Section 1 of IA: Evaluation of Sources
To what extent did the Tet Offensive influence the American public’s view of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War? The research of this paper will be focusing on what the public perception of the war was leading up to the Tet Offensive. The goal is to identify how specifically the Tet Offensive affected the public’s sentiment of the war and to what extent.
The most important source in the IA is titled “Major Problems in the History of the Vietnam War”. The book is written by Robert McMahon and is a collection of primary and secondary source documents and essays written by other historians and people during who lived through the Vietnam War. McMahon is a prolific author and has updated this book multiple times in the past few decades.
One value of this source is that it encompasses many different perspectives of the Vietnam War. These perspectives come from soldiers and civilians on both sides of the War as well as historians who offer their evaluations. This provides excellent content for the primary sources in this investigation as well as academic and analytical viewpoints. Furthermore the book has over fourty pages of content, strictly dedicated to the Tet Offensive; which provides opinionated views of the war. Another value would be the balanced opinions, in which, for every source that appears to have a more negative stance on an incident in the War, McHanon includes a source thats contrary to it.
The limitations for this book include the choices in essays as many of them repeat information and seem to act more like tertiary sources. There is also a lack of narrative in the book which can make linking events quite difficult, especially that the sources in each chapter are not always chronologically organized.
Another sourced used was “American Public Opinion and the War in Vietnam”. Written by David Schmitz in 2005 the book encompasses the history of the Tet Offensive, how it affected the war, and how it affected U.S. public opinion. The book was published by Rowman & Littlefield publishers and was meant to be an “authoritative re-examination of the key turning point in the Vietnam War”.
A value of this source is that fact Schmitz addresses the common argument that it was the media's portrayal of the Vietnam War that led to the US's loss of the war; he deciding that this was not the case and was instead the lacking patience for the further escalation of the war. There are uses of materials both primary and secondary in addition to an annotated bibliography. This has helped the research in the investigation by providing reasoning to why the Tet Offensive was perhaps the most important event in the Vietnam War.
Some of the limitations come from the text being a little outdated. The Pentagon Papers were released in 2011 while the book was published in 2005. The lack of information in the book relating to the Pentagon Papers prevents this investigation from examining how the government saw the Tet Offensive affecting public opinion.
Section 2 of IA: Investigation
On January 31, 1968, during the Vietnamese New Year called "Tet," communist forces unleashed massive attacks on U.S. positions throughout Vietnam. The Tet Offensive, televised nightly in the U.S., shocked many Americans who previously had the idea the U.S. was easily defeating communist forces in a war originally planned to last a few months. U.S. forces eventually pushed the North Vietnamese forces back and inflicted huge casualties on them, but the impact the fighting had on U.S. public opinion was equally huge. The successive lying and manipulation of information along with the expansion of the “Credibility Gap” sowed profound doubts about the war’s course exposing the truth that, in spite of the presence of some 500,000 American military personnel in Vietnam, years of fighting and heavy casualties had yielded nothing more than a bloody stalemate. Ultimately, multiple events over the course of the Vietnam War combined with the Tet Offensive gradually led to the total withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam by 1975. The Vietnam war had clearly shown the frustration of media with the decisions made by the government involving war and foreign policy.
The Tet Offensive arrived at the worst time for the Johnson administration which at the same time was trying to convince an increasingly skeptical U.S. public that the Vietnam War was not the stalemate that it appeared to be. Defense and military officials painted a picture of a weakened enemy nearing collapse. Gen. William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in South Vietnam, said during a speech at the National Press Club in November 1967 that U.S. forces had reached a point where “the end begins to come into view” and that “the enemy’s hopes are bankrupt”. Through 1967, it’s hard to exaggerate how much effort the White House put into what it called the “success campaign” propaganda campaign, “. . . to convince the American people that the war was going in the right direction, even when internally they weren’t at all sure,”(Appy). However, most sources show that the White House was very concerned about the defeat in Vietnam. The campaign was perhaps too convincing, given what the North Vietnamese unleashed in January 1968, a full blown attack that underscored how far the North was from defeat. The U.S. military deemed the heavy enemy casualties as an American victory, but the U.S. public focused on a determined enemy that inflicted unacceptable loses on fellow Americans.. “For an American public that is increasingly persuaded by that argument, when the Tet Offensive happens, there seems to be a disconnect between what they’ve been told and what they’re seeing on the ground” (Daddis).
The pairing of national security interests with the success of anti-communism was a feature of Cold War-era foreign policy. The U.S. support for President Ngo Dinh Diem of the Republic of Vietnam was a notable failure within the Vietnam war. America’s disillusionment with Diem and its subsequent complicity in his overthrow and murder in 1963 marked the beginning of its direct military involvement in Vietnam. Two-and-a-half million U.S. troops would eventually serve in Vietnam in a failed effort to prevent the Democratic Republic of Vietnam from uniting the country under a communist regime. President Kennedy “had come to doubt Vietnam’s manageability. He had learned painfully from Diem’s assassination that the U.S. could influence events there, but not necessarily control them.” Examination of the U.S. partnership with Diem during the Kennedy administration's illuminates some of the factors that led to the demise of the Vietnam War.
