On March 25, 1968, just two months after Tet, a Harris poll showed that the majority of Americans, 60 percent, regarded the Tet Offensive as a defeat for U.S. objectives in Vietnam.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Vietnam Magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

Westy’s insistence that the media somehow betrayed the troops in the field still rings true with many senior U.S. military officers. In the book The War Managers, retired General Douglas Kinnard polled the 173 Army generals who commanded in Vietnam. Eighty-nine percent of them expressed negative feelings toward the printed press and even more — 91 percent — were negative about TV news coverage. Despite those findings, Kinnard concluded that the importance of the press in swaying public opinion was largely a myth. That myth was important for the government to perpetuate, so officials could insist that it was not the real situation in Vietnam against which the American people reacted, but rather the press’ portrayal of that situation.

In a research paper for the Joan Shorenstein Center at Harvard, William Hammond of the U.S. Army Center of Military History describes a breakdown in the basic spirit of cooperation and communication that had made MACV’s Guidelines for the Press so successful in Vietnam.

In a paper titled Who were the Saigon correspondents, and does it matter? Hammond observes, Flailed both by the Nixon White House and increasingly by officers in the field for their supposed disloyalty, reporters had encountered generals who would no longer give interviews, staff officers who declined to respond to the most innocuous questions in a timely manner, and official dissembling on a range of topics that stretched from the so-called ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ to the supposedly secret wars in Laos and Cambodia…as a result many reporters lost faith in their government’s word.

The psychological impact of the 1968 Tet Offensive was considered a contributing factor in South Vietnam’s collapse seven years later. In 1975, a minor setback in a battle near Ban Me Thout escalated into the ARVN’s panicked retreat and the fall of Saigon a few weeks later.

Tet should have taught a hard lesson to American leaders: Responsible leadership in wartime will recognize problems clearly and publicize events that are likely to have a serious impact on the nation. Public relations spinning only makes matters worse.

But American leaders extracted a different lesson: the need to control images coming from the battlefield. The bad rap the press got in the wake of Tet stuck and became the rationale for the military’s hostility toward the press. The fallout is still with us, in tighter battlefield censorship of war dispatches and a denial of access to soldiers in the field — changes that have reduced public information about more recent conflicts, including the invasions of Grenada and Panama, the Persian Gulf War and NATO’s Serbia bombing campaign.

In 1968, a few months after the Tet Offensive, although the hole in the wall had been repaired, bullet holes still pockmarked the facade of the U.S. Embassy. In the lobby a plaque commemorating the U.S. soldiers who died defending the embassy that morning had been erected. It read: In memory of the brave men who died January 31, 1968, defending this embassy against the Viet Cong: Sp4 Charles L. Daniel MPS, Cpl James C. Marshall USMC, Sp4 Owen E. Mebust MPC, Pfc William E. Sebast MPC, Sgt Jonnie B. Thomas.

On the same wall nearby someone had framed a quotation from Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by Lawrence of Arabia: It is better that they do it imperfectly than that you do it perfectly. For it is their war and their country and your time here is limited.

This article was written by Don North and was originally a February 2001 Vietnam eContent Feature for Vietnam magazine. For more great articles be sure to subscribe to Vietnam Magazine today!

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to