Lie Witness: How We Got Into Vietnam
Next Monday is the 25th anniversary of the shameful day when mendacity swept America into its longest war.
And Congress wasn’t told that the second attack never happened at all. A malfunctioning radar, freakish weather conditions, and jumpy nerves caused the two destroyers to open fire on an enemy that wasn’t there. Soon Lyndon Johnson realized it. “Hell,” said LBJ a few days later, “those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish.”
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But we were in the war.
Everyone knew that already but the American people, and Stockdale understood that he could be turned into the propaganda coup of the war. For the seven and a half years he was captive he protected his secret any way he could, going so far at one point as to attempt suicide.
But in the few months allotted to him to put the truth before the country, he hadn’t. So we put down the book on John Paul Vann and wrote Stockdale a letter asking him why.
He’d strayed from our question, but he returned to it. “I have one afterthought,” he wrote, “and it deals with loyalties. Suppose somebody said to me (which they have never done) ‘If you were loyal to your country you would have sacrificed their position of leadership, bowed out of the scrap and become an (ineffectual I’m sure) protestor.’
Stockdale observes, “I sometimes think of myself as the phoenix who arose from the ashes to answer that question.”
