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PDF FormatMany have argued that support for the war began to dwindle after the Tet Offensive at the end of January 1968, shortly after the American government and military commanders had made statements about the end of the war being close at hand. In a wide-ranging attack, North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces took the American and South Vietnamese armies by surprise. Even though the attacks were repulsed everywhere but Hue City, the magnitude of the assault surprised the American press and public76 such that the Tet Offensive has come to be seen by many as the turning point of the war.77
After the Tet Offensive, there was a noticeable change in the way battles were covered on television. Even though the status of the war and the balance of forces remained more or less unchanged, fewer battles were reported as victories, slightly more were reported as defeats, and far more as draws.78 The administration’s statements about the war were treated with more skepticism: General Westmoreland was presented as a liar or deluded optimist, and President Johnson and his administration came under intense criticism. Arguably the final blow to America’s hopes of success in Vietnam was dealt by the legendary CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite, at the time often referred to as “the most trusted man in America.” When Cronkite visited Vietnam, he was shocked to see the mass graves of thousands of citizens murdered by North Vietnamese forces in Hue City during the Tet Offensive, and said that he would do everything he could to put an end to the war. On February 27, 1968, in one of the most famous broadcasts in the history of American television, Cronkite announced to his millions of viewers:
To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.79
Johnson was deeply affected by Cronkite’s statement. It is said that after the broadcast he remarked to his press secretary, “If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”80 David Halberstam of the New York Times later claimed that “The Vietnam War was declared over by a television anchorman.”81
Johnson’s poor showing two weeks later in the New Hampshire primary against an anti-war challenger further demoralized him.82 On March 22 he met with his “Wise Men,” as he called his foreign policy advisers. Most of them, heavily influenced by the media, took a pessimistic line. “As I walked back to my office,” Johnson later wrote, “I was turning over in my mind the opinions I had just heard and what these reactions meant as a reflection of broader opinion…. If they had been so deeply influenced by the reports of the Tet Offensive, what must the average citizen in the country be thinking?”83 That same day the president announced that Westmoreland would end his tour of duty in Vietnam by June 1968. In his famous speech of March 31, 1968, in which he announced he would not seek re-election, Johnson announced an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and expressed his hope that the government of North Vietnam would cease “its efforts to achieve a military victory.” The word “victory” was mentioned only twice in the forty-five minute speech, and even then only regarding North Vietnam’s military aspirations. “If they do mount another round of heavy attacks,” said Johnson, “they will not succeed in destroying the fighting power of South Vietnam and its allies.… Many men… will be lost… and the war will go on. There is no need for this to be so. There is no need to delay the talks that could bring an end to this long and this bloody war.”84
Johnson made no mention whatsoever of the possibility of an American victory. He did not tell the public what he wrote some time later in his memoirs—that the Tet Offensive had been “the most disastrous Communist defeat of the war in Vietnam.”85 He had claimed in his speech that the Tet Offensive had “failed to achieve its principal objectives,” but added that “the Communists may renew their attack any day.”86 It was difficult not to see Johnson’s speech as an attempt to extricate the United States from involvement in Vietnam. After all, if the president had thought that victory was imminent, why would he have proposed saving the North Vietnamese from defeat? Why would he have refused to send more troops to Vietnam or replaced Westmoreland at such a sensitive moment?
Taking a cue from Johnson’s gloomy view of the war, none of the 1968 presidential candidates talked anymore about victory in Vietnam. Even Richard Nixon, the Republican who went on to win the presidency and had criticized the administration after the Tet Offensive for not escalating the war, spoke about “peace with honor.” Even though it would be four years before America got out of Vietnam, in 1968 it was clear that the government was looking for a way to extricate the United States from a perceived morass.
