"Hippies" and the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War

American soldiers in the Battle of Hamo Village during the Tet Offensive, 1968

It's become an article of faith among Republican propagandists, and even among many serious military and foreign policy theorists, that the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in early 1968 was a military victory for the United States. But it turned public opinion against the war, making the weak-kneed public insist on pulling the rug out from under Gen. William Westmoreland's invincible forces just as they were winning.

Another variation in this view holds that when Gen. Creighton Abrams took over Westmoreland's command, he implemented a successful clear-and-hold campaign that routed the Vietcong (National Liberation Front/NLF). And the Communists would never have won if those back-stabbing Democrats hadn't cut off additional funding to the South Vietnamese government in 1975.

This is the essence of the stab-in-the-back view of the Vietnam War. And we see a similar political myth already being constructed around the Iraq War, no matter how it actually ends.

Antiwar protesters in the heartland (Wichita KS) in 1967

It's a subject that I've returned to here again and again. Because it's important for more than one reason. In an historical sense, it's a question of getting an accurate understanding of what happened. It also is a key factor in looking at how public opinion in the United States responds to war situations. And it also says something about which strategies of communicating to the public about a war in progress may be more effective.

The period immediately after the Tet Offensive which began in January 1968 is one of the key periods, because that's when the political alignments shifted on the war in a decisive way. Although in popular memory, the war was rejected by the public at this time, that needs to be kept in context. There was a strong public reaction against the war after the Tet Offensive. But even then, the percentage of Americans rejecting the Vietnam War was not as high as those rejecting the Iraq War now. Whatever similarities exist between the two wars, the Iraq War has been clearly more unpopular and became unpopular faster.

In his book The Year the Dream Died: Revisiting 1968 in America (1997), Jules Witcover - who is good enough of a journalist it seems a shame to call him part of the Establishment press any more - wrote about a meeting on 02/27/1968 that included incoming Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, outgoing SecDef Robert McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk.

On the same day, according to Clifford in his memoir, Counsel to the President, both Clifford and McNamara in another meeting with Dean Rusk reacted strongly to continued claims that the Tet Offensive had been an enemy defeat, and to pressures for a major increase in American forces in Vietnam. "Despite these optimistic reports," Clifford said, "the American people and world opinion believe we have suffered a major setback. How do we gain support for major programs if we have told people that things are going well? How do we avoid creating the feeling that we are pounding troops down a rathole? What is our purpose? What is achievable?" Clifford wrote that he then asked for a review of "our entire posture" in Vietnam, which Johnson soon ordered, under Clifford's direction.

At the same meeting, Clifford wrote, "as Rusk responded with a discussion of the need to intensify the bombing of North Vietnam, a remarkable event took place. Overcome with conflicting emotions, Bob McNamara's controlled exterior cracked. The goddamned Air Force, they're dropping more on North Vietnam than we dropped on Germany in the last year of World War II, and it's not doing anything!' he said. His voice faltered, and for a moment he had difficulty speaking between suppressed sobs. He looked at me: 'We simply have to end this thing. I just hope you can get hold of it. It is out of control.' We were all stunned, but, out of a shared pain and sense of embarrassment, we went on with the discussion as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. Everyone in the room understood what had happened: this proud, intelligent, and dedicated man was reaching the end of his strength on his last full day in office. He was leaving the Pentagon just in time." (my emphasis)(pp. 80-81)

Witcover also relates the reaction of New York Sen. Robert Kennedy, for whom the Tet Offensive was a decisive event persuading him to break more clearly with the Johnson administration's Vietnam War policies:

A tipoff to Kennedy's intentions came in a speech on the Senate floor on March 7. Fulbright had just made his demand that before LBJ sent 206,000 more Americans to Vietnam, the Senate should be consulted. Kennedy seconded the demand with a blistering attack. Every time there was a problem in Vietnam over the previous seven years, he said, "the answer has always been to escalate the conflict. It has always been to send more troops. And at the time we sent the larger number of troops, or increased the bombing, we have always stated that there would be light at the end of the tunnel, that victory is just ahead of us. The fact is that victory is not just ahead of us. It was not in 1961 or 1962, when I was one of those who predicted there was light at the end of the tunnel. There was not in 1963 or 1964 or 1965 or 1966 or 1967, and there is not now. ...

"Moreover, there is a question of our moral responsibility. Are we like the God of the Old Testament that we can decide, in Washington, D.C., what cities, what towns, what hamlets in Vietnam are going to be destroyed? ... Do we have that authority to kill tens and tens of thousands of people because we say we have a commitment to the South Vietnamese people? But have they been consulted, in Hue, in Ben Tre, or in the other towns that have been destroyed? Do we have the authority to put hundreds of thousands of people - in fact, millions of people - into refugee camps for their protection, or should these decisions be left to them?"

This time Kennedy did not shy away from criticizing Johnson. Citing corruption in the South Vietnamese military draft, he recalled that "when this was brought to the attention of the president, he replied that there was stealing in Beaumont, Texas. If there is stealing in Beaumont, Texas," Kennedy said, "it is not bringing about the death of American boys." (pp. 97-98)

Leaving aside Kennedy's somewhat shaky pre-Vatican II theology about "the God of the Old Testament", it strikes me that for all the hoo-ha we've had the last two and a half decades over "putting God back into the public square", as the highbrow Christian Right types like to put it, we rarely hear elected officials these days evoking a religious thought this bluntly in relation to war. Too bad. Maybe we need to get the side of the Christian God that hates war and killing back more prominently into the "public square".

The Tet Offensive did shape American opinions about the war. But it was not a matter that the civilians back home mistook an American military victory in that encounter - which in conventional terms it was. It was that the Tet Offensive jolted many people, from ordinary citizens who had doubts about the war to war critics in Congress to even President Johnson himself, into taking a new and more realistic look at the costs and benefits of the war.

It may sound particularly manly or tough-minded to old Republican white guys (and younger ones, too!) to act as though the only goal of a military action is the complete and total surrender of the enemy and the destruction of their government and the occupation of their territory by American troops. We did that in Iraq, and that's not really turning out that happily.

In the real world, everyone other than our more delirious hawks does make some calculation about costs and benefits in war. Undoubtedly, some of the costs and benefits of a war are no less real and important for being intangible. But it just doesn't make sense to pour huge amount of American lives and treasure and kill a lot of people on the Other Side (civilians and combatants) in a cause that is not significant and important to American security.

This is not a new concept. It was formulated by St. Augustine in his concept of the Just War, which remains the basis of the Catholic Christianity's view of war.

And that's what happened in 1968 for many people. There were two critical factors in the change in attitudes. One was that Gen. Westmoreland was requesting an escalation of another 200,000 or so troops in Vietnam and could offer the civilian decision-makers not realistic assurance that it would achieve the goal of preserving a non-Communist South Vietnam by defeating the NLF and the North Vietnamese. The costs of the war were going up. And the perceived benefits were shrinking.

The other thing was that both civilian and military leaders had been presenting an unrealistically optimistic view of the progress of the war. Or, less diplomatically, they had been lying to the public about it. Some of that was no doubt self-deception. Some of it was propaganda happy-talk. But once the Tet Offensive exposed it for being wildly exaggerated, the credibility of both civilian and military spokespeople on the war plummeted. And didn't really return, even with a new administration in 1969.

This is not to say that the antiwar movement didn't have an effect. On the contrary. It's just that the loss of credibility of official spokespeople, which the Tet Offensive accelerated but didn't exclusively cause, along with a new look by many people at costs and benefits of the war, gave a broader hearing to the antiwar movement.

Tags: antiwar movement, antiwar protest, vietnam war