, thanks very much.
Okay.
My pleasure.