On the night of August 4, 1964, the U.S. Navy destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy reported that they were under attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin. Within hours, President Lyndon Johnson ordered the first U.S. airstrikes against North Vietnam, and on August 7, Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which gave President Johnson authority to take "all necessary measures" to prevent further aggression.

Almost everyone on the two destroyers believed at the time that they were under attack. Some still believe so, while others have since decided that what had appeared on radar screens as torpedo boats had actually been false images generated by weather conditions, birds, or American planes overhead. In a careful reconstruction of that night's events, Edwin Moise conclusively demonstrates that there was no North Vietnamese attack.

But the original report was not a lie concocted to provide an excuse for escalation; it was a genuine mistake.

To put this error in context, Moise recounts the genuine battle between the Maddox and three North Vietnamese torpedo boats just two days before the phantom incident and describes the overall context in which the United States was drifting into war during 1964. He argues that U.S. policy was inconsistent: President Johnson's senior military and civilian advisors were drawing up plans to escalate the war, but, at the same time, Johnson was cutting the U.S. military budget instead of expanding it.