Remembering the Tet Offensive 1968

Veteran Vietnam War reporter Stanley Karnow, also the author of one of the best-regarded histories of the war, recalls the Tet Offensive of 40 years ago in When War Seems Unwinnable: Why Tet Matters Washington Independent 02/01/08. The Washington Independent is a new online news source.

The Tet Offensive is a key piece in the stab-in-the-back theory of loss of the Vietnam War which has practically become sacred Republican Party doctrine. Karnow debunks that interpretation:

Analyzed in hindsight, the offensive has been misinterpreted. It did not, as popularly believed, stimulate American resistance to the war. The U.S. public, motivated by the mounting casualties, a tax surcharge and the lack of apparent progress, began to have reservations about the commitment in October 1967. The prevailing attitude in the United States, however, was hawkish rather than dovish—as epitomized in the crude bumper sticker maxim, "Either win or get out."

Nor did the Communists galvanize the effort to sway American opinion. Their goal was to instigate an uprising in South Vietnam by dramatizing to its population the vulnerability of the U.S. forces. They fumbled completely and, like many of my colleagues, I miscalculated the extent of their setback and the ghastly losses they suffered. Henceforth, the decimated Vietcong brigades would be replaced by North Vietnamese regulars, and their battles with the Americans increasingly conventional.

Nonetheless, the impact of the events at home was devastating. Johnson’s poll rating dropped precipitously, and he came within an ace of being defeated by Eugene McCarthy, the peace candidate, in the New Hampshire primary in March. Opposition to the war mushroomed into a vehicle for disgruntled elements as disparate as the civil-rights movement in the South and the free-speech advocates in colleges across the nation. (my emphasis)

Karnow's wording there could probably be more precise.


It's probably misleading when he says that the Tet Offensive did not "stimulate" public opposition to the war. What he clearly means is that it did not cause or originate antiwar sentiment. But, as he says in the quote above, it did have the effect of increasing criticism of and opposition to the war.

Karnow dismisses parallels between the Vietnam and Iraq Wars. And at the end of his piece, he seems to indulge in a bit of threat inflation of his own concerning transnational terrorism. But this is a valuable historical observation:

We were challenged [in Vietnam] by an adversary [North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front] ready to make limitless sacrifices to achieve its objective. Thus it was an unwinnable war. Perplexed by that conspicuous reality, Gen. William Westmoreland, the U.S. commander, and his officers would comment as they scrutinized the mounds of twisted Vietcong corpses, “Life means nothing to Orientals.” The obviously racist remark obfuscated their ignorance of the fact that 40,000 Union and Confederate soldiers, devoted to their respective causes, died within hours at Antietam in 1862. (my emphasis)

Put another way, one of the key problems for the US in the Vietnam War is that the outcome mattered far more to the enemy than it did to the United States. And that calculation on the Americans' part was rational. The outcome of that war did matter more to the Vietnamese enemy, and it never mattered to the United States in any objective sense nearly as much as both Democrats and Republicans thought it did for far too long.

Tags: stab-in-the-back, stanley karnow, vietnam war

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