Vietnam, Laurel Canyon, Hippie Dream

I’ve just read a very interesting book, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops and the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream, by Dave McGowan, about the music scene that came out of Laurel Canyon in the mid to late 1960s. This tends to be a very romanticised era and scene, but McGowan’s book sheds a very different light on much of what went on - and why it may have gone on in the first place. One  random little detail regarding this idyllic scene and community: Neil Young, according to himself, gave Charles Manson the gift of a motorbike - presumably because he really liked Manson’s vibe. 

Anyway, to go to one little detail of the book. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident is where a US battleship was alleged to be attacked by the North Vietnamese communists, and thus as an enforced matter of self-defence, slightly off the US coastline way over in Vietnam, the US entered or began the Vietnam War. The truth is though that the US was clearly seeking to provoke an incident as a pretext for kickstarting full military engagement, and now it is accepted that while there may have been some genuine confusion initially due to climactic conditions as to whether any aggressive incident occurred in the Gulf of Tonkin, it is now accepted that there was no incident, and the pretext was an opportunistic fabrication. The Vietnam War was going to happen, and if not this ‘incident’, some other pretext would have been found or created.

The head of the American fleet in the Gulf of Tonkin waters was US Navy Admiral George Stephen Morrison, whose particular command there, besides the fleet as a whole, was the USS Bon Homme. And here he is below on that very ship in January 1964 with his son, James Douglas Morrison, better known as Jim Morrison of The Doors.