TET IN THE NEWS
One of the most momentous events of the Vietnam War, the communists’ 1968 Tet Offensive, is mired in controversy over whether the press inaccurately portrayed a U.S. victory as a defeat and turned the public against the war. There is a widespread belief, fostered by a multitude of articles and books, that the media treated the attacks as a disaster for American and South Vietnamese troops. But those charges against the press are often phrased in generalities that aren’t backed with actual quotes from news reports and don’t reflect the media consensus on the attacks.
The communist forces—mostly Viet Cong, but including substantial numbers of North Vietnamese—were heavily outnumbered and even more heavily outgunned when the offensive began on Jan. 30 and 31, 1968. To have even a chance of victory they would have needed good coordination and near-complete surprise. The demand for surprise prevented them from disseminating their plan widely among their own forces, causing a massive failure of coordination. Still, they achieved a partial surprise. Some American and many South Vietnamese units were poorly prepared or completely unprepared for the offensive, but others were ready for the attackers.
The initial communist attacks came as a terrible shock to the American public and to many journalists who reported on them. The U.S. government and military had been painting for the press and public a picture of communist weakness. Gen. William Westmoreland, in charge of all U.S. combat forces in South Vietnam as head of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, had been especially conspicuous in pushing claims of progress.
Most of the best reporters in South Vietnam, who talked a lot with officers in the field, recognized that those claims were exaggerated, but higher-ranking journalists in New York and Washington tended to believe the optimistic statements of senior officers and officials. If the anchor of a network news program believed Westmoreland’s claims that the communist forces were weakening, it did
