Lyndon Baines Johnson: Remarks on the Gulf of Tonkin Incident

Glossary

• Ambassador Stevenson former Illinois governor and two-time Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 1961 to 1965
• destroyer a fast, maneuverable warship designed to protect larger vessels in a convoy
• Gulf of Tonkin an arm of the South China Sea bordered by northern Vietnam (whose capital, Hanoi, was once known as Tonkin) and China
• Maddox third U.S. naval destroyer named after William A. T. Maddox, a marine captain in the nineteenth century, the Maddox (DD-731) was launched after a Nazi dive-bomber sank its predecessor in the Mediterranean in 1943
• Security Council the United Nations of a body within the United Nations consisting of five permanent members (the United States, Russia, China, Great Britain, and France) and ten elected members; preserving peace is its goal
• Senator Goldwater Barry Goldwater, Republican senator from Arizona and Johnson’s opponent in the 1964 presidential election