6. The Gulf of Tonkin attack never happened.
In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson (the 36th president of the United States) told the public that some U.S. ships were attacked by the Vietnamese—known as the Gulf of Tonkin attack. He claimed this in order to obtain the support of the American people to justify their entry into the conflict in Vietnam.
However, just a year later, the president admitted there was virtually no attack and was quoted as saying, “For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.” In 2005, official documents from the National Security Agency were released and they confirmed that the whole Gulf of Tonkin attack never occurred and that it was designed to get support.
In the 2003 documentary The Fog of War, LBJ’s former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara admitted that the August 2 USS Maddox attack happened with no Defense Department response, but the August 4 Gulf of Tonkin attack never happened.
