VN I think you’re saying that unlike the Battle of the Bulge, with Tet the initial impression became the accepted wisdom. But there were some balanced accounts. It was Peter Braestrup, once the Saigon bureau chief for The Washington Post, who exposed such shoddy reporting in his book, The Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington. It was Vietnam war correspondent Don Oberdorfer who wrote Tet: The Turning Point of the Vietnam War, which also set the record straight. And it was another former war correspondent, Stanley Karnow, author of Vietnam: A History, who got the VC to admit how badly they had been mauled.

Weyand: True. But unfortunately those books were written long after the event, and long after the damage had been done. Don’t get me wrong. I believe strongly that a free press is essential to our democracy. And I’ve never subscribed to the simple-minded notion that the media lost the Vietnam War. I think most of the war correspondents in Vietnam were competent and capable professionals. But I also think–and the reporting of Tet is a prime example–that the media wields such great influence in shaping public opinion that it must be especially careful to get the story straight. The American people deserve at least that.

VN Your comment about public opinion raises another issue. Several years ago Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger laid out six preconditions for the commitment of U.S. military forces to combat abroad. One of the most controversial was his conviction that there must be some reasonable assurance of public and congressional support. Do you agree with that assessment?

Weyand: I think he had it exactly right, and the Vietnam War proved his point. In 1976, in a message to the Army, I laid out some of my observations on the Vietnam War. ‘Vietnam was a reaffirmation of the peculiar relationship between the American Army and the American people,’ I said. ‘The American Army really is a people’s army in the sense that it belongs to the American people, who take a jealous and proprietary interest in its involvement. When the Army is committed, the American people are committed; when the American people lose their commitment, it is futile to try to keep the Army committed.’ When the American people lost their commitment after the Tet Offensive of 1986, for all intents and purposes the war was lost. I think President Nixon realized that fact, and that’s why soon after he entered office he ordered a gradual withdrawal of American combat forces and the ‘Vietnamization’ of the war.

VN Why did they lose their commitment? Was it just because of the perceived defeat in Tet?

Weyand: No, it was much more than that. Tet was just the final straw. The fundamental reason, as you pointed out in your book On Strategy, was the lack of clear-cut and understandable political and military objectives. That was true from top to bottom. When Clark Clifford took over as secretary of defense after Tet 1968, he found that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had no concept of victory and no plan to end the war. And that was the case in Saigon as well. As you know, a Letter of Instruction is the means by which the president, as commander in chief, issues orders to his commanders in the field for the conduct of military operations. For example, President Roosevelt’s Letter of Instruction to General Eisenhower in World War II began, ‘You will invade the continent of Europe….’ But during our quarter-century involvement in Vietnam, no president–not Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon or Ford–ever issued such clear-cut instructions to their military commanders in Vietnam. In 1974, Brigadier General Douglas Kinnard did a survey and found that ‘almost 70 percent of the Army generals who managed the war were uncertain of its objectives.’ As he concluded, that ‘mirrors a deep-seated strategic failure: the failure of policy-makers to frame tangible, obtainable goals.’ It was this lack of a sense of purpose that finally turned the American people against the war. The anti-war movement likes to take credit for it–why anyone would want to take ‘credit’ for the resulting massacre of some three million Cambodians, the consignment of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese to forced-labor camps, and the suffering of over a million Indochinese boat people is beyond me–but I believe they’re wrong. The turnaround was more pragmatic than ideological. It was the fall of 1967 when polls showed that for the first time more Americans were against the war than in support of it. And I think that shift took place because of public suspicion that the government didn’t know what it was doing. When the Tet Offensive hit several months later it merely confirmed that suspicion–especially when President Lyndon B. Johnson gave up on the war.

VN Such a misreading of events could have led to the development of a’stab-in-the-back syndrome’ within the American military. The feeling among German army veterans after World War I was that their political leaders had betrayed them, and that led to the destruction of the Weimar Republic and brought Adolf Hitler to power. The same type of reaction led to open military revolt in France after Algeria, and to a military coup in Portugal after Angola. But it never happened here, and when you retired from active in duty in 1976, the House of Representatives and the Senate gave you credit for preventing such a reaction in the American Army. How did you bring it about?

Weyand: Well, for one thing I thought the whole notion of a stab-in-the-back syndrome was overblown. All military officers take an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution without any reservation, and to defer to the civilian command of the president. I took that responsibility very seriously, as do virtually all of the members of our armed services. In any event, I was fortunate to have a solid foundation on which to build. It had been laid by my predecessor as Army chief of staff, General Creighton Abrams, who turned the Army away from its Vietnam troubles and reoriented it to its vital security interests in Europe and northeast Asia. He persuaded the Congress to stabilize the Army’s manpower and obtained its approval to activate three new divisions rounded out with brigades from the National Guard. Most importantly, he gave the Army a sense of mission and a sense of self-worth. After his tragic death in office, I saw it as my responsibility to continue the work he had begun. It is General Abrams who should get the lion’s share of credit.

VN It’s now 15 years since all American combat forces were withdrawn from Vietnam. Do you see an improvement in public attitudes toward Vietnam veterans?

Weyand: As I said earlier, America should have been proud of them from the start, for they were a remarkable group of young men and women. Now they’re finally beginning to get their due, and it’s gratifying to see the increased public recognition of the dedication, bravery and compassion the overwhelming majority of these men and women displayed while they were serving in Vietnam.

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The article was written by by Colonel Harry G. Summers and originally published in the Summer 1998 issue of Vietnam Magazine.

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