Gulf of Tonkin Resolution

And even as to a lot of those instances, there's still frequently more congressional authorization than we have here.

For Vietnam, there was the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

For the war in Iraq, there was the authorization for the use of military force.

Here, there's nothing in the way of congressional approval.

Why they haven't stepped in recently? Well, some of these are defensive actions, and that was in a way what the blockade, the Supreme Court decided with Lincoln's blockade, that that was domestic insurrection, that wasn't a foreign war.

And With these others, you did have at least a fig leaf.

Whatever Erwin might say about how comprehensive the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution or the resolution that passed Congress to begin the Iraq War, in both of those cases, these senators took it seriously.

Sure, they were being lied to in retrospect, but they took it seriously and they voted and they paid the consequence of voting.

And I would just point back to 2002, October 2002, and the words of Senator Robert Byrd, who spoke in relation to the dir- uh, the deception he believed was being played out in the justification for war with Iraq.

We began voting for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.

We were basing our votes on bad information.

We learned that the claims that the ad- th- that the ad- claims that the ad- th- that the administration then in power had made on the need for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution were simply not true, and history is repeating itself.

We tragically and belatedly learned that we had not taken enough time to consider the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.

We had not asked the right questions.

We had not gotten enough questions answered.

Anyways, then Congress voted appropriations for war, which is different than declaring war.

Vietnam, you have the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, only two members of that.

The Senate say no, and it appropriates the use of money and permits the president to strike back against attacks from northern Vietnam and to the south.

But in no way could it be said to approve a long-term and costly war.

And then his next post was Saigon, Vietnam.

We got there in, like the summer of 62 and left in 65 right after the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.

And then as his career shifted to Latin America and places like Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala, Nicaragua during the Sandinista Revolution, Haiti, I traveled with him and lived in those countries.

was an incredible education, Fred, but it came with a lot of danger and difficulty, sacrifice.

Mm-hmm

... with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

They did it with the Gulf War, Afghanistan, Iraq.

All those after the things were underway.

[laughs]

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 increased US involvement in-

In Tonkin

...

Okay.

The Gulf of Tonkin resolution has to be understood within that context.

All right.

Even that said, that was not the right way to proceed.

Okay.

But that was a starting point for criticism of what became known not just punitively in kind of colloquial terms of on the op-ed pages, but came to loom conceptually in people's minds as this real and dangerous phenomenon of the imperial executive.

It was the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and discussion around it that really represents the kind of sea change in how executive authority was viewed.

Okay.

The Johnson administration presented the incidents as evidence of North Vietnamese aggression.

Congress subsequently passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving Johnson broad authority to take military action in Vietnam.

The resolution came, became one of key, the key turning points in American involvement, and in 1965, the America, uh, the United States launched Operation Rolling Thunder, which is a fantastic name.

[laughs]