• This document contains extracts from an interview with Cyrus Vance in 1970. The interview was part of a very large Oral History Project carried out by the University of Texas and the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library. The aim was to capture the memories of people involved in major events in their own words rather than through history books or newspapers or similar sources.
  
• Cyrus Vance was a very senior US politician. By the end of his career he rose to become head of the US State Department (the equivalent of the British Foreign Office).
  
• At the time of the events he was describing he was a senior official in Johnson's government.
  
• The Tonkin incident refers to an event when North Vietnamese patrol boats fired on US warships. Johnson then got Congress to pass the Tonkin resolution. This basically meant that the President could take any action which he felt was necessary in Vietnam.
  
• Four months later Johnson ordered US troops into action in Vietnam at Da Nang (see Source 1).