At 11:37 p.m. on August 4, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson announced on national television that US air attacks against North Vietnam were underway in response to “open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America” in the Gulf of Tonkin. The president was referring to North Vietnamese PT-boat attacks on two American destroyers – the USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy – that he said had occurred earlier that day, and to his decision to order a reprisal bombing of North Vietnam. Minutes later, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara reported that the US military reprisal was an “appropriate action in view of the unprovoked attack in international waters on United States naval vessels.”

The next day, August 5, the eight-column headline on the front page of the New York Times reported:

The lead front-page story on the incident said that the president's order to bomb North Vietnam “followed a naval battle in which a number of North Vietnamese PT boats attacked two United States destroyers with torpedoes.”

A second front-page story reported that McNamara “said that the [US air] attacks had been directed against the bases used by the North Vietnamese PT boats that attacked two United States destroyers in international waters yesterday.”

In a third front-page story that day on the Tonkin Gulf incident, the Times reported that “the Defense Department announced tonight that North Vietnamese PT Boats made a ‘deliberate attack’ today on two United States destroyers patrolling international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin off North Vietnam.” Throughout its news coverage of the Tonkin incident that day and the days that followed, the Times reported the North Vietnamese attacks on the Maddox and Turner Joy on August 4 as established events as claimed by top Johnson administration officials. The Times editorial page, on August 5, in effect confirmed those events, arguing that President Johnson had presented “the American people last night with the somber facts.”