Tet Offensive Analysis

making a mockery of the wildly optimistic statements that Westmoreland, Bunker, and Johnson himself had delivered so recently. Johnson and his chief aides publicly claimed that the attacks were not unexpected and that the U.S. and South Vietnamese defenders had inflicted a devastating defeat on the insurgents. The year 1968 certainly deserves the distinction as the conflict’s pivotal year as decision makers hesitantly accepted the fact that the war simply could not be won-at least not at an acceptable cost and exposing the fundamental contradictions of the Johnson-Westmoreland military strategy.

Willbanks references Ronnie Ford’s, Tet 1968: Understanding the Surprise, argument that the bureaucratic infighting over order-of-battle issues

Schreiber claims that other Tet related changes were reductions in the public’s approval of President Johnson’s handling of the Vietnam situation and of his performance as President. An effect of the Tet Offensive was reflected in public’s change in preference from “hawk” to “dove” between the January and March 1968; one observer called this “the largest and most important change in public opinion during the entire war.” According to Anderson, the surprise offensive caused the Johnson administration, after three years of steady escalation of the U.S. commitment, to reevaluate the strategic importance of Vietnam against the known and potential costs to the United States. In late 1967, Johnson compounded his earlier mistake with a public-relations campaign to convey the idea that America was winning the war of attrition. The pressure that he felt indicated that the antiwar movement was having an impact. For both the U.S. public and the Johnson administration, the heavy fighting in early 1968 brought with it a demand for reexamination of American policies. As historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has recorded, Johnson similarly insisted that his policies had not failed and that he had not been forced to begin American de-escalation after the Tet Offensive. The resulting pressures forced Lyndon B. Johnson to confront some of the hardest issues that any American president has ever faced. They led him, in the end, to choose the path of negotiation, de-escalation, and tentative disengagement as less dangerous to America’s domestic stability, economic health, and international stature than the highly uncertain path of more arms and troops. This proud politician, nearing the end of more than thirty years of public service, clung stubbornly to the illusion that he could still salvage an honorable settlement of the war that he knew would forever define his