Defense: Yep, We Were There

Mrs. Joseph Kress, 44, a proud Navy mother in Dubuque, Iowa, walked into the Dubuque Telegraph-Herald newsroom with a little item for the paper's servicemen's column. She had a letter from her son, James J. Kress, 20, a fireman aboard the U.S. destroyer Richard S. Edwards, and she wanted Jimmy's friends to know where he was. The letter began: "Dear Mom and Dad: In case you haven't heard the names of those destroyers that were attacked in the Tonkin Gulf last Friday night, they were the R. S. Edwards and the Morton. Yep, we were there, all right."

The Telegraph-Herald was delighted to run Jimmy's letter; indeed, to Mrs. Kress's great astonishment, the letter made the front pages of newspapers all over the U.S. For the most part, it contained a lively, although almost certainly inaccurate account of the mysterious Sept. 18th destroyer action in the Tonkin Gulf. Wrote young Kress: "We picked up about seven contacts on the radar screen. The Edwards blew two of them out of the water for certain and shot up another one. I don't know if the Morton destroyed any or not. One of them boats like to got us. It was trying to sneak up on our rear end and almost succeeded. It came to within 2,000 yards before we blew it up."

Jimmy Kress's letter was just one more embarrassment to a Pentagon already embarrassed by the third Tonkin Gulf incident. The incident came at a time when Barry Goldwater was trying to make a political issue out of Washington's ability to maintain instant communications with combat areas. When he first got the word, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara broke off a news conference, canceled a speaking engagement that had been scheduled for Chicago later that day.

Some 24 hours later, McNamara announced that two U.S. destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf had been approached by "four unidentified vessels with hostile intent." The destroyers fired, and the craft disappeared. But there were so many conflicting accounts of the action that the Pentagon finally sent an investigating team to the area. Returning to Washington, the investigators said only that they had verified two of the radar contacts, but "there may have been more."

The Defense Department also refused to reveal the names of the destroyers on the claim that they carried highly secret electronic snooping gear. But after Jimmy Kress's letter, the Pentagon grudgingly confirmed that the destroyers were, in fact, the Morton and the Richard S. Edwards. After all, how can you stay mum when Mom out there in Dubuque wants the folks to know where her boy is?