After the first reports of the attacks on Saigon and other cities, Westmoreland still thought them diversionary to what he considered the main enemy effort at Khe Sanh!

The U.S. responded with what one reporter called “the most hysterical use of American firepower ever seen,” particularly air power. “The Viet Cong had the government by the throat in those provincial towns,” explained one U.S. military adviser. “Ordinary methods would have never gotten them out, and the government did not have enough troops to do the job, so firepower was substituted.”

But firepower alone in some cases wasn’t enough. The North Vietnamese Army and the NLF held Hue for twenty-five days, and it was only retaken in vicious house-to-house fighting by Marines and ARVN forces. Superior firepower (in the air and on the ground), however, tipped the balance. “Nothing I saw during the Korean War, or in the Vietnam War so far,” wrote Robert Shaplen of the New Yorker, who toured Hue after its destruction, “has been as terrible, in terms of destruction and despair, as what I saw in Hue.” One report after the battle found that 80 percent of the city’s buildings had been destroyed.

The American and South Vietnamese response to Tet forever altered the American public’s perception of the war in Vietnam. It is now reminiscent of one of those “dirty colonial wars” fought by one of the declining European imperial powers (like the French in Algeria or the British in Kenya) trying to hold on at all cost against the wishes of the subjugated population. It was clear from the scope of the Tet Offensive that the mass of the South Vietnamese people were opposed to the Americans and in support of the NLF, the complete opposite of what the American public had been told for years. The destruction U.S. forces wreaked on South Vietnam shocked many back home and the Orwellian thinking to justify the violence made it even worse. Ben Tre in Kien Hoa Province was obliterated by U.S. firepower. “We had to destroy the town to save it,” the commanding officer in charge of recapturing Ben Tre told reporters—“coining one of the most notorious phrases of the war and a fitting motto for the U.S. counterattack against the Tet offensive,” writes Hunt.

The war literally came into American homes every night, with film footage of besieged American soldiers huddled behind tanks fighting for their lives, not in the remote countryside, but in the “secure” cities. Then came the film footage, broadcast all over the world, of Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan, South Vietnam’s police chief, summarily executing a suspected NLF officer by shooting him in the head with a pistol, a scene that looked to many as straight out of film clips of Nazi-occupied countries during the Second World War.

Another Nazi-like incident took place at a village called My Lai in March 1968, when American soldiers led by Lt. William Calley executed more than 300 unarmed men, women, and children in ditches. It would be a year and a half before the My Lai massacre became public.

While American firepower pushed back the Tet Offensive, the costs were high. During the offensive South Vietnamese forces were severely mauled at the hands of the NVA and the NLF. The Americans suffered nearly 4,000 casualties between January 30 and March 31, 1968. American military forces were clearly demoralized after Tet, beginning the process of decay and rebellion that would reach crisis proportions in the remaining years of the war. A March 3 State Department report dismally concluded:

We know that despite a massive influx of 500,000 U.S. troops, 1.2 million tons of bombs, 400,000 sorties per year, 200,000 KIA [killed in action] in three years, 20,000 U.S. KIA, etc., our control of the countryside and the defense of the urban levels is now essentially at pre-August 1965 levels. We have achieved a stalemate at a high commitment.

The effect of Tet on domestic U.S. politics was swift and dramatic. Walter Cronkite, the anchor of “CBS Evening News” and considered the most respected figure in television journalism, was apparently furious when he heard about the Tet Offensive. “What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning the war!” he is reported to have said. Cronkite went to Vietnam in late February and then in front of millions of American viewers said: “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] did the best they could.”

Johnson’s personal popularity had been declining for two years. Tet decimated his credibility with the American public. Six weeks after the Tet Offensive began, “public approval of [Johnson’s] overall performance dropped from 48 percent to 36 percent—and, more dramatically, endorsement for his handling of the war fell from 40 percent to 26 percent.” Eugene McCarthy, a relatively obscure first-term U.S. senator from Minnesota who was for American withdrawal from Vietnam, nearly defeated Johnson in the February New Hampshire Democratic primary. Soon after McCarthy’s new victory, Robert Kennedy (D-N.Y.), a much more substantial threat for Johnson’s renomination by the Democratic Party, announced that he too would be running for president on an antiwar platform. Robert McNamara, secretary of defense and an architect of the war in Vietnam, was replaced by Clark Clifford. Clifford, a longtime Washington lawyer and adviser to Democratic presidents, began a massive review of U.S. war policies in Vietnam that would quickly convince him of the need for the U.S. to get out.

The final blow to Johnson came from the very same people who had just recently endorsed his war policies, the U.S. State Department’s Senior Informal Advisory Group—popularly known as the “wise men.” The wise men were a group of the most senior advisers on foreign policy in the United States, many of whom were architects of the postwar world, including Dean Acheson, Truman’s secretary of state, John J. McCloy, former American high commissioner for occupied Germany, and many others. They met with Johnson on March 18 and told him that his policies were in shambles and that U.S. interests demanded that the troops begin withdrawing from Vietnam. Johnson was stunned. He addressed the nation on March 31 and announced that he would not seek reelection as president. The presidential race was now wide open. The antiwar movement began to surge in the U.S. and American politics was dominated by the question of withdrawal from Vietnam. In November 1968, Richard Nixon won the presidency over Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s vice president, by almost the same margin he had lost eight years earlier against Kennedy. Nixon won largely due to the impression given by his campaign that he had a “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam.

The Tet Offensive was only the opening shot of a year in which the U.S. ruling class and its allies around the world faced the greatest challenges to its rule in a generation. In April, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and 100 cities rose in rebellion. In May, a student rebellion in Paris ignited a general strike by French workers, the largest in that country’s history, putting back on the agenda the possibility of a workers’ revolution in an advanced industrial country. Robert Kennedy was assassinated after winning the California primary in June. Mayor Daley’s cops’ brutal attack on antiwar demonstrators at the Democratic convention in Chicago drew the world’s attention to political repression in America, while the Democrats, ignoring the wishes of their primary voters, nominated Johnson’s prowar vice president Hubert Humphrey as the presidential nominee of their party. These brutal and treacherous events (all related in some way to the war in Vietnam) convinced a substantial number of political activists to embrace one form or another of revolutionary politics in order to change the world. Meanwhile in Vietnam, the U.S. military started to report major disciplinary problems with its troops that marked the beginning of a soldiers’ rebellion. Within a few years, the U.S. Army was no longer capable of waging a war on the ground and had to be withdrawn from Vietnam.

What do the events of four decades ago mean for antiwar activists today? The greatest lesson of Tet is the importance of the resistance of the victims of U.S. imperialism in bringing about the end of the war. The Vietnamese have a long and proud tradition of resistance to foreign domination from a thousand-year resistance to the Chinese to the defeat of the Japanese and the French during and after the Second World War. This tradition enabled them to withstand the American military onslaught, while the Tet Offensive broke the will of the United States government to continue the war.

The Vietnamese resistance also inspired many in the American antiwar movement, who drew a direct connection between the Vietnamese national struggle and the radical tradition in the United States. Dave Dellinger, a long time radical pacifist and a leading Vietnam antiwar activist, when brought before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in December 1968 told them:

I make a comparison between the Vietnamese people, who feel that there is no other way to defend the independence and the sanctity of their homeland than by the use of violence, I compare them to the American patriots under George Washington who also used violence. The word “terror” is a tough one, you know, what constitutes “terror.” [Our patriots] applied methods similar to those of the NLF against the British and, also, by the way, against American Tories.