The Tet Offensive

Anthony Edmonds

Although much controversy still swirls around the Tet Offensive, most observers seem to agree on one broad proposition: Tet was probably instrumental in causing a major reassessment of U.S. policy, given the official perception that the offensive had caused a shift in public opinion. In other words, Tet helped push the American public toward a deepening pessimism about the war and America's role in it; this pessimism, then, was instrumental in causing an alteration in U.S. policy.

The journalist Don Oberdorfer, in his early and still valuable account of the offensive, argues that Tet "was a pivotal event, one of the great turning points of our day."¹ He emphasizes Tet's "powerful impact on American public attitudes and governmental decision-making" and concludes that "the American people and most of their leaders reached the conclusion that the Vietnam War would require greater effort over a far longer period of time than it was worth."²

Writing two decades later, James Olson and Randy Roberts make the same point in their superb textbook, Where the Domino Fell: "Tet was an overwhelming strategic victory for the Communists. . . . Americans were no longer in the mood for more talk about victories."³ For Olson and Roberts, Art Buchwald's column entitled "We Have the Enemy on the Run, Says General Custer" aptly symbolizes the public's Tet-induced pessimism about the war.⁴

Finally, the most recent specialized scholarly account of Tet, James Wirtz' masterful The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War, echoes the views of Oberdorfer and Olson and Roberts. Wirtz proclaims at the outset that

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