HANOI’S TET DECEPTION

On Jan. 31, 1968, the start of a cease-fire for the Lunar New Year celebration called Tet, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army launched large-scale assaults across South Vietnam. Even though the communists had conducted seven major attacks in the northern and central regions the previous day, most senior American and South Vietnamese political leaders and mid-to-senior level military officers were away for the holiday. Surprised and paralyzed, most South Vietnamese units responded slowly, enabling the Viet Cong to seize their initial objectives.

The early successes of the communists’ Tet Offensive, intended to spark a national uprising that would overthrow the Saigon government, rudely shocked the American public and congressional leaders who had been treated to months of optimistic statements from President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration and military commanders. The breadth and scale of the offensive discredited the government’s claims that the Viet Cong were on the verge of defeat. It seemed as if America’s intelligence agencies and political leaders were either delusional or dishonest.

In the end, the communists suffered a costly defeat on the battlefield, but Tet gave them a political victory that would lead to a U.S. military withdrawal seven years later.

The outcomes of the offensive can be traced to a combination of strategic decisions in Washington, Hanoi and Saigon; conflicting intelligence information that hobbled Washington and Saigon; and Hanoi’s effective deception operations that were incorporated into plans for a “general offensive-general uprising.”

Leaders in all three capitals believed the war was going their way, but none had a unified view of the road ahead. As South Vietnam’s scheduled November 1967 elections approached, Saigon’s leaders were more concerned with internal political disputes than with the war itself, and some resented the United States’ domination of the tactical and operational planning. Similarly, with a U.S. presidential election looming in November 1968, rising casualties had increased opposition to the war and provided an incentive for Johnson and the Pentagon to present a rosy view of the