What led to what? Did a change in public opinion affect the government’s position? What happened was in fact precisely the opposite. The Tet Offensive at first actually strengthened the hawks and weakened the doves; a great majority of the public favored escalating the war and opposed the cessation of bombing in North Vietnam. Even Cronkite’s famous newscast editorial did not have an immediate effect on the public. At the end of February 1968, the percentage of those supporting the war was identical to the percentage supporting it at the beginning of the month.87 One month later, for the first time there was a sharp drop in support for the war and doves slightly outnumbered hawks88—but even then a majority thought that Westmoreland was doing an “excellent” job conducting the war and expressed confidence in America’s military strategy in Vietnam.89 The level of support for the war was highest among young people, the age group that was serving in Vietnam, and only in August did it drop significantly.90
Looking at these facts, it seems likely that if Johnson had adopted a more hawkish posture after the Tet Offensive, public opinion would have followed him. The fact that support for escalating the war was far higher than support for the president suggests that it was the administration’s lack of clarity and resolve, not the war itself, that led to its downfall. Johnson almost never spoke to the nation from the beginning of the Tet Offensive until his speech at the end of March, and he virtually gave up any attempt to present the public with a coherent policy. He rejected the suggestions of those in favor of escalation but did not adopt the contrary policy, and he most certainly did not say anything to refute Cronkite. From the point of view of public opinion, Johnson suffered from what one scholar has called a “collapse of leadership.”91 “The media’s generalized portrait of ‘disaster’ in South Vietnam,” wrote journalist Peter Braestrup, who researched the role of the press in the Tet offensive, “affected political Washington far more than it did the general public.”92 Johnson was mistaken in thinking that along with Cronkite he had lost the ordinary citizen; he erred, according to Adam Garfinkel, when “at a crucial moment, his administration and its fabled Wise Men seem to have accorded a greater impact to the antiwar movement than it had and may have given it more influence than it deserved.”93
Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to seek a second term was motivated by several personal considerations: His failing health, his feeling that the public was turning against the war, and his belief that the American strategy in Vietnam was leading to a stalemate.94 According to William Hammond, a media historian who researched the press and the military in Vietnam, Johnson was “convinced that the conflict was necessary but believed that the American public and Congress lacked the will… to carry it through to a successful conclusion.”95 But clearly it was not the public that lacked the will to succeed, but the president, who had been influenced by advisers and a press riddled with doubt.96
The ability of political leaders to weaken public resolve in wartime is similarly seen in the IDF’s withdrawal from the security zone in southern Lebanon in 2000. The security zone had been part of Israel’s security posture for almost a decade before it began to be publicly debated.97 A large majority of the public thought that staying in the security zone was essential, a view that was not noticeably affected by the toll in Israeli lives in Lebanon.98 Even in June 1999, three weeks after Ehud Barak was elected to lead a government that came to power on a wave of promises to withdraw from Lebanon, the percentage of those opposed to a unilateral withdrawal, 61 percent, was almost exactly what it had been in February 1997.99
Yet on July 6, 1999, Prime Minister Barak declared that the IDF would pull out of Lebanon within a year. In the months that followed, Israeli public opinion turned dramatically in favor of that position.100 Barak’s declaration also affected IDF soldiers, who for the first time were outspoken in their support for the new policy. In February 2000, during a visit by Barak to an outpost in the Lebanon security zone, a group of enlisted soldiers mustered the courage to explain to the prime minister why they felt the IDF was failing in Lebanon and why they were in favor of an immediate pullout. One soldier summed up his thoughts by saying, “We have to start getting out now; why wait till July?”101 “Gilad,” a company commander serving in the security zone, wrote of his feelings in early 2000:
As a soldier I have never dared to ask why we are in Lebanon. My big brother… also didn’t ask if it was the right thing to do politically or not, nor did my father… and now, in the last few months… suddenly there have been some who have argued, suddenly asked questions, even cases of refusing an order. “What good will it do? Do you want to send us to our deaths?” they asked. It’s not nice to admit, in the last few months amidst a wave of funerals and thirty mortars a day, a situation was created in which it’s simply been difficult to function with the soldiers. You don’t conduct a war this way.102
In May 2000, the IDF withdrew from Lebanon hastily and in disarray, quickly leading to the collapse of the South Lebanese Army and enabling Hezbollah to take up positions along the border. The message sent to Israel’s enemies was a clear one, and was eloquently expressed by Hezbollah’s secretary-general, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah: “Israel, which has both nuclear power and the strongest air force in the region,” he said, “is weaker than a spider’s web.”103
