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He structured the bombing of four North Vietnamese torpedo boat bases and an oil storage warehouse that had been considered three months beforehand (Gulf of Tonkin, n.d.).
President Johnson then went on television and told the American people that recurring actions of aggression against the military of the United States must be met not only with attentive resistance, but with an affirmative response. The Congress accepted Johnson's choices to bomb North Vietnam and passed what has become recognized as the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. It passed in the Senate by 88 votes to 2 and in the House of Representatives by 416 to 0. This declaration sanctioned the President to take all essential actions against Vietnam and the NLF. Johnson's conviction that the intimidation raid on North Vietnam in August, 1964, would influence Ho Chi Minh to cut off all assistance to the NLF was unsubstantiated. In the time before the November election, the NLF carried out a sequence of assaults and only two days prior to the election, the U.S. air base in the vicinity of Saigon was shelled and four Americans died (Gulf of Tonkin, n.d.).
The Gulf of Tonkin Incident was a key turning point in United States military participation in Vietnam. Because of President Johnson's declarations, the United States Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. This declaration sanctioned Johnson to strike back for the alleged assaults in the Gulf of Tonkin....
The decree permitted the president to take all needed steps, comprising the utilization of armed force, to aid any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty demanding aid in defense of its freedom. In spirit, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution allowed Johnson to augment the United States' contribution in North and South Vietnam. Prior to Johnson becoming president, there were roughly sixteen thousand Americans acting as advisors to the South Vietnamese military. Researchers often debate whether or not these soldiers were merely serving as advisors or were essentially waging conflict against South Vietnamese revolutionaries and their North Vietnamese allies. Nonetheless, after the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, Johnson improved the amount of American troops helping in South Vietnam to more than 500,000. These men and women were undoubtedly employed in tangible fighting, but no one at the time would admit that (Gulf of Tonkin Incident, 2010).
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