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Then, as often happened in Viet Nam, one murderous mirage overtook another. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces launched their general offensive during the lunar New Year, called Tet. Militarily, Tet was a defeat for the Communists. But once again in Viet Nam and in the American mind, illusion triumphed over reality. America, and much of the rest of the world, regarded Tet as shocking proof that the war was a disaster for the U.S., unwinnable.
The first unhappy surprise for Americans came at dawn Viet Nam time on Jan. 30, 1968. Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces attacked Da Nang, the second largest city in South Viet Nam, and seven other major towns. Almost 24 hours later, they mounted a wave of near simultaneous attacks throughout South Viet Nam. They hit 36 of the country's 44 provincial capitals. They overran all but a corner of the historic former capital at Hue. Communists penetrated the heart of Saigon. They attacked the U.S. embassy, the presidential palace, the government radio station. All this was the work of an enemy that the Johnson Administration had reported to be "struggling to stave off military defeat."
The Communists had hoped to use their Tet offensive to provoke a general uprising in the countryside. In that, they failed. They also suffered disastrous casualties. Yet Tet was for them an enormous victory. It turned American opinion decisively against the war. "What the hell is going on?" Walter Cronkite demanded when he heard about the offensive. "I thought we were winning this war."
Tet broke whatever residual spell was left in America's old cold war calls to arms in the name of defending freedom around the globe. America's national morale curdled and began tumbling off into the unthinkable. The true unthinkable was that "Amerika," as those on the New Left dubbed it, was not merely mistaken or even bad, but evil. The mild unthinkable, entertained probably by most, was that the nation had made a bad mistake. Americans, who love a winner, detest thinking of themselves as losers, and they saw themselves distinctly as losers after Tet. Metaphysically, they may have thought that if America was a loser, God's grace had been withdrawn, or possibly was never there; the entire American idea turned into a fraud.
Viet Nam and Tet reverberate now in American foreign policy and in American psychology about the rest of the world. Ever since, any attempts to assert American force have twitched a neo-isolationