Tet, My Lai and the War at Home, 1968-70

The War the United States Was Told It Was Winning

By the end of 1967 General William Westmoreland was telling the American public that the Vietnam War had reached a turning point. In a speech to the National Press Club on 21 November he said that ‘we have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view’ — the optimism the press summed up as light at the end of the tunnel. The Vietcong were exhausted; the body count was rising; the South Vietnamese government was stabilising. Three months later that confidence collapsed. The events of 1968 to 1970 — the Tet Offensive, Walter Cronkite’s CBS broadcast, the My Lai Massacre and the Kent State shootings — broke the credibility of the Johnson administration, divided American society into a war camp and an anti-war camp, and brought the home front and the battlefield together as a single political problem.

The Tet Offensive

On the night of 30 January 1968, during the Vietnamese lunar new year holiday, around 84,000 Vietcong and North Vietnamese soldiers launched coordinated assaults on more than a hundred cities and military bases across South Vietnam. A Vietcong commando squad blew its way into the grounds of the US embassy in Saigon and held part of it for six hours. The ancient imperial city of Hue was overrun in the first hours and held for twenty-five days. Footage of US marines fighting house to house in Hue, and of Vietcong gunmen inside the embassy compound in Saigon, ran on every American evening news bulletin.

The Tet Offensive was, in narrow military terms, a US-South Vietnamese victory. The Vietcong took catastrophic casualties — around 40,000 dead, by some estimates — and lost almost all the urban territory they had briefly seized. The southern uprising that Hanoi had hoped to provoke did not materialise. Westmoreland told a press conference in early February that he had ‘defeated the enemy’s will to win’. The political reality was the reverse. Tet contradicted the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ assurances of November 1967 so completely that no one in the United States believed the war was being won. The gap between official optimism and televised reality produced what journalists called the credibility gap.

Walter Cronkite and the ‘Stalemate’ Broadcast

On the evening of 27 February 1968, after a reporting trip to Vietnam, the CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite closed his programme by telling viewers that ‘to say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion’. Cronkite was the most trusted television journalist in the United States; his on-air judgement, made in his own voice rather than as part of a news report, registered as a verdict. President Johnson reportedly told an aide that if he had lost Cronkite, he had lost ‘Mr Average Citizen’. On 31 March Johnson made a televised address: he announced a pause in bombing of most of North Vietnam, opened the door to negotiations, and stated that he would not seek the Democratic nomination for re-election. By June, polls showed that for the first time more Americans called the war a mistake than supported it.

My Lai, March 1968

On the morning of 16 March 1968 American soldiers from Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, entered the South Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai on a search-and-destroy mission. There was no enemy in the hamlet. Over four hours the soldiers killed between 347 and 504 unarmed Vietnamese civilians — mostly women, children and elderly. Some victims were shot in their homes; others were rounded up and machine-gunned in a drainage ditch. Helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson Jr landed his observation aircraft between American troops and a group of fleeing Vietnamese, ordered his crew to fire on his own side if they advanced, and rescued around eleven civilians.

The Army covered up the massacre for over a year. The story broke in the American press in November 1969 in an investigation by the freelance journalist Seymour Hersh, illustrated by the colour photographs that combat photographer Ronald Haeberle had taken on the day. Lieutenant William Calley, the platoon leader, went on trial in November 1970 charged with the premeditated murder of 109 Vietnamese civilians. He was convicted on 29 March 1971 of murdering twenty-two and sentenced to life imprisonment. Within forty-eight hours President Nixon ordered him moved from prison to house arrest at Fort Benning. He was paroled in 1974 after serving around three and a half years.

Kent State, May 1970

On 30 April 1970 President Nixon announced on television that US ground troops had crossed into Cambodia. Anti-war protests, which had thinned during the early withdrawals of the Nixon Doctrine, exploded across more than 350 college campuses in the days that followed. At Kent State University in Ohio the Reserve Officer Training Corps building was set on fire on the evening of 2 May; Governor James Rhodes deployed the Ohio National Guard. On the early afternoon of 4 May 1970 a contingent of seventy-seven guardsmen, exhausted and inexperienced, faced a crowd of student protesters and bystanders. Twenty-eight of them opened fire, loosing sixty-seven rounds in around thirteen seconds. The Kent State shootings killed four students — Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer and William Schroeder — and wounded nine. Two of the dead were not protesters but students walking between classes.

The killings produced the largest student strike in US history: more than four million students walked out from over 700 campuses, and around 450 universities and colleges shut down for the rest of the spring term. The Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph by John Filo of fourteen-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over the body of Jeffrey Miller became the defining image of the home front war.

Hard Hats and the Silent Majority

It would be wrong to think the United States by 1970 was unanimously anti-war. President Nixon had won the 1968 election by appealing to what he would call in a televised address on 3 November 1969 the silent majority: older, mostly white, conservative-leaning Americans who supported the war and disapproved of the protest movement. On 8 May 1970 — four days after Kent State — around two hundred New York construction workers in red, white and blue helmets attacked an anti-war demonstration in lower Manhattan, beating students and breaking up the rally. The hard hats later in the month organised a demonstration of around 100,000 marchers in support of Nixon’s Vietnam policy. The war was now an argument among Americans, on Americans, as much as a war fought against a Vietnamese enemy.