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The Tet Offensive

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The North Vietnamese assault on Khe Sanh began on January 21, 1968, and the endless shelling of U.S. Marine positions there reminded many of the opening salvo against the French in Dienbienphu. Almost immediately, the White House received reports of wild, bloody assaults on almost every town of significance in South Vietnam. At first, the reports were too shocking to accept. Then General Westmoreland interpreted the nationwide orgy of violence as a major diversionary effort. The enemy, he believed, was attempting to divert America's attentions away from the primary target, the base at Khe Sanh. It took days for Westmoreland to realize that that was exactly what the North Vietnamese wanted him to think.

The most brutal North Vietnamese attack of the Tet Offensive was on the old imperial capital of Hue in central South Vietnam. This stately, attractive city was destroyed by the North Vietnamese invaders. They took few prisoners, fighting house to house and executing innocent civilians.The civilian murders were conservatively estimated to be 3,000, and it would take American and South Vietnamese forces three weeks and 5,000 killed in action before Hue was liberated. The North Vietnamese government would always claim that the atrocities in Hue were accidents or the unfortunate consequences of urban combat. In reality, horror for the sake of horror had been part of the battle plan, and terrorizing the South Vietnamese populace into a surrender was just another tactic. More than 116,000 of Hue's 140,000 residents were left homeless. This type of horror, accompanied by nationwide attacks that kept U.S. forces pinned down everywhere, were also supposed to stimulate high desertion rates and mutinies in the American ranks. In fact, most American troops saw the Tet Offensive as a fight for survival. Mass desertions or mutinies never took place. Meanwhile, American and South Vietnamese forces had also contributed to the final destruction of Hue. The Vietnam-influenced expression "it had to be destroyed in order to be saved" guided the U.S. military approach there.

Adding to all the battle plans, objectives, and horror were long-lasting myths and legends born in the misery of the Tet bloodbath. One of the more popular Tet Offensive myths was that the North Vietnamese deliberately timed the carnage to influence voters in America's first presidential primary. Giap and Ho Chi Minh supposedly expected Senator McCarthy to topple Lyndon Johnson in New Hampshire, build a bandwagon for his antiwar message, will the White House, and abandon the U.S. cause in Vietnam to Hanoi and the communist victory. However, the New Hampshire primary took place weeks after the Tet Offensive began, and it was unlikely that the North Vietnamese leadership studied the voting trends of New Hampshire residents.

Another Tet Offensive legend involved the alleged North Vietnamese plan to make sure that sympathetic South Vietnamese communists were in the first ranks of the assault. Given the wild, suicide-styled attacks in the opening days of the Tet Offensive, many of these South Vietnamese operatives would be killed. According to the legend, this South Vietnamese massacre was also the objective. Fewer troops in the field would mean less of a power base for South Vietnamese-based communists, permitting North Vietnam to will full control of all southern residents who opposed both the Saigon regime and the American presence. Consequently, whether Hanoi won or lost, this legend suggests, North Vietnam would always determine the future of the South. To early political analysts of the Tet Offensive, this interpretation seemed to make good sense. It also added to Giap and Ho's reputations as brilliant military and political strategists. But winning the war against the Americans and the Saigon regime had been the immediate and primary goal of the Hanoi regime in the Tet Offensive. Deliberately sacrificing thousands of crack troops and supporters for elusive postbattle and political reasons was never part of the grand plan. The deaths of thousands of South Vietnamese-based Vietcong would be a consequence of the carnage, not the main goal.

As the battle raged, American television viewers remained transfixed. After all the effort to prop up the Saigon government, and after thousands of Americans killed, the enenry remained in control of much of the country. America's weekly casualty count, still announced every Thursday, equaled World War II-like proportions into March 1968. TV viewers even saw armed bureaucrats at the U.S. embassy in Saigon forced to shoot it out with invading Vietcong troops. Meanwhile, Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams and an NBC television news crew filmed Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, head of the South Vietnamese police and troubled by personal losses in the battle for Saigon, shoot a captured Vietcong prisoner in the head. Adams's still picture of the shooting won him a Pulitzer Prize, and to many Americans that one picture came to symbolize the entire madness of the Tet Offensive.

In an extremely rare display of anger, America's most-trusted newsman, Walter Cronkite, denounced Johnson's war policy on national television, and dozens of U.S. Marines told Cronkite's CBS News that they had no idea why they were fighting in Vietnam. Years later, General Westmoreland complained that the daily television coverage of the Tet Offensive offered a "psychological victory" to the North Vietnamese, for the American people turned against the war because of it. This type of conclusion led to one more another myth. "The press lost the Vietnam War" became a common refrain for those who believed that U.S. reporters had enjoyed too much power and influence throughout the conflict. Somehow, if the press had been absent from the scene, this myth implies, U.S. victory would have been possible.

U.S. military forces prevailed in the Tet Offensive, and often the historical debate over the battle's political and psychological impact misses this obvious point. To assure the victory and keep the enemy "on the ropes," Westmoreland and the Johnson administration generally agreed that 206,000 more troops were needed in Vietnam as soon as possible. This number (reservists and new draftees) were added to the 486,000 men in Vietnam at the time of the Tet Offensive. The new Vietnam buildup was supposed to be matched by international efforts as well. In other words, thousands of U.S. troops would also be sent to U.S. military bases in other potential hot spots around the world. The message would be clear. The United States might be hurting in Vietnam, but its commitment to global anticommunism remained firm.

While the conservative, normally hawkish Wall Street Journal editorialized that U.S. Vietnam policy was simply not working, a depressed and frustrated Robert McNamara resigned his post as secretary of defense. The call for 206,000 more troops threw the Johnson administration into emergency cabinet meetings, but it would be the new secretary of defense, Clark Clifford, who played a key decision-making role.

Although he had doubted the original decision to escalate the war, Clifford, a senior Democratic Party figure but a junior cabinet member, had been a loyal defender of the president's war policies for more than three years. Insisting on a full, comprehensive analysis before agreeing to commit huge numbers of new troops, Clifford received conflicting advice from both Defense and State Department analysts. Even Johnson's aged "Wise Men" advisers recommended immediate peace talks and no further escalation of the war. Coming to a different conclusion than Johnson expected, Clifford asked for a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam and a resulting round of peace talks with Hanoi government officials in Paris. The president agreed.

Westmoreland received only 13,000 troops within the original 206,000 request, search-and-destroy missions across Vietnam were temporarily canceled, and Westmoreland himself was removed from his Vietnam post. He was named the new army chief of staff and replaced by General Creighton Abrams. All of these decisions were viewed as concessions to North Vietnam in order to help speed up the peace process in Paris once the talks began. However, the war still raged, and the North Vietnamese saw U.S. interest in fast-moving peace talks as an indication of the impending U.S. defeat. It was in their interest to wait and see who won the U.S. presidential election before committing to any peace deal, and it made sense to continue the war in earnest at the same time. While the United States dreamed of peace in 1968, North Vietnam envisioned victory.

Timothy P. Maga. The Perils of Power. The 1960s (Eyewitness History Series) Facts on File. 2003.

Tet-Offensive, 1968 The 1968 Tet Offensive was the decisive battle for Vietnam. Masterminded by the brilliant North Vietnamese General, Vo Nguyen Giap, it was intended to trigger a general uprising in South Vietnam. However, the bloody fighting for Saigon, Hue and other cities actually resulted in a catastrophic defeat for the North. In this excellent assessment of the key battle of the Vietnam conflict, James Arnold details the plans and forces involved and explains how, despite the outcome of the battle, the American people and their leaders came to perceive the war for Vietnam as lost.

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