At the end of 1963, media cynicism towards the government in South Vietnam, coupled with the assassination of Diem, made public opinion sway away from escalating U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Additionally, the assassination of Kennedy left the nation uninterested in Vietnam affairs. Public opinion in “1964 was apathetic and permissive” regarding Vietnam. For example, a “growing [number] of Americans opposed a major war, and while there was also opposition to withdrawal, the public would likely have gone along with a skillfully executed disengagement.” Even the majority of the press favored “de-escalation and a negotiated settlement.” and the Johnson Administration “was well aware”. However, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident had provided the Johnson Administration room to escalate the war in Vietnam and to guide the media back into the direction of the Cold War framework, the process of selection of stories and the angles of approach involves frames. The Cold War was a broad frame into which stories of conflict could be simply but often misleadingly fitted to enable the media to narrate a story in a means best meant for the American public. In essence, most of the media was “on-board” with the general idea of removing communism from Vietnam and preventing the domino effect of east Asia but the public was clearly not ready for the involvement of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and thousands of lives to be spent.
The climate of distrust with the Johnson Administration during the time produced the term “Credibility Gap”, which was widely used by skeptics to question the truthfulness of Johnson administration’s policies and statements about the war in Vietnam. Throughout 1967, Johnson administration began to propagate an optimistic picture about the U.S. situation in Vietnam. In late 1967, General William Westmoreland, the head commander of Military Assistance Command, returned to the United States to give an upbeat assessment of the American War in Vietnam. In the speech before the National Press Club in Washington D.C. on November 21, Westmoreland announced the U.S. “had turned the corner in the war” and that the end of the war in Vietnam “began to come into view”. Together with Westmoreland, many government officials such as Walt W. Rostow, National Security Advisor, also spoke confident words about Vietnam. Rostow claimed he “see the light at the end of the tunnel”. A direct quote by Johnson shows his intentions of the War changing once he became elected “We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” This may have proved more politically consequential than it first appeared.
However, the Tet Offensive in 1968, and later the Pentagon Papers, were irrefutable pieces of evidence that Johnson administration had deceived not only the public but also Congress. Those events helped to prove public suspicion that there was a significant “gap” between the administration’s declarations and reality.
In 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered his department to prepare an in-depth history of American involvement in the Vietnam War. McNamara had already begun to harbor serious doubts about U.S. policy in Vietnam, and the study–which came to be known as the “Pentagon Papers” validated his misgivings. Top-secret memorandums, reports, and papers indicated that the U.S. government had systematically lied to the American people, deceiving them about American goals and progress in the war in Vietnam. The devastating multi-volume study remained locked away in a Pentagon safe for years. In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg, a Defense Department employee who had turned completely against the war, began to smuggle portions of the papers out of the Pentagon. These papers made their way to the New York Times, and on June 13, 1971, the American public read them in stunned amazement. The publication of the papers added further fuel to the already powerful anti-war movement and drove the administration of President Richard Nixon into a frenzy of paranoia about information “leaks.” The “Pentagon Papers” further eroded the American public’s confidence in their nation’s Cold War foreign policy. The brutal, costly, and seemingly endless Vietnam War had already damaged the government’s credibility, and the publication of the “Pentagon Papers” showed people the true extent to which the government had manipulated and lied to them. Some of the most dramatic examples were documents indicating that the Kennedy administration had openly encouraged and participated in the overthrow of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963; that the CIA believed that the “domino theory” did not actually apply to Asia; and that the heavy American bombing of North Vietnam, contrary to U.S. government pronouncements about its success, was having absolutely no impact on the communists’ will to continue the fight. "Once we suffer large casualties, we will have started a well-nigh irreversible process. Our involvement will be so great that we can not-without national humiliation-stop short of achieving our complete objectives. Of the two possibilities, I think humiliation would be more likely than the achievement of our objectives —even after we have paid terrible costs." a statement from U.S. diplomat George Ball.
Section 3 of IA: Reflection
This investigation has helped me better understand the methods used by historians when researching and analyzing information, as well as the challenges they encounter. I believe I have improved my skills with the “so what” aspect in evaluating sources, something that is critical to any historian. The problem comes from being able to take information from a potentially longer analytic work and place it in an essay that is much shorter. The initial quote or piece of information may make sense under the context of all the information from the original source but may not have clear relevance within the new paper. To mitigate this the writing needs to be written around the quotes, in order to bring significance to the research conducted. For example the text might say “ If Johnson had trusted his initial assessment of Vietnam, which was not to involve troops the war would have never escalated out of his control(Bullard)”, to the researcher this may sound like a strong opinion that supports the essay however, it doesn’t have any value to it since it was most likely the sentences and information around the original quote that were the most significant. Part of being a historian is making sure your sources are important to the essay and provide context to the overall argument and as a result I had to re-consider many of the quotes I had in my essay.
Contradictory statements come up a lot in research. Sometimes this can be useful for a historians as differing opinions can provide better perspective in a paper. Other times it’s the factual information that seems to not align with what others might be saying. This could be a result of bias from the author of the source or simply that not enough was known about that event for historians to agree on one idea. Finding reliable sources is a challenge that many historians face. The best way I was able to handle this through my research was checking to see if the author was prolific in his work or had revisions made on his work with other historians.
Another difficulty that historians face is organization of research. An essay needs to have a certain flow and clarity in order for the readers to follow along with the context of what is being talked about. Historians have to properly organize different dates and events and connect their significance to other events without making the overall analysis too hard to follow. The narrative in the essay needs to provide understanding of the situation at the time, it should not serve as filler information in the essay or like it is based off of tertiary sources The more clear the point the better the writing. With this, my investigation has brought to light some of the difficulties, techniques, and methods of historians when conducting research papers.
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