The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution or the Southeast Asia Resolution, Pub. L. 88–408, 78 Stat. 384, enacted August 10, 1964, was a joint resolution that the United States Congress passed on August 7, 1964, in response to the Gulf of Tonkin incident. It is of historic significance because it gave U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson authorization, without a formal declaration of war by Congress, to use conventional military force in Southeast Asia. Specifically, the resolution authorized the president to do whatever necessary in order to assist "any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty." This included involving armed forces. It was opposed in the Senate only by Senators Wayne Morse (D-OR) and Ernest Gruening (D-AK). Senator Gruening objected to "sending our American boys into combat in a war in which we have no business, which is not our war, into which we have been misguidedly drawn, which is steadily being escalated." The Johnson administration subsequently relied upon the resolution to begin its rapid escalation of U.S. military involvement in South Vietnam and open warfare between North Vietnam and the United States.
Towards the incident In March 1956, the North Vietnamese leadership approved tentative measures to revive the southern insurgency in December 1956. A communist-led uprising began against Diem's government in April 1957. The North Vietnamese Communist Party approved a "people's war" on the South at a session in January 1959, and on July 28, North Vietnamese forces invaded Laos to maintain and upgrade the Ho Chi Minh trail, in support of insurgents in the south. In September 1960, COSVN, North Vietnam's southern headquarters, gave an order for a full scale coordinated uprising by the Viet Cong in South Vietnam against the government and 1/3 of the population was soon living in areas of communist control. About 40,000 communist soldiers infiltrated from North Vietnam into the south from 1961 to 1963. Throughout 1963, the administration of U.S. president John F. Kennedy was concerned that the South Vietnamese regime of Ngo Dinh Diem was losing the war to the North Vietnamese directed Viet Cong. Such concerns were intensified after Diem was overthrown and killed in a CIA-supported coup on 2 November 1963. On 19 December 1963, the Defense Secretary Robert McNamara visited Saigon and reported to President Lyndon B. Johnson that the situation was "very disturbing" as "current trends, unless reversed in the next two or three months, will lead to neutralization at best or more likely to a Communist-controlled state." McNamara further reported that the Viet Cong were winning the war as they controlled "larger percentages of the population, greater amounts of territory and have destroyed or occupied more strategic hamlets than expected." About the Revolutionary Command Council as the South Vietnamese military junta called itself, McNamara was scathing, saying "there is no organized government in South Vietnam" as the junta was "indecisive and drifting" with the generals being "so preoccupied with essentially political affairs" that they had no time for the war.
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