Part iI. desperation tactics

On January 30th, the Commander of US Forces in Vietnam, William Westmoreland, sent a telegram to General Earle Wheeler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The telegram described a surprise attack launched by North Vietnamese forces during the truce meant to allow the celebration of the Vietnamese new year: 

The current outlook depicts a situation similar to my foregoing account. The enemy has displayed what appears to be desperation tactics, using NVA troops to terrorize populated areas. He attempted to achieve surprise by attacking during the truce period. The reaction of Vietnamese, US and free world forces to the situation has been generally good. Since the enemy has exposed himself, he has suffered many casualties. As of now, they add up to almost 700. When the dust settles, there will probably be more. All my subordinate commanders report the situation well in hand.

The Tet Offensive marked the first moment in the post-World War II era that the United States was staring directly at the limits of its imperial grasp. Colliding with a significant economic crisis threatening the west, Tet and the reaction it triggered at home forced Lydon B. Johnson to answer fundamental questions about the future of the United States and its investment in the Cold War.

Tet marked the collapse of Kennedy’s activist foreign policy that adapted the Eisenhower Doctrine to offer global protection, financing, and architecture to nations under threat. By 1968, however, Kennedy was gone, and with him his ambitions.

After his election in 1964, Johnson made his intentions to distinguish himself from his predecessor clear. Johnson, who had ascended to the Oval Office from impoverished depression ravaged Texas, announced the creation of his “great society,” a new deal for the 1960s that would rescue the quarter of America’s population still living in poverty. By 1968, however, public enthusiasm for LBJ’s ambition at home had been spoiled by his agenda abroad. When his presidency began, the number of US soldiers in Vietnam was 28,000. By January 1968, that number had reached its peak at 535,000.

Yet in war, there is always a figure more influential than any statistic of troop involvement, injury, or casualty - money. By 1967, the Vietnam War was directly weakening the value of the US dollar by placing "a burden of 3.6 billion a year on an already overheated US economy, triggering inflation across the global markets. Further spoiling LBJ’s daily memos was news of the mass devaluation of the British pound and the gold crisis of 1967 that undermined the gold resources upon which the US previously relied. The dilemma was apparent: the US government no longer had the resources to support the war on poverty and the war in Vietnam. Things were bad, and they were about to get much worse. 

On the morning of Westmoreland’s telegram, North Vietnamese and NLF forces launched the Tet Offensive, a bid to overwhelm the South Vietnamese forces during the informal truce meant to celebrate Vietnam’s most important holiday. Though Tet ended in disaster for North Vietnam, the brutality of the conflict shocked Americans at home. The Vietnam campaign in 1968 no longer protected the insecurities of the Oval Office from overflowing into the public consciousness. 

Tet immediately became the most perilous period of the war and the first to be fought in cities. In one month, Tet told the story of the Vietnam war. Though American forces inflicted massive casualties and proved they could maintain a hold on the Saigon regime, the feeling of an inevitable stalemate also withstood the assault. No amount of money, napalm, or loss of life appeared to make any difference. 

Writing to General John McConnell in late 1967, Missouri Senator Stuart Symington seemed to predict the crises that any hiccup in Vietnam may ignite. He wrote, “politically, militarily, and economically” the United States would soon find itself forced into a confrontation with the Soviet Union leaving the US no option but to “start throwing nuclear weapons from tubes and silos.”

What originally appeared a justified battle against the global forces of communism to defend democracy’s frontier had become a quagmire of chaos and confusion. Just two months after Tet, on March 16th, a group of American soldiers entered the South Vietnamese village of My Lai in pursuit of NLF forces that previously used the village as a base. Frustrated to find only women, children, and the elderly, the soldiers proceeded to slaughter hundreds of civilians. Though this horrific event would only materialize in US newspapers and broadcasts years later, it legitimized the violent images of street executions and bloody US soldiers that appeared on television and in newspapers from Berkeley to Washington, DC. That same year, an American photographer captured the point-blank execution of an NLF suspect, a snapshot of how drastically American Cold War Policy had failed. Democracy’s frontier had birthed brutality without purpose.

What was the point of this horror? To expand democracy’s frontier? To end the threat of nuclear war? Or to merely extend the fantasies of politicians, generals, and Presidents desperate to preserve an image of America’s role on the international stage that existed only in their dreams?  

In his memoirs, LBJ accused Walter Cronkite and other journalists who announced these horrors to the public of establishing a “chorus of defeatism” responsible for America’s failure in Vietnam. Despite LBJ’s best wishes, the chorus only grew louder as anti-war protests exacerbated the boiling racial and economic tensions that dominated American life in previous years. The White House feared that their two-fronted war effort was on the verge of complete collapse. The nation was changing direction, looking to new figures campaigning on messages of fiscal responsibility and promises to get the US out of Vietnam. Having lost the public's confidence and conceding the defeat of JFK’s frontier vision, LBJ announced from the desk of the oval office his decision not to seek reelection.