presidential blunders

It's an understatement to say that the Vietnam war was a boondoggle. And Lyndon Johnson owns it. President Kennedy had intended to reduce the number of U.S. military advisers in Vietnam, but LBJ reversed Kennedy's order to pull a thousand troops out. Next, incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964 gave Johnson the authority he wanted to ratchet up activity in Vietnam in an attempt to stop the spread of Communism. But the Gulf of Tonkin incidents, in which it was purported that North Vietnam ships attacked U.S. vessels, was mostly a ruse...and Johnson knew it. In taped conversations between LBJ and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, LBJ admitted that the Gulf of Tonkin incidents weren't definitive. Here's a transcript snippet of their September 18, 1965 conversation, as featured in Michael Beschloss's excellent Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson's Secret White House Tapes, 1964-1965.

LBJ: Take the best military man you have, though, and just tell him that I've been watching and listening to these stories for thirty years before the Armed Services Committee, and we are always sure we've been attacked. Then in a day or two, we are not so damned sure. And then in a day or two more, we're sure it didn't happen at all!
McNamara: Yeah, yeah.
LBJ: Just say that you want to be sure...that we were fired upon. Because you just came in...a few weeks ago and said that, "Damn, they are launching an attack on us. They are firing on us." When we got through with all the firing, we concluded maybe they hadn't fired at all.

Pictured are Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Johnson and McNamara at a Cabinet meeting, courtesy of Yoichi R. Okamoto, White House Press Office.