NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011 TOP SECRET – Sensitive
IV.C.1.
II. NSAM-288 - TONKIN GULF
1. General Character of the Period from NSAM-238 to Tonkin Gulf
In enunciating the policies of NSM-288 we had rhetorically committed ourselves to do whatever was needed to achieve cur stated objectives in South Vietnam. The program decided upon and spelled out in NSAM-288 reflected our recognition that the problem was greater than we had previously supposed and that the progress that we had previously thought we were making was more apparent than real. The program constituted a larger effort than we had undertaken before; it corresponded to our increased estimates of the magnitude of the task before us. Nevertheless, we might have chosen to do more along the lines of what we did decide to do, and above all we might have chosen to do some things that we specifically chose not to do at this time (although we began to plan for some of these on a contingency basis). If there were to be new or greater problems in the future it was because we did not correctly appraise the magnitude of the problem nor fully foresee the complexity of the difficulties we faced. There were indeed some who believed that the program we decided upon was not enough, notably the JCS who had gone on record that until aid to the VC from outside of South Vietnam was cut off. it would be impossible to eliminate the insurgency there. But the program as decided upon in 288 did correspond to the official consensus that this was a prescription suited to the illness as we diagnosed it.
There were many inhibitions that discouraged doing more than the bare necessity to get the job done. These inhibitions related, to the image of the U.S. in world affairs, to possible risks of over-reaction from the Communist side, to internal American hesitancies about our operations there, and finally to a philosophy concerning the basic social nature of what was happening in Vietnam and how wise it was for the U.S. to become very deeply involved. We had given serious thought to a program of pressures upon the North, largely covert and intended more to persuade than to compel. This was on the theory that the heart of the problem really lay not in South Vietnam but in North Vietnam. But these measures, although far from forgotten, were put on the shelf in the belief, or at least the hope, that they would not be needed.
The long year from March 1964 to April 1965 is divisible into three periods that correspond to major modifications or reformulations of policy. The first would be from March (NSAM-288) to the Tonkin Gulf affair in early August 1964, the second would be from August 1964 to February of 1965, and the third would be from February to April 1965.
From March to August 1965 we tried to make a go of it with the program approved in NSAM-288, in hope that that program would carry us toward our
