Government Lies From Vietnam

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harmed citizens, but also put a damper on there own fight for justice. Just a few years before the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the CIA had failed miserably with their attempted invasion of the Bay of Pigs.
The government’s need to lie can be summed up by Victor Zorza in his Washington Post Article of November 1965: “In psychological warfare… the intelligence agencies of the democratic countries suffer from the grave disadvantage that in attempting to damage the adversary they must also deceive their own public.” Shortly before sending General Paul D. Harkins off to Vietnam, President Kennedy meet with him at the White House. In addition to being a general, Harkins was also the head of the United States Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG). In this meeting, Kennedy gave explicit instructions that he wanted to be fully informed on every aspect of the war. This included both the good news and the bad news. As Commander-in-Chief, Kennedy had every right to this information, however he ...

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war was during the night of Tet, The Vietnamese New Year. The United States Army was expecting this attack, but they could not be sure of where exactly it would be. It turns out that the battle was in every place that had at least a decent size population. The Viet Cong had planned roughly one hundred hit points throughout the country. One hit point was the newly rebuilt U.S. Embassy. Two and a half million dollars had recently been spent to fix the embassy up after a previous hit. It turned out that the tax money used to rebuild the embassy should have been saved instead of spent. After all of the festivities and celebrations had been completed, nearly 60,000 Viet Cong spread out all ...

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