Volume 14, Number 1 & 2 · January 29, 1970
Tonkin Bay: Was There a Conspiracy?
By Peter Dale Scott
Truth Is the First Casualty: The Gulf of Tonkin Affair—Illusion and Reality
by Joseph C. Goulden
A James B. Adler Inc. Book, published in association with Rand McNally, 285 pp., $6.95
Seaman Patrick N. Park, on the night of August 4, 1964, was directing the gun-control radar of the USS Maddox. For three hours he had heard torpedo reports from the ship's sonarman, and he had seen, two or three times, the flash of guns from a nearby destroyer, the Turner Joy, in the rainy darkness. But his radar could find no targets, 'only the occasional roll of a wave as it breaks into a whitecap.' At last, just before midnight, a target: 'a damned big one, right on us…about 1,500 yards off the side, a nice fat blip.' He was ordered to open fire; luckily, however, not all seamen blindly follow orders.
Review, 7090 words
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