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The 1968 Tet offensive is one of the best-known episodes of the Vietnam War. It was covered intensively by American news media and was an important factor in Lyndon Johnson’s political demise. It was also, according to critics of the press, an example of how the news media can rush to judgment and deliver information that is fundamentally flawed.

On January 30 and 31, 1968, more than 80,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops began coordinated attacks in South Vietnam, targeting three-quarters of the country’s provincial capitals and most major cities, including the national capital, Saigon.⁵² In terms of shock value, the communists were immediately successful. The American military had not anticipated such a sweeping offensive, and the American public was dismayed to find that the consistently upbeat information they had been receiving from its government was clearly wrong. Because so much of the press corps was based in Saigon, initial reports from the fighting were filled with first-hand accounts of the attacks there, including the communists’ success (although brief) in breaching the defenses of the US embassy.

Clark Clifford, who had just been confirmed by the Senate as US secretary of defense, later wrote about the deluge of bad news during the next several weeks:

 On February 18, the Pentagon reported the war’s highest one-week American casualty toll: 543 killed, 2,547 wounded.

 On February 23, the Selective Service announced it would draft an additional 48,000 men, the second-largest call-up of the war.

 On February 25, General William Westmoreland, commander of the US forces in Vietnam, told the press that he would need even more troops. General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told the White House that as many as 205,000 more soldiers would be needed.53

Other pieces of information also contributed to the appearance of chaos in South Vietnam. A widely seen photograph taken by Eddie Adams of the Associated Press showed South Vietnamese police general Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a handcuffed Vietcong prisoner, Nguyen Van Lem, on a Saigon street. In another incident, Associated Press correspondent Peter Arnett reported that an American officer said about the fighting in the Mekong River town of Ben Tre, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”⁵⁴ Herbert Schandler later wrote about this famous quote: “This widely repeated sentence seemed to sum up the irony and the contradictions in the use of American power in Vietnam and caused many to question the purpose of our being there. If we had to destroy our friends in order to save them, was the effort really worthwhile, either for us or for our friends?”⁵⁵

President Johnson understood the precariousness of his military and political positions, and he knew that the “unmanaged” information about Tet was worsening his situation. (The White House and Pentagon began a hunt for the officer whom Arnett had quoted, but Arnett refused to divulge his name and the search was unsuccessful.⁵⁶) Daniel Hallin observed:

For the most part, journalists seem to have interpreted Tet, without consciously making the distinction, for what it said rather than what it did – as proof, regardless of who won or lost it, that the war was not under control … . The journalists were inescapably a part of the political process they were reporting. If they said Tet was a political defeat for the administration, they were helping make it so; if they resisted the journalistic instinct to put Tet in that context, they were helping the administration out. Most of them followed that journalistic instinct.⁵⁷

Tet may have been a tipping point at which information from the news media became ascendant, outweighing the government’s messaging and reshaping perceptions of the war. Hallin cited the “ideological framing” of the war “as a conflict between a ‘Western-backed regime’ and ‘Communist guerrillas.’”⁵⁸ For Americans during the Cold War, such a match-up presented an easy choice, requiring little debate. But Tet introduced factors that complicated the thinking about the war. It was no longer simply a choice between “good” and “bad,” but now also required cost–benefit analysis: was this war truly worth fighting? And what information should be relied upon in formulating an answer to that question?

Public opinion was shifting. In November 1967, a Gallup Poll asked respondents if they thought the United States was losing, standing still, or making progress in Vietnam. The answers were 8 percent losing, 33 percent standing still, 50 percent making progress, with 9 percent undecided. Just three months later, in February 1968 (a few weeks after Tet), the responses were 23 percent losing, 38 percent standing still, 33 percent making progress, and 6 percent undecided.⁵⁹

Understandably, many members of the American public may have been uncertain about whom to believe and what to think. The Tet offensive seemed to reflect the “false premises and false promises” that Clark Clifford later cited. The heavy (and sometimes bloody) news coverage of the fighting further undermined Johnson’s credibility. For the president, the coup de grâce may have been a February 27 CBS News special, “Report from Vietnam by Walter Cronkite,” America’s most widely known journalist, who was sometimes referred to as “the most trusted man in America.” The hour-long broadcast included footage from Cronkite’s post-Tet visit to Vietnam and concluded with his commentary from his New York anchor desk. He said, in part: “To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, if unsatisfactory conclusion … . It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.”⁶⁰

Johnson tried to retake control of the information reaching the public. He dispatched his cabinet members to television talk shows and said at a news conference that “the enemy will fail and fail again because we Americans will never yield.”⁶¹ But these efforts could not compete effectively with the information coming from the more than 200 American journalists in Vietnam. Under Secretary of the Air Force Townsend Hoopes later wrote that “the scale, virulence, and tenacity of the Tet offensive had all but severed the remaining strands of the Administration’s credibility. The President was speaking out forcefully, but his words and their tone struck listeners as more shrill than reassuring; in them one detected a profound inner discomfort and unease, a thrashing about in uncertainty.”⁶²

In the past – as recently as during the Kennedy years – the government–press dynamic often favored the government because there were limited ways that information could reach the public. The turnaround had taken hold beginning on November 22, 1963 when Kennedy was assassinated. People turned to television to confirm the news of his death and to gather details. The audience continued to grow; according to Nielsen research, 81 percent of the approximately 50 million American homes with a television were tuned in to the President’s funeral on November 24.⁶³ Within the space of a few days, television had established itself as the nation’s go-to source for crisis information.

Aside from the sheer number of viewers, this event provided evidence of a media-connected national community. Whether you were in Miami or Seattle, you watched the funeral at the same moment, as it happened. No longer did you need to wait for information to wend its way across the country. Radio had achieved something similar 20 years before, but in 1963 the impact of information was heightened by being able to see the funeral. This created the effect of being at least emotionally present at the ceremonies. Information was becoming more immersive and more personal, and, at a time of national tragedy, information was the country’s connective tissue.

