Word: tet
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...maneuvering really began in earnest last February, when General William C. Westmoreland, then the U.S. commander in Viet Nam and now Army Chief of Staff, appealed to the President for 206,000 more U.S. troops in the wake of the Communists' Tet offensive. Johnson rejected the request, though he did agree to a modest increase, and the ceiling on U.S. manpower now stands at 549,000. Then came Johnson's March 31 renunciation of a second term and his declaration of a partial bombing pause over the North. Six weeks after that, in mid-May, the Paris peace...
...Differences. Says Eugene Bable, a ranking U.S. official in the Delta: "You can say the villagers are doing it to save their own skins. But it was their skins before, and they remained passive." Two things have made the difference. The first spur was the deadly 1968 Tet offensive, which brought the war home to urban Vietnamese as never before. The Viet Cong occupied large sections of Phu Vinh, capital of Vinh Binh province, and killed 13 civilians be fore they were driven out. The second factor is a swashbuckling ex-actor named Tom Hayden...
...Saigon. Outside the South Vietnamese capital, the ceaseless patrolling and ambushing continued last week, although there was only limited contact. In Paris and Washington, wary allied and North Vietnamese diplomats maintained their watch on the peace talks. But Saigon, a subdued shadow of its old hedonistic self since the Tet offensive of February, was beginning to glitter once more...
...conclusion is that the war will end." A farmer uprooted from his Mekong Delta paddies planned to "go to my rice again." Adding to the euphoria, the government pushed the 10 p.m. curfew up to 11 p.m. "We now talk," said a Saigon journalist, "of spending our next Tet in peace...
...this calculation Johnson and his advisors committed the cardinal sin of diplomacy: they failed to place themselves in the enemy's shoes and examine the options as he must see them. What would Johnson have thought if the North Vietnamese offered peace and then launched a Tet offensive? The answer is clear. The error was so elementary that Johnson could hardly have taken the peace initiative seriously to begin with. The tendency of American statesmen to judge themselves and their enemies by different standards is a continuing motif of the Vietnam...