In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson authorized covert raids against North Vietnam under Operations Plan (OPLAN) 34A but these were too small to have any real impact. Johnson and his top officials increasingly believed that averting a Communist victory in South Vietnam would require overt U.S. military action but Johnson did not want a war. He wanted to cut the U.S. military budget not expand it to make funds available for his domestic programs.On July 31 the destroyer Maddox began a reconnaissance cruise off the coast of North Vietnam.

On August 2 near an island that had been shelled in an OPLAN 34A raid a few nights before three North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the Maddox. On the night of August 4 the Maddox and another destroyer the Turner Joy more than half expecting to be attacked saw what they interpreted as hostile torpedo boats on their radars and reported themselves under attack. The following day the United States bombed North Vietnam in retaliation.Congress promptly passed almost unanimously and with little debate a resolution granting President Johnson authority to take "all necessary measures" to deal with aggression in Vietnam. He had been eager to get this blank check for war but he frustrated senior officials by his reluctance to cash it in the months that followed. He finally began significant escalation in February 1965. The incident of August 4 1964 is at the heart of the book. The author interviewed about twenty Americans who had been present.

Most had believed at the time that an attack was occurring. By the time they were interviewed there were more doubters than believers but the ones who still believed were more confident in their opinions. Factoring in degree of assurance one could say that the witnesses were split right down the middle on this fundamental question. Other forms of evidence including intercepted North Vietnamese naval communications interrogations of North Vietnamese torpedo boat personnel captured later in the war and the destroyers' detailed records of the location and duration of radar contacts make it clear that no attack occurred that night.Intercepted North Vietnamese communications were of great value in this book's reconstruction of the events but they were much less useful to U.S. personnel in 1964. The United States had only recently begun seriously listening to North Vietnamese naval communications and had not yet learned enough to put intercepts in context and extract their complete meanings.