was close to despair as he wrote in a letter to Erich Fromm that this "literally a miasma of madness in the city, enveloping everyone in the administration and most of those in Congress. I am at a loss of words to describe the idiocy of what we are doing." Seeing that the Johnson administration was reeling in the wake of the Tet Offensive, Fulbright in February 1968 called for hearings by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee into the Gulf of Tonkin incident, as Fulbright noted that there were several aspects of the claim that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked American destroyers in international waters that seemed dubious and questionable. McNamara was subpoenaed, and the televised hearings led to "fireworks" as Fulbright repeatedly asked difficult answers about De Soto raids on North Vietnam and Operation 34A. On 11 March 1968, Secretary of State Dean Rusk appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Fulbright made his sympathies clear by wearing a tie decorated with doves carrying olive branches. Through Rusk was scheduled to testify about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the previous day in The New York Times had appeared a leaked story that Westmoreland had requested for Johnson to send 206,000 more troops to Vietnam. During Rusk's two days of testimony, the main issue turned out to be the troop request with Fulbright insisting for Johnson to seek congressional approval first. In response to Fulbright's questions, Rusk stated that if more troops were sent to Vietnam, the president would consult "appropriate members of Congress." Most notably, several senators who had voted with Stennis and the other hawks now aligned themselves with Fulbright, which indicated that Congress was turning against the war. In late October 1968, after Johnson announced a halt in bombing in North Vietnam in accordance with peace talks, Fulbright stated that his hopefulness that the announcement would lead to a general ceasefire. Nixon administration In March 1969, Secretary of State William P. Rogers testified at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the Nixon administration's foreign policy, Fulbright telling Rogers that the appearance was both useful and promising. In April 1969, Fublright received a letter from a former soldier who served in Vietnam, Ron Ridenhour, containing the results of Ridenhour's investigation into the My Lai massacre, said that he had heard so many stories from other soldiers about a massacre that had happened in March 1968 at