By virtually ignoring the political aspect of the war, we stepped onto a treadmill. While our troops spent their time finding, engaging, and destroying the enemy’s larger units, the Communists ruled the villages. Their presence was constantly felt. Their infrastructure remained intact. Their troops returned a few days after ours left, and their war effort resumed almost without a hitch.
When the British army advocated a purely military solution in Malaysia, Britain’s counterinsurgency expert, Sir Robert Thompson, disagreed, saying, “It’s all very well having bombers, masses of helicopters, tremendous firepower, but none of these will eliminate a Communist cell in a high school which is producing 50 recruits a year for the insurgent movement.” In Vietnam, while we were fighting in the hills, the Communists had free run of the hamlets.
Attrition was a fatally flawed strategy. We underestimated the enemy’s ability to control his losses and to bring in reinforcements from North Vietnam. No matter how hard we tried to engage him in decisive battles, he could avoid them by either evading our troops or withdrawing to sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos. Guerrilla units in the field received excellent intelligence about our troop movements from the Communist infrastructure in cities and villages. If the guerrillas did not want to fight, they simply let our forces pass through the areas they occupied. Because the guerrillas controlled the tempo of the fighting, the Communists were able to control their own casualty rates and thereby prevent the attrition of their ranks.
Our strategy ultimately failed because we did not stop the steady stream of reinforcements coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail from North Vietnam. The success of a strategy of attrition depended on whether we would pass the point where enemy losses exceeded new recruits in the South and reinforcements from the North. That point was never reached. From January 1965 through December 1967, Communist losses totaled 344,000, including 179,000 troops killed in action. Despite these staggering figures, Communist forces in South Vietnam increased from 181,000 in December 1964 to 262,000 in December 1967. Over those three years, North Vietnam and recruitment in South Vietnam had supplied over 400,000 reinforcements. Population statistics indicated that this rate could be sustained: Another 120,000 North Vietnamese boys reached military age each year.
We should have realized that it was impossible to win a war of attrition against the guerrillas in South Vietnam as long as the Ho Chi Minh Trail remained open for business. But during the years of our deepening involvement, we never formulated a strategy to put North Vietnam’s invasion out of business.
From 1965 through 1968, the United States carried out an aerial bombing campaign against North Vietnam. President Johnson’s objective was not military but political. He was not trying to stop North Vietnam’s invasion but rather to raise South Vietnamese morale and to increase steadily the cost to Hanoi’s leaders of their infiltration of men and matériel into the South. Civilian advisers had convinced him that we should pursue a strategy of gradual escalation coupled with repeated offers to negotiate settlement. Our bombing would begin at a low level and increase in gradual increments. It was naively assumed that when Hanoi recognized the pattern of our mounting pressure, it would come to the negotiating table and call off its war against South Vietnam in order to avoid the destruction of North Vietnam.
Our bombing was always sharply restricted in practice. President Johnson once boasted that the military “can’t even bomb an outhouse without my approval.” Both Johnson and Secretary of Defense McNamara, who personally chose the targets for the bombing program, were afraid of provoking the intervention of China or the Soviet Union and therefore limited the intensity and frequency of our attacks. No strategic bombers such as B-52s were used. No targets apart from roads, railroads, bridges, power plants, barracks, and supply dumps were attacked. No bombing was permitted within a twenty-five to thirty-mile-deep buffer zone along the Chinese border, a thirty-mile radius around Hanoi, and a ten-mile radius around the port of Haiphong.
In accordance with its strategy of gradual escalation, the administration unilaterally declared sixteen pauses in the bombing, ranging from twenty-four hours to thirty-six days, and sent out seventy-two diplomatic peace initiatives in the hope that North Vietnam would take reciprocal steps toward ending the war.
Our attempt to fine-tune our bombing in order to send precise political messages to Hanoi wasted our military advantage. Eisenhower saw that it was folly. While he supported Johnson’s war effort in public, he was bluntly critical of the policy of gradualism in private. He told me in 1966, “If an enemy holds a position with a battalion, give me two battalions and I’ll take it, but at a great cost in casualties. Give me a division and I’ll take it without a fight.”
Our gradual escalation gave North Vietnam time to adapt to the additional pressure by dispersing its people, military supplies, and industry. Also, our restraint put many important military targets off limits. Johnson forbade air strikes against Haiphong, the port through which 85 percent of North Vietnam’s supplies arrived, because Soviet and Chinese ships docked there. When Soviet antiaircraft missile sites began to appear, he prohibited attacks on them while they were under construction to avoid the possibility of killing any Soviet personnel.
Hanoi exploited our restraint. When it was clear that we would not bomb a small airfield outside Hanoi because it was used by couriers from Moscow and Peking, the Communists put their best airplanes there. And whenever we declared a bombing pause, the Communists immediately accelerated their shipments of troops and supplies into South Vietnam.
