U.S. Planned Before Tonkin For War on North, Files Show

The Johnson administration planned for major American military action against North Vietnam nearly five months before the 1964 Tonkin Gulf incident, according to secret government documents made public yesterday by the New York Times.

These plans were made, the documents, show, at a time when the United States already was directing clandestine sabotage operations in the North.

Two months before the attack on two American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin on Aug. 2 and 4, 1964, the administration sent a Canadian diplomat, J. Blair Seaborn, on a secret mission to Hanoi where he is quoted as telling Premier Pham Van Dong that "in the event of escalation (of the war) the greatest devastation would result for the D.R.V. (North Vietnam) itself."

It was the Tonkin incident - called totally unprovoked by the administration - which led Congress on Aug. 7, 1964 to pass a resolution declaring that the United States was "prepares, as the President directs, to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force," to assist South Vietnam. It was on this resolution that President Johnson subsequently leaned heavily to widen the war.

The documents are part of a multi-volumed collection of records and comments assembled under the direction of then Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. The bulk of the documents disclosed this far by the Times are of military origin but include some White House and State Department papers that reached the Pentagon. Other documents were only alluded to or quoted from in the newspaper's story.

A National Security Action Memorandum of March 17, 1964, presumably the result of a presidential decision, set out both the administration's political aims and the basis for its military planning. A cable sent three days later by the President to Henry Cabot Lodge, then the American ambassador in Saigon illuminates his intentions.

The memorandum says that "we seek an independent non-Communist South Vietnam" but "do not require that it serve as a Western base or as a member of a Western alliance. South Vietnam must be free, however, to accept outside assistance as required to maintain its security."

Repeating language from a McNamara memorandum of March 16 to the President (language in part drawn in turn from a memorandum to McNamara on Jan. 22 from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor) the National Security Council document reflects the prevailing belief in what President Eisenhower had called the "domino effect" of the loss of South Vietnam.

Unless the objective is achieved in South Vietnam, it says, "almost all of Southeast Asia will probably fall under Communist dominance" or accommodate to Communism. The Philippines, it was judged, "would become shaky" and "the threat to India on the west, Australia and New Zealand to the South, and Taiwan, Korea, and Japan to the north would be greatly increased.

The policy decision then was to "prepare immediately to be in a position on 72 hours' notice to initiate the full range of Laotian and Cambodian 'border control actions'" as well as "the 'retaliatory actions' against North Vietnam and to be in a position on 30 days' notice to initiate the program of 'graduated overt military pressure' against North Vietnam . . . ."

The President's cable to Lodge says that "our planning for action against the North is on a contingency basis" on the grounds that "overt military action" then was "premature." Mr. Johnson offered as one reason that statement that "we expect a showdown between the Chinese and Soviet Communist parties and action against the North will be more practicable after than before a showdown."

The President also told Lodge that part of his job then was "knocking down the idea of neutralization" of Vietnam, an idea advanced by then French President Charles deGaulle, "wherever it rears its ugly head and on this point I think that nothing is more important than to stop neutralist talk wherever we can by whatever means we can."