Tet offensive what was

By March, when anti-war Democrat Senator Eugene McCarthy performed unexpectedly well in the New Hampshire primary, the polls had really turned on the president and the war. An initial spike in public support from Tet in February, with a notable increase in hawkish sentiment about Vietnam, turned hard against the administration in March. Only 35 percent believed that it would end within the next two years. His overall approval ratings for handling the war fell to a meager 26 percent.

On the last day of the month, with his support plummeting, Johnson shocked the nation by going on television to announce that he would not run for reelection. When rumors circulated that Westmoreland had asked for , more troops in response to Tet, Americans were outraged and the apparent blindness of the people in power. The Democratic Convention in was a disaster, as liberal Democrats and the anti-war movement opened up a civil war. Ironically, the person to reap the most benefits from the war was Richard Nixon, the next president of the United States, who lied and deceived the public about Vietnam in ways that even Johnson could not have imagined.

Besides the damage that Tet imposed on Johnson, the surprise attack and the revelation that the administration had vastly oversold the prospects for success were a severe blow to public confidence in American government leaders to tell the truth and to do the right thing.

The right also took its own lessons from Tet and other parts of the increasingly critical wartime coverage, namely that the media could not be trusted. As reporters focused on Tet as evidence of failure, hawkish Democrats and Republicans were quick to note, rightly so, that the U. Johnson felt this way and tried to hammer away on the point that the media was misrepresenting what happened. For much of the nation, however, the specifics of Tet were beside the point. As the historian Fred Logevall has argued, Tet is not the sole culprit behind the shattered faith from Vietnam, as opposition to the war and the realization of government falsehood had been growing for several years.

But Tet still packed an extraordinarily powerful punch on a nation primed to be disillusioned. A successful attack on major cities might force the United States to negotiate or perhaps even to withdraw. At the very least, the North Vietnamese hoped it would serve to stop the ongoing escalation of guerilla attacks and bombing in the North. Hanoi selected the Tet holiday to strike because it was traditionally a time of truce, and because Vietnamese traveling to spend the festival with their relatives provided cover for the movement of South Vietnamese National Liberation Forces NLF who supported the communist forces.

The first phase of the assault began on January 30 and 31, when NLF forces simultaneously attacked a number of targets, mostly populated areas and places with heavy U. The NLF even managed to breach the outer walls of the U. Embassy in Saigon.

In mid-November, U. The U. Embassy in Saigon actually distributed a translation of the Vietnamese document 25 days before the embassy was attacked; it was widely discounted. On the copy I picked out of a bin at the embassy press office, I expressed my own skepticism in longhand: "moonshine.

In fact, the very night the Tet attacks began, some U. As the Communists prepared their attacks, the White House was setting itself up for a political disaster with a misguided "success offensive," claiming that victory was in sight. From the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise , President Johnson declared that the war would continue "not many more nights. William Westmoreland, the handsome, square-jawed commander of U. We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view.

In this context, the Tet attacks came as a particular shock. James J. Wirtz, a historian at the Naval War College who has closely studied the offensive, declared at the Bethesda conference that Tet was "an earth-shattering, mind-shattering event that changed the course of the war. My friend and former Washington Post colleague, the late Peter Braestrup, blamed misreporting by the American press for the impact of Tet on the American public, citing "a portrait of defeat for the allies" that emerged from journalistic accounts.

Many high-level military officials shared Braestrup's view, stimulating efforts by the post-Vietnam Pentagon to restrict press coverage of military operations. In order to combat better-supplied American and South Vietnamese forces during the Vietnam War, Communist guerrilla troops known as Viet Cong VC dug tens of thousands of miles of tunnels, including an extensive network running underneath the Cu Chi district northwest of Live TV.

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Vietnam War Timeline The Vietnam War started in the s, according to most historians, though the conflict in Southeast Asia had its roots in the French colonial period of the s.