Our policy sent the wrong political message to Hanoi. Johnson’s advisers stated publicly that we faced a long and difficult war in Vietnam; that we feared Soviet and Chinese intervention; and that we would not “widen” the conflict into North Vietnam. Meanwhile, the administration carried out a limited bombing campaign in fits and starts and sent out a cascade of peace feelers almost begging Hanoi to come to the negotiating table. Ho Chi Minh, who had deliberately begun the Vietnam War and who had never indicated a willingness to settle on any terms other than his own, could only have interpreted our gradual escalation as a sign not of restraint but of weakness.
• • •
When a President sends American troops to war, a hidden timer starts to run. He has a finite period of time to win the war before the people grow weary of it. In February 1968, President Johnson ran out of time.
A single event brought to a halt the steady deepening of American involvement in the Vietnam War. A concerted, nationwide Communist assault—the Tet Offensive—caught the United States and South Vietnam off-guard and shocked the American people. Our forces quickly crushed the enemy. It turned out to be a major military defeat for the Communists in South Vietnam, but grotesquely inaccurate news-media reporting turned it into a major political and psychological victory for them in the United States.
North Vietnam’s leaders launched the Tet Offensive because they thought victory was at hand. In late 1967, the North’s Communist party stated that the political situation in South Vietnam was right for a “general offensive and general uprising in order to achieve a decisive victory for the revolution.” Ho Chi Minh knew he did not have the military power to rout the armies of South Vietnam and the United States. But he believed he could win anyway.
His plan came straight out of a handbook on revolutionary war: Communist forces would strike South Vietnam’s cities, and these attacks would trigger the South Vietnamese people to revolt and to join the Communists in bringing down the government in Saigon. The plan’s critical assumption was that in their hearts and minds the people supported the Communists.
On January 31, 1968, the Communists began their offensive. It was timed to coincide with the start of a truce they had pledged to observe during the celebrations of Tet, the Vietnamese new year. General Westmoreland had warned that a major enemy offensive was in the works. But nobody expected it to come during the Tet truce, when half of South Vietnam’s army would be on holiday leave. Nor did anyone anticipa
te the size or scope of the attack. Over 70,000 Communist troops attacked more than 100 cities and towns and scores of military bases throughout South Vietnam. Four thousand Communist troops surged into Saigon itself. Ugly urban warfare ensued. Because they achieved total surprise, the Communists won early gains. Within a day, we reversed the tide. Within a week, we cleared out all but their strongholds. Within a month, we routed them. It is particularly significant to note that Ho’s plan failed because none of his attacks was followed by a popular uprising.
Years later, a CBS News documentary claimed that the enemy’s successes during the Tet Offensive resulted in part from a conspiracy led by General Westmoreland to suppress intelligence estimates that Communist troop levels were twice as high as the figures in our official order of battle. The documentary’s vicious attack on the personal integrity of one of America’s most distinguished military leaders was yellow journalism at its worst. Westmoreland is a straight-arrow, almost painfully by-the-book military professional. I cannot think of a military man who would have been less likely to deceive American political leaders or the public by giving a falsely optimistic appraisal of the military situation in Vietnam. On the contrary, I found him more realistic and at times even more pessimistic in his assessments than other military and civilian leaders I met on my trips to Vietnam.
In Vietnam, order-of-battle figures were difficult to fix with precision because so much depended on how we defined an enemy combatant No one questioned the inclusion of the troops in Communist mobile battalions. But some, including those who produced the allegedly suppressed estimates, wanted to count members of the Communist infrastructure and unarmed self-defense forces. Westmoreland decided that only those who contributed directly to the enemy’s military strength in the field would be tallied in his order of battle. All of this was explained to President Johnson and his national security adviser. Westmoreland acted rightly and honorably. Throughout this whole controversy, the only deceptions have been those of CBS in its documentary.
The Tet Offensive was a military disaster for North Vietnam. Ho had staked everything on the roll of the dice and lost. American and South Vietnamese forces mauled his best military units. Thousands of his most dedicated and experienced troops and combat leaders were killed or seriously wounded. Official North Vietnamese reports soon expressed alarm at plummeting morale as troops “lost confidence” in their leaders, became “doubtful of victory,” and displayed “shirking attitudes.” It would take two years for the North Vietnamese Army to recover.
Also, the National Liberation Front was broken as a military force. Expecting victory, Ho had ordered all secret Communist operatives and terrorists in South Vietnam to abandon their covers. When his offensive failed, those agents not killed in combat were identified and captured. South Vietnam’s police were able to uproot almost the entire Communist network.
Finally, the Tet Offensive was a political disaster for the Communist cause in South Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh lost the “people’s war.” The Communists never had the support of more than a small minority of the South Vietnamese, but that did not mean the majority supported the government in Saigon. The Communist threat had seemed distant to many, especially those living in the cities, and the anti-Communist cause was weak and disorganized. The Tet Offensive radically altered the political landscape. It galvanized the South Vietnamese through the shock of the urban fighting and the horror of widespread Communist atrocities. Far from producing the uprisings Ho expected, it created a strong counterreaction that led to the full mobilization of the South Vietnamese people against the Communist aggressors.
