The Titans, Story Behind The Movies, Chapter 14

Navy pilot Commander James Stockdale (later a Vietnam prisoner of war, winner of a Medal of Honor, Navy Vice Admiral and Ross Perot’s Vice Presidential running mate in 1992) was flying in the skies above the Gulf of Tonkin that August night. He had also been there two nights before - on August 2, 1964 - when U.S. Navy ships had been attacked by the North Vietnamese. Here is what Admiral Stockdale recalls about the night of August 4:

I was out there, I wasn’t waiting for orders, I took it upon myself to get out there where they thought the boat was and try to kill it if they didn’t. But it was fruitless and as time went on, one guy said...I think I got a PT boat trailing me. I said, I have you in sight, I’ll fly up from behind and I’ll take care of him if I see him. And there was nothing there.

During the 1992 presidential campaign, Admiral Stockdale told reporters:

I had the best seat in the house to watch that event and our destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets - there were no PT boats there...There was nothing there but black water and American fire power.

Senator J. William Fulbright, the long-standing Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, ultimately held hearings on the Gulf of Tonkin incident. In his 1989 book, The Price of Empire, he wrote that the Pentagon had misrepresented the actual events:

Only when we began those later hearings on the Tonkin Gulf did it really begin to dawn on me that we had been deceived. In the beginning--before Vietnam, that is--it never occurred to me that presidents and their secretaries of state and defense would deceive a Senate committee.

Senator Fulbright draws a sobering conclusion from the hearings he conducted:

I thought you could trust them to tell you the truth, even if they did not tell you everything. But I was naive, and the misrepresentation of the Tonkin Gulf affair was very effective in deceiving the Foreign Relations Committee and the country, and me, because we didn't believe it possible that we could be so completely misled.

Many more people were massively injured and killed before the war was finally over. Nine-year-old Kim Phuc, whose village was bombed in 1972 by a South Vietnamese pilot with bad information, pierced the hearts of people around the world when they saw her terror-filled face and her napalm-burned body. (She is still alive today and is living in Canada.)

Many other "bright shining lies" were revealed before the Vietnam War was finally over. In the wake of those lies, President Richard Nixon resigned and America’s soul was shaken to the core.