The Tet Offensive, 1968
The Calm Before
By the end of 1967 General Westmoreland was telling the American press that the war had reached a ‘crossover point’. Body counts, he insisted, now exceeded the rate at which Hanoi could replace its losses. The Vietcong, in his telling, were broken and the war was being won. President Johnson echoed the message. To restore confidence, Westmoreland was flown back to Washington in November 1967 to brief Congress on the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’. Behind the optimism, North Vietnamese commanders were planning the largest combined operation of the war.
The Offensive Itself
On the night of 30 January 1968, the Vietnamese New Year holiday of Tet, around 84,000 Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army troops simultaneously attacked more than 100 cities, towns and military bases across South Vietnam. The traditional Tet ceasefire was used as cover. Targets included Saigon itself: a Vietcong commando squad blasted its way into the US Embassy compound and held part of the grounds for six hours. Television crews filmed the wreckage at the heart of supposedly secure South Vietnam.
The most prolonged fighting was in the imperial city of Hue, which the North Vietnamese held for 25 days. US marines and ARVN troops retook the city block by block. Civilian casualties were heavy and a mass grave was later discovered containing some 2,800 South Vietnamese officials, teachers and Catholics executed by Vietcong cadres during the occupation. Khe Sanh, a US marine base near the Laotian border, was simultaneously besieged for 77 days; its relief tied down US forces who could otherwise have responded faster to the city attacks.
On the night of 30–31 January 1968, around 84,000 Vietcong and NVA troops attacked more than 100 cities, towns and bases across South Vietnam during the Tet ceasefire. Targets included the US Embassy in Saigon, the imperial city of Hue (held for 25 days) and the besieged marine base at Khe Sanh.
A Tactical US Victory
In purely military terms, Tet was a disaster for the communist side. Within weeks the Vietcong had been driven back from almost every position they had briefly seized. They lost an estimated 40,000–50,000 dead and most of their experienced cadres — the southern guerrilla movement was so badly damaged that for the rest of the war the burden of fighting fell on the regular North Vietnamese Army. The hoped-for popular uprising in the South never materialised. By any measurement of ground retaken or enemy losses, the United States and ARVN had won.
For two months, every American newspaper showed images of an enemy that was supposed to be broken: a Vietcong commando dead inside the US Embassy; the chief of South Vietnam’s national police executing a captured suspect on a Saigon street with a pistol shot to the head, photographed by AP photographer Eddie Adams; flames pouring from the city of Hue. None of this matched what Westmoreland and Johnson had told the public for months. The gap between official claims and televised reality became known as the credibility gap.
Walter Cronkite and the Loss of Public Confidence
Walter Cronkite was the anchor of CBS Evening News and routinely described as the most trusted man in America. He travelled to Vietnam in February 1968 and broadcast a special report on 27 February titled ‘Report from Vietnam: Who, What, When, Where, Why?’ His conclusion was unambiguous: the war was ‘mired in stalemate’ and the only rational course was a negotiated settlement. The Cronkite report is reported to have prompted Johnson to remark privately that if he had lost Cronkite, he had lost middle America.
Westmoreland responded to Tet by requesting 200,000 more troops. Johnson rejected the request and instead announced, in a televised address on 31 March 1968, a partial halt to bombing of North Vietnam, an opening to peace talks — and his decision not to seek re-election. Westmoreland was reassigned in June 1968. The strategic landscape had shifted decisively, even though the Vietcong had been militarily defeated on the ground.
On 27 February 1968 Walter Cronkite told American viewers the war was ‘mired in stalemate’. On 31 March 1968 President Johnson announced a partial bombing halt, peace talks — and his decision not to seek re-election. Tet had been a tactical defeat for the Vietcong but had broken Johnson’s political position.
The 1968 Election and Its Consequences
Johnson’s withdrawal from the race opened the field. Anti-war Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June. The Democratic Convention in Chicago in August dissolved into riots between police and anti-war protesters, broadcast live. Republican Richard Nixon won the November election narrowly, promising ‘peace with honour’. Tet had not won the war for Hanoi militarily, but it had ended the Johnson presidency and brought to the White House a Republican who would campaign on extracting the United States from Vietnam.
Two photographs in particular fixed Tet in American memory. Eddie Adams’s image of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a captured prisoner on a Saigon pavement won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize. Footage of the destruction of Ben Tre — the town reportedly described by an unnamed major with the line ‘it became necessary to destroy the town to save it’ — became a symbol of the absurdity many Americans now saw in the war. Together these images captured what statistics could not: the war America had been told it was winning did not match what the cameras showed.