Lacking Kennedy’s ease in front of the TV cameras, Johnson was on unfamiliar and hostile terrain. His efforts in the weeks following the first Tet attacks were not enough to offset the pessimism that imbued news reports about the Vietnam situation. In a March 31 televised address, Johnson announced a bombing halt and new efforts to have the South Vietnamese do more of the fighting. He concluded his speech by saying, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

This was from someone who in the election just four years before had won 61 percent of the popular vote, carried 44 states, and won 486 electoral votes (while his Republican opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater, won 52). Had Vietnam – and specifically the Tet offensive – done him in? If so, was the information that contributed to his political downfall accurate?

On the day after his speech from the White House, Johnson spoke to the National Association of Broadcasters and offered his cautionary view of television coverage of war:

As I sat in my office last evening, waiting to speak, I thought of the many times each week when television brings the war into the American home. No one can say exactly what effect those vivid scenes would have on American opinion. Historians must only guess at the effect that television would have had during earlier conflicts on the future of this nation: during the Korean War, for example, at that time when our forces were pushed back there to Pusan; or World War II, the Battle of the Bulge; or when our men were slugging it out in Europe.⁶⁴

Johnson’s point was that graphic depictions of military setbacks – even temporary ones – can undermine the popular support essential in a democracy for those waging war. To an extent, that can be viewed as a self-serving outlook that considered only part of the information situation. Even Johnson’s national security adviser Walt Rostow admitted that the administration had failed to present a “clear and persuasive” picture of what was happening in Vietnam, thus ceding information dominance to the news media, whose work Rostow characterized as “generally undistinguished and often biased.”⁶⁵ Even if Rostow’s appraisal was correct, the Johnson administration had lost control of the war narrative and found itself plagued by a “credibility gap.”

Further, suppose that the information provided in the news coverage was wrong. Suppose that Tet had actually been a massive setback for the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces, but journalists had been so surprised by the breadth and ferocity of the attacks that they assumed the communists were victorious. If the public were to learn about such inaccuracy, would Johnson and his war policy be vindicated? In terms of influence, what would it mean about the role of television and other news media, and how would this affect policymakers’ decisions about information management in the future?

We will later see how a “Vietnam syndrome” – an offspring of the credibility gap of the Johnson years – had significant effect on some future wars. For now, it is useful to consider flaws in the news coverage of the Tet offensive, which many historians today consider to have been a military defeat for the communist forces that were unable to hold territory or spur a popular uprising in the South. They did, however, achieve political success because they were perceived as victorious by many journalists. The United States and its allies had previously relied on misleading information to create expectations that could not be fulfilled. The communist forces were able to puncture that balloon.

The principal analyst of Tet news coverage and its impact was Peter Braestrup, who was Saigon bureau chief of the Washington Post during Tet. His book, Big Story, was published in 1977 in two volumes. In it, he meticulously chronicles events during Tet and how they were covered. Among his conclusions:

Rarely has contemporary crisis-journalism turned out, in retrospect, to have veered so widely from reality. Essentially, the dominant themes of the words and film from Vietnam (rebroadcast in commentary, editorials, and much political rhetoric at home) added up to a portrait of defeat for the allies. Historians, on the contrary, have concluded that the Tet offensive resulted in a severe military-political setback for Hanoi in the South. To have portrayed such a setback for one side as a defeat for the other – in a major crisis abroad – cannot be counted as a triumph for American journalism.⁶⁶

Valuable lessons about what not to do can be found in the flawed news reports. The journalistic errors were partly attributable to mutual distrust between press and government. Even when the government-supplied information was accurate, many journalists were so skeptical that they were inclined to treat it as being misleading. Johnson’s failure to understand the breadth of the enlarged information universe is also significant. With the addition of radio and then television, the news media environment had become less forgiving of leaders who did not understand it and respond to its demands. Braestrup wrote of this: “In contrast to John F. Kennedy during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, or to Franklin D. Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor, [Johnson] started by setting a hesitant tone – which did not go unnoticed in the media. Initially, the President sought to repeat his 1967 public-relations strategy, dominating the media with reassuring statements about Vietnam by subordinates.”⁶⁷

Johnson did not recognize that the increase in the number of news venues meant that information would be more difficult to manage. The information pie now had more slices from which the public could choose. By the late 1960s, it was impossible to dominate the information flow as some of Johnson’s predecessors had been able to do. Television, for instance, had already helped to amplify the debate about Vietnam at home, as when NBC in 1966 had televised five hours of testimony by George Kennan, retired diplomat and critic of the Johnson war policy. Kennan told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the national television audience that “There is more respect to be won in the opinion of this world by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions than by the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant or unpromising objectives.”⁶⁸ That was the kind of message that was now, to Johnson’s distress, reaching the American public more consistently.

When Johnson had been, in Robert Caro’s words, “master of the Senate,” he was largely able to control the political atmosphere in which he worked, including much of the information related to the Senate’s business. As president, on a vastly larger playing field, he learned painfully that he did not retain that kind of power, and without it he could not fight “his” war as he wanted to.

The cases examined in this chapter are by no means the only examples of information affecting public support for or opposition to a war. What does emerge, however, from this chapter is evidence that, as information flows become more diverse and pervasive, they are more difficult for political leaders to manage.

Evidence of this can be seen in the fact that the myth that “the press lost the Vietnam War” survives a half-century after it was born. Johnson’s abdication has haunted more recent US presidents, and also has served as an object lesson for other governments. The result: consistent, forceful, and increasingly sophisticated efforts to control information at war.