VIETNAM: THE IMPOSSIBLE WAR

Calls For An End To The War

	By the end of 1967, the twin crises of the war in Vietnam and the social battles at home
produced profound social and political tensions.  In the course of 1968, those tensions seemed 
suddenly to burst to the surface and to threaten the nation with genuine chaos.  Not since 
World War II had the United States experienced so profound a sense of crisis.  

	On January 31, 1968, the first day of the Vietnamese New Year (Tet), communist forces
launched an enormous, concerted attack on American strongholds throughout South Vietnam.  A few 
cities, most notably Hue, fell to the communists.  Others suffered major disruptions.  But what
made the Tet offensive so shocking to the American people, who saw vivid reports of it on 
television, was the sight of communist forces in the heart of Saigon, setting off bombs,
shooting down South Vietnamese officials and troops, and holding down fortified areas.  
	The Tet offensive also suggested to the American public something of the brutality of
the war in Vietnam.  In the midst of the fighting, television cameras recorded the sight of a 
captured Viet Cong soldier being led up to a South Vietnamese officer in the streets of Saigon.  
Without a word, the officer pulled out his pistol and shot the young man in the head, leaving 
him lying dead in the street, his blood pouring onto the pavement.  No single event did more
to undermine support for the war in the United States.  
	American forces soon dislodged the Viet Cong from most of the positions they had seized,
and the Tet offensive in the end cost the communists such appalling casualties that they were 
significantly weakened for months to come.  Indeed, the Tet defeats permanently depleted the
ranks of the NLF and forced North Vietnamese troops to take on a much larger share of the 
fighting.  But all that had little impact on American opinion.  Tet may have been a military
victory for the United States; but it was a political defeat for the administration, a defeat
from which it would never fully recover.  
	In the following weeks, opposition to the war grew substantially.  Leading newspapers and 
magazines, television commentators, and mainstream politicians began taking public stands in 
favor of de-escalation of the conflict.  Within weeks of the Tet offensive, public opposition
to the war had almost doubled.  And Johnson's personal popularity rating had slid to 35 percent,
the lowest of any president since Harry Truman.