later write: Many Senators who accepted the Gulf of Tonkin resolution without question might well not have done so had they foreseen that it would subsequently be interpreted as a sweeping Congressional endorsement for the conduct of a large-scale war in Asia. Fulbright hearings and opposition to war By his own admission, Fulbright knew almost nothing about Vietnam until he met, in 1965, Bernard B. Fall, a French journalist who often wrote about Vietnam. Speaking to Fall radically changed Fulbright's thinking about Vietnam, as Fall asserted that it simply not true that Ho Chi Minh was a Sino-Soviet "puppet" who wanted to overthrow the government of South Vietnam because his masters in Moscow and Beijing had presumably told him to do so. Fall's influence served as the catalyst for the change in Fulbright's thinking, as Fall introduced him to the writings of Philippe Devillers and Jean Lacouture. Fulbright made it his mission to learn as much as possible about Vietnam and indeed he had learned so much that at a meeting with the Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Fulbright was able to correct several mistakes made by the former about Vietnamese history, much to Rusk's discomfort. Although President Lyndon Johnson cajoled Fulbright into sponsoring the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in August 1964, his relationship with the President soured after the 1965 U.S. bombing of Pleiku in central Vietnam — which Fulbright consider a breach of Johnson’s commitment to not escalate the war. Fulbright’s opposition to the war in Vietnam took root, and beginning in 1966, he chaired public Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on the conduct of the war. Fulbright invited President Johnson to appear before the Committee in January 1966 to explain why America was fighting in Vietnam, an offer that the President refused. On 4 February 1966, Fulbright held the first hearings about the Vietnam War, where George F. Kennan and General James M. Gavin appeared as expert witnesses. The hearings had been prompted by Johnson's request for additional $400 million to pay for the war, which gave Fulbright an excuse to hold them. Kennan testified that the Vietnam War was a grotesque distortion of the containment policy that he had outlined in 1946 and 1947. The World War II hero Gavin testified that it was his opinion as a soldier that the war could not be won as it being fought. On 4 February 1966, in an