On August 6, 1964, the seventy-seven-year-old junior senator from Alaska, Ernest Gruening, delivered a brief address in the Senate chambers. The upper chamber was considering the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which President Lyndon Johnson had submitted to obtain approval for retaliatory air raids against North Vietnam. Though Gruening conceded the difficulty of rebuffing a presidential request “couched in terms of high principle and national interest,” he dissented from Johnson's approach for constitutional, historical, and policy reasons. The Alaskan reminded his colleagues that the aura of increased presidential authority associated with the Cold War did not absolve senators of their “right and duty” to express opinions on foreign policy issues, particularly “if those views embody doubt or dissent.” The specifics of Vietnam policy, Gruening reasoned, made Senate action even more important. He considered the administration's policy inherently contradictory. Though Johnson had contended that only the South Vietnamese could win the war, an “inevitable development” of “our steadily increasing involvement” would be the weakening of the very regime that the president deemed essential to long-term victory. Regardless of the tactical problems, Gruening could detect “no threat to our national security” from a Communist victory in what he perceived as a Vietnamese civil war. Indeed, he claimed, “all [of] Vietnam is not worth the life of a single American boy.” Most important, the military escalation violated traditional American ideals.