In 1964, the White House and Defense Department lied and misrepresented a supposed act of naval aggression in order to fraudulently justify launching a war they sought for other reasons.

Its relevance to the present day is left as an exercise for the reader.

The United States government decided that they wanted to escalate the war in Vietnam. For public relations reasons, they manufactured an incident and used it as an excuse.

Somewhere between 1.5 million and 3.5 million people died. The United States got Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian restaurants, and also 60,000 dead soldiers and 300,000 wounded soldiers.

'Tis an ill wind, and all that.

Basically declassified evidence points to Sec of Defense at the time intentionally lying to Congress to get the US involved in Vietnam regarding Gulf of Tonkin attack.