WASHINGTON -- Ernest Gruening of Alaska and Wayne Morse of Oregon are dead now but if -- 20 years ago -- Congress had heeded their warnings, many of the 58,012 Americans killed in the Vietnam War might be alive today.
Morse and Gruening, however, were outcasts, lonely echoes in a Senate brimming with war-fever patriotism and hell-bent on punishing North Vietnam.
On Aug. 1-2, 1964, North Vietnamese PT boats attacked the U.S. destroyer Maddox without provocation in the Gulf of Tonkin and two days later enemy torpedoes cut through the water -- their target: the Maddox and another destroyer, the C. Turner Joy.
President Lyndon Johnson, armed with what he called this new provocation in the simmering Vietnamese civil war, called on Congress to join him in a show of American resolve.
Specifically, Johnson, then in office less than a year, asked the Senate and House to pass a resolution 'making it clear that our government is united in its determination to take all necessary measures in support of freedom and in defense of peace in Southeast Asia.'
Within days, the resolution swept unanimously through the House and shortly after 1 p.m. Aug. 7, the Senate acquiesced 88-2. Gruening and Morse cast the lone dissents.
Known in history as the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, it gave Johnson a 'blank check' to wage an undeclared war in Southeast Asia -- and Johnson never allowed Congress to forget.
Gruening, the most distinguished public servant in Alaska's history and Morse, a party-switching maverick with a long career in the Senate, warned colleagues of what would happen.
They said that passage would lead to an open-ended war without hope of victory and although some others, notably George Aiken of Vermont, expressed concern, Gruening and Morse stood alone.
In the hours before the Senate's fateful passage of the Gulf of Tonkin, they knew all their warnings were about to be ignored.
But Morse, never a man short of words, once again made a prophetic remark that he and Gruening had made time and again.
'As the senator from Alaska has said over and over again, and as I have joined him in saying, all Vietnam is not worth the life of a single American boy; and the killing of a single American in South Vietnam is an unjustified killing.'
The Gulf of Tonkin resolution gave the president, as commander in chief, the power to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.
Using the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon, poured American troops and materiel into Vietnam and, to a much smaller extent, Laos and Cambodia.
At the peak of the buildup, in April 1969, the United States had 543,400 military in Southeast Asia.
By the end, there were 58,012 killed and 153,303 wounded. About 1,200 are still listed as missing in action.
As the United States became deeper and deeper embroiled in southeast Asia, the nation was torn by anti-war riots and anti-war demonstrations, young Americans sneaked accross the border into Canada and fled to Scandanavia to escape the draft while others were clapped in jail, and, worst of all, for the first time in American history, returning veterans were shunned and ostracized.
Johnson's political career was destroyed; the war split the Democratic Party in 1968, very possibly leading to the Nixon presidency, and Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy and George McGovern became the national anti-war candidates.
And the Gulf of Tonkin resolution also marked a turning point in relations between Congress and the executive branch on the conduct of foreign policy and the use of military force, a confrontation that persists to this day.
The 'blank-check' resolution came at a time in American history when Congress was subservient to the dictates of the White House on foreign affairs -- a master-slave relationship rather than the equal partnerership envisioned in the Constitution.
As a direct result of the Vietnam war, there grew over the years a new demand for a partnership, leading to a confrontation that exists to this day.
Charles Ferris, chief counsel to the Senate Democrats from the early 1960s until he became chairman of the Federal Communications Commission in 1977, said he could not pinpoint the time the mood changed on Capitol Hill but added it was 'well before' the 1968 Tet offensive.
Even at the time the resolution passed, Ferris said, there were a number of senators -- Fulbright of Arkansas, Mansfield of Montana and Russell of Georgia -- who had no enthusiasm for what they were doing.
But, Ferris said, 'the rhetoric surrounding it was all wrapped up in the notion of hot pursuit. ... There was none of this notion of a functional equivalency of war.'
Ferris also said that Johnson at the time was a popular president and 1964 was still part of an era that decreed 'you back your president' and 'you rally around the flag.'
'Vietnam really changed that,' Ferris said. 'Vietnam burst that bubble.'
Ferris recalled that Sen. J. William Fulbright, D-Ark., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had great misgivings about the resolution.
'I think he had tremendous remorse that he did not fight forcefully for what I think his insticts were telling him,' Ferris said. 'But the only troops he had were Morse and Gruening and the institution was demanding action.'
Similarly, he said that Sen. Richard Russell, D-Ga., who was chairman of the Senate Armed Service Committee and has since died, had great doubts -- due to an isolationist streak or the feeling the war could not be won.
'Russell in private had very strong reservations,' Ferris said, adding that Mansfield, then the Senate majority leader, felt if Russell had used his great influence with Johnson, the president 'would have moved much more quickly.'
Eventually these private reservations, notably in the case of Fulbright, Mansfield, Frank Church of Idaho, John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky and others,led Congress to 'ventilate' the issue of the war and to assert a much stronger role.
By 1970, after earlier failures and still more defeats to come, Congress put its mark on anti-war legislation by denying the administration money to carry on the war.
But the major piece of legislation, which stemmed directly from the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and the Vietnam War, was the War Powers Resolution adopted in 1973 over President Nixon's veto.
The resolution, invoked for the first time in the Lebanon crisis, requires the president to notify Congress whenever he sends U.S. combat troops into action or situations where hostilities are imminent.
The president then has 60 days to withdraw the troops unless Congress declares war or otherwise votes to allow them to remain. The president is given an additional 30 days, if necessary, for the orderly withdrawal of the troops.
Since its adoption, successive administrations have called it unconstitutional because it interferes with the president's authority as commander in chief and his responsibility for the conduct of foreign policy. But the administrations have sought to avoid a showdown with Congress on the issue.
Congressional demands for its share in the making of foreign policy and the use of American military might is probably now at its peak - with full debate and action on the Marines pulled out of Lebanon, military aid to El Salvador, troop exercises and military construction in Honduras, clandestine help to the rebels in Nicaragua, modern weapons for Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
At the same time, there is more and more concern about the war powers act, within the halls of Capitol Hill and among the military.
In late June, Vice Admiral James A. (Ace) Lyons, deputy chief of naval operations, called for repeal of the resolution, calling it 'insidous' and an 'impediment.'
'The practical effect is to reduce the effectiveness of a classic tool of presidential power,' Lyons told a seminar at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., '... (it) devalues a show of force as a deterrent.'
Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the Republican presidential candidate in the summer the Gulf of Tonkin resolution passed, has voiced similiar misgivings, warning that 535 members of Congress cannot conduct a war.
'These things go in cycles,' Ferris said when asked if there had been a real change in the congressional role. 'There will be a questioning period for a while.'
He said Congress can 'influence' but also cautioned that senators and congressmen 'have to assume responsibility. An awful lot of them have been acquiescent. ... It is a much easier role.'
Twenty years ago, Wayne Morse, a man of intense feelings about many subjects, was returning to his office after the Gulf of Tonkin vote, a beaten man.
Riding on the vintage underground trolley from the Capitol to the Senate Office building, Morse told Ferris, 'Charlie, this day will go down in history as one of the great days of infamy.'
