When I first began writing my Week in Review column in 1961 for the Washington Star, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were all exotic Southeast Asian countries. They had all been under French control prior to World War Two and then subject to internal strife due to Communist efforts to take over the countries. A 1954 Geneva agreement divided Vietnam into a Communist North Vietnam and a South Vietnam initially dominated by a Catholic hierarchy headed by President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, who were determined to keep the majority Buddhist population subservient. President Eisenhower had initially supported the sending of a small number of U.S. military advisers to South Vietnam, and the CIA was reportedly aiding the Laotian non-Communist side.

But like most Americans in the early 1960s, I was more focused on the U.S.-Soviet tensions, highlighted by the Berlin crisis and then the Cuban Missile crisis. President Kennedy had been persuaded by Eisenhower on the importance of aiding these Southeast Asian countries to prevent the spread of Communism. And he began sending more military teams to South Vietnam.

Everything began to change for me in November 1963. At the beginning of the month, Diem and his brother were kidnapped by mutinous troops and killed. It later turned out that the U.S. Government had urged the South Vietnamese military to stage a coup, but Kennedy was shocked when he learned of the murder of the leaders. That plunged the country into prolonged chaos.

Kennedy, himself, was assassinated a few weeks later in Dallas, and Lyndon B. Johnson became president with only a limited knowledge of the situation in Asia, even though Kennedy had sent him on a good will visit to South Vietnam earlier. But by the summer of 1964, it had become apparent that Vietnam, and, with it, Laos. were going to become serious campaign issues in the presidential elections that fall. Lyndon Johnson was going to seek election on his own, with Senator Hubert Humphrey as his running mate, and he was going to be running against Senator Barry Goldwater, an arch conservative. Goldwater was publicly attacking Johnson for not doing enough to bolster the South Vietnamese war effort. Throughout the government, there were meetings held on trying to formulate a sound political/military strategy for Southeast Asia.

As I wrote in “My Memoirs,” “early in August, 1964, the American public became rudely awakened about Vietnam.” I wrote: “As [Defense Secretary Robert] McNamara wrote in his memoirs, ‘Before August 1964, the American people had followed developments in Vietnam sporadically and with limited concern. The war seemed far off. Tonkin Gulf changed that.'”

Earlier in the year, the United States had approved covert military help to South Vietnam, code-named Plan 34A. On the night of July 30, a 34A mission being carried out by South Vietnamese patrol boats attacked two North Vietnamese islands in the Tonkin Gulf sough to support infiltration operations against the South. The next morning,  the U.S. destroyer Maddox began patrol in the gulf, well away from the islands.  On August 2, the Maddox reported it was being approached by high speed boats and was being attacked by torpedoes and automatic weapons.

In response President Johnson met with his top advisers and chose to seek a Joint Resolution of Congress, backing  retaliation against North Vietnam. He got it quickly: 82-2 in the Senate and 416-0 in the House. McNamara, who later soured on the war, wrote that “no doubt exists that Congress did not intend to authorize without further, full consultation,  the expansion of U.S. troops in Vietnam, from 16,000 to 550,000 men, initiating large-scale combat operations with the risk of an expanded war with China and the Soviet Union and extending U.S. involvement in Vietnam for many years to come.” Nothing was done at first. But on February 7, 1965—well after Johnson had been re-elected president—the Viet Cong attacked two U.S, camps at Pleiku, 240 miles north of Saigon. The report said that eight Americans were killed and at least 63 were wounded, and seven parked aircraft were destroyed. The attack came as Soviet Premier Kosygin was arriving in Hanoi on an official visit,  This was the worst attack against U.S. forces during this war. It also happened while McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, was on a fact-finding mission to Vietnam for President Johnson.  Bundy returned to Washington on February 8 with a pessimistic report that said “the situation in Vietnam is in deterioration and without new U.S. action, defeat appears inevitable…The stakes in Vietnam are extremely high…The  international prestige of the United States and a substantial part of our influence are directly at risk in Vietnam.”

That led to the start of regular bombing raids on North Vietnam, which the United States said would continue until North Vietnam ended what Secretary of State Dean Rusk called its “systematic campaign” to overthrow the Saigon government.

I will discuss subsequent developments and the peace negotiations in my next report.