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South Vietnamese population. As a result the dismissed the NVA and Vietcong calls for a general uprising as propaganda. At the same time, Middle America was starting to protest the war and losing confidence in our government handling of the conflict. General Earle Wheeler and Joint Chiefs of Staff were telling the President and the American public that the NVA and the Vietcong are not yet at the end of their military rope. They felt they still needed the ability to send more troops to the south and that the war could be won.

The Chicago Tribune and many of the nation newspapers brought the shocking news of the Tet Offensive to American homes the morning of February 1st, 1968. On January 30/31st 1968, the NVA and the Vietcong attacked cities and providential capitols with coordinated and well-synchronized attacks. Their strategy was brilliant and had gone undetected by our intelligence community. Only days before the offensive, the American public was led to believe that something of this magnitude could never happen. After Tet, the American public wanted out of the war and felt that there was no need to be involved in South East Asia. The media, which at times was pro war, quickly became part of the anti-war protests. The American public quickly turned on the president. The Democratic Party had Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy as anti-war candidates running for the presidency. On March 31st, 1968, President Johnson went on TV and told the American public that he will not run for president or accept his party’s nomination for president of the United States in the fall elections.

This was not our first intelligence failure. Looking back to 1941 when Pearl Harbor was bombed. We knew that there were indications that Japan was going to bomb us but the intelligence community failed to recognize the imminent attack. The Tet Offensive could be compared to the Battle of the Bulge where the German caught the US off guard; this was the same for Tet Offensive when the Vietcong and the NVA attacked unexpectedly during the Lunar New Year cease fire. After the Vietnam War, the United States almost reverted to isolationism of post WWI. From the Time that America pulled out of the Vietnam War until the Gulf War, as Americans we tried to avoid any conflicts that we compare to the Vietnam War. If only our intelligence information would have been analyzed fully we might not have impacted the United States public opinion so dramatically.



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