Although it was an overwhelming victory for South Vietnam and the United States, the almost universal theme of media coverage was that we had suffered a disastrous defeat. This was true not only in the first chaotic hours of the offensive but also weeks later after the fog of war had lifted. One network reporter flatly said we were “losing” the war. Another stated that it was increasingly clear that “the only rational way” out of the war “will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people.” The steady drumbeat of inaccurate stories convinced millions of Americans that we had lost a major battle.
Reporters, most of whom knew nothing about military affairs, missed the big picture. Instead, they focused on isolated, dramatic incidents, often getting their stories dramatically wrong. At first the media played an attack on the American Embassy in Saigon as an enemy triumph. One television anchorman reported that “twenty suicide commandos” were “holding the first floor of the embassy.” That was not what happened. A platoon of insurgents had blown a hole in the embassy wall, and a few entered the grounds of the compound before all of them were gunned down by our guards.
Later the news media fixed their attention on the nine-week battle of Khesanh. They described the siege of the 6,000-man American base as if it were a reenactment of Dien Bien Phu, with one network reporter intoning that “the parallels are there for all to see.” In fact, we were never in danger of losing Khesanh. North Vietnam threw 40,000 men into the battle and lost over 10,000 of them. It was the most costly single battle for the enemy in the entire Vietnam War.
Even more glaring was the news media’s failure to report on the massacre at Hue.
When the Communists overran the city, they came prepared with “blood-debt lists” drawn up five months before. These contained the names of all policemen, government personnel, and political enemies of the National Liberation Front who could be killed on the spot without consulting a higher authority. Once inside Hue, Communist death squads quickly killed the 200 targets on their lists. But they did not stop there. They began murdering anyone who, in their eyes, had any link to the Saigon government. These included a part-time janitor at a government office who was executed in his front yard along with his two young children, and a cigarette vendor who was assassinated simply because her sister was a government worker. Eyewitnesses later reported seeing victims forced to dig their own graves before being gunned down by firing squads.
It should have made a big story. After all, the fate of Hue, the only provincial capital to fall to the Communists during the Tet Offensive, certainly indicated what the Communists had in mind for the rest of South Vietnam. But the total news coverage of the massacre amounted to six stories on the wire services and seven in the major dailies. Nothing appeared on network television. These stories described the discovery of the first mass grave and estimated the death toll to be between 200 and 400. No reports came out when another eighteen mass graves were found in the following days. Nor did reporters flock to the area as more burial sites were found in nearby mountains, jungle clearings, and coastal-sand flats. The death toll would climb to 2,810 by mid-1970, while another 1,946 remained missing.
During their twenty-five days in power in Hue, the Communists had killed between 5 and 10 percent of the city’s population, but the news media did not find it newsworthy.
The stark contrast between the extensive media coverage of the American massacre at My Lai and the minimal reports on the massive Communist atrocities at Hue illustrated one of the most striking differences between democratic and Communist regimes: We advertise our faults; they bury theirs.
News media accounts of the Tet Offensive disillusioned the American people with the Vietnam War and thereby turned the offensive into a major political and psychological victory for North Vietnam. The Johnson administration had always exuded optimism about our progress in the war. Now the people heard that we were losing the war as they watched street fighting in Saigon on their television sets. That this could even happen caused them to question the validity and credibility of the administration’s policy.
In November 1967 and February 1968, Gallup polls surveyed public opinion on how the war was going. The proportion who said the United States was losing the war rose from 8 percent before the Tet Offensive to 23 percent afterward. The second poll also indicated that 61 percent believed we were either losing ground or standing still in Vietnam. Public
opinion was not caught up in antiwar sentiments. Unlike many in the antiwar movement, the American people did not want to see their country humiliated. But after almost three years of fighting, they were frustrated because no quick end to the war was in sight.
The Tet Offensive shook the Johnson White House to its foundations. Serious doubts arose in the minds of many of his advisers about whether we could win in Vietnam. When Johnson consulted a group of former high officials he called the “wise men,” all of whom had been strong supporters of our commitment in Vietnam, he found that six favored disengagement in some form, four advocated standing firm, and one straddled the fence. “If they had been so deeply influenced by the reports of the Tet Offensive,” Johnson later wrote, “what must the average citizen in the country be thinking?” On March 31, President Johnson answered his own question by announcing that he would not seek reelection.
• • •
After the Tet Offensive, Johnson’s growing pessimism about the war led him to engage in the most wishful exercise of diplomacy in American postwar history: the talks leading to the complete halt in the bombing of North Vietnam on November 1, 1968.
Johnson passionately wanted peace and was shaken by the sharp increase in antiwar sentiment after the Tet Offensive. His advisers told him that North Vietnam was eager to reach a negotiated resolution of the war and that American public opinion would soon no longer support our military efforts in Vietnam. On March 31, in accordance with their advice, Johnson declared a unilateral halt to all bombing of North Vietnamese territory above the twentieth parallel, and later the nineteenth, in the hope that Hanoi would take reciprocal steps toward peace.
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