spartans_in_darkness

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(D) Trapped in the Looking Glass:
The Post-Tet Reality Hits Washington
CU) The Communists slavishly held to their
TCK/TCN campaign, even after the failure of the
January attacks. In March and, again in August,
new offensives saw communist troops hurl themselves
against American and ARVNbases, only to
fail just as miserably as the first time. In
February, General Westmoreland had proclaimed
a military victory after Tet. Strictly speaking,
he was right. The Viet Cong military units
and political cadre were decimated by the offensive.
The Americans estimated 40,000 communist
soldiers were killed as compared to an Allied
total of about 4,000. Although the Allied estimates
would later be shown to be, at best, contentious,
there was no doubt that the communists,
especially the NLF political cadre and the
regular PLAF formations, had been hurt seriously.
From this point, the war was fought on the
communist side by the conventional units of the
People's Army of Vietnam.
CU) If the communists lost so heavily, then
why was Tet considered a strategic defeat for the
United States Part of the answer lay in the perception
of the battle itself. The Johnson administration
had been stating for a long time that the
communist forces had been losing manpower due
to Westmoreland's "attrition" strategy. Suddenly,
all of South Vietnam was attacked by forces which
supposedly had been destroyed earlier by the
American and ARVNforces. Many politicians and
journalists saw the contradiction between the
administration claims and the sudden appearance
of large communist forces, and they questioned
the rosy statements which had preceded
the offensive. The Democratic Party's fissures
over the war widened as various senators openly
questioned Johnson's leadership. Normally conservative
newspapers such as the Wall Street
Journal wondered if America's effort was
doomed.
CU) Actually, these stories about the press
and its influence are mostly anecdotal. Opinion
polls before and after Tet scarcely changed: they
reported that the majority of Americans, about
60 percent, were critical of the president's handling
of the war. However, this criticism is often
portrayed as exclusively liberal, antiwar senti-
...­
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(V) The Wise Men meet with President Johnson and other members ofhis admtnistration.
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