Following a confirmed skirmish two days earlier, USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy radioed reports of a renewed torpedo boat attack in stormy, poor-visibility conditions on August 4, 1964. The reports, later shown to be based on faulty radar and sonar readings rather than an actual attack, were used by the Johnson administration to justify the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, granting broad war powers that escalated US involvement in Vietnam.
Captain John Herrick, aboard the Maddox, sent increasingly uncertain messages that night, at one point cabling that 'freak weather effects' and 'overeager sonarmen' may have caused false target reports, urging a 'complete evaluation before any further action.' That caveat was largely ignored in Washington.
President Lyndon Johnson, already primed by the confirmed August 2 incident, used the reported second attack to seek congressional authorization for military action. Within days, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution almost unanimously, giving Johnson sweeping authority to escalate US involvement without a formal declaration of war.
Declassified documents and the National Security Agency's own historical review later concluded that no second attack had actually occurred, that radar and sonar operators had misread weather and their own ships' wakes. The incident became a textbook case of how contested, ambiguous intelligence can be marshaled to justify a war whose costs, in Vietnamese and American lives, would prove staggering.