A Tonkin Gulf In Reverse
Nothing To See Here, Keep Moving
We’ve recently seen release of ever more definitive documents showing that nothing happened in the Gulf of Tonkin, despite the use of the “Incident” as Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam War MacGuffin.
Now we learn that the Kennedy Administration’s finest hour, the storied grace under pressure of a wise beyond his years Jack Kennedy, was kind of a bust too.
Specifically, the moment of high seas drama when Soviet Missile ships turned back from the US Cuba blockade, the Eyeball to Eyeball/Other Fellow Blinked stuff – that didn’t happen either.
The Washington Post’s Michael Dobbs is unleashing his account of the Missile Crisis semi-serially in the paper, with vast companion documents and excerpts available on the National Security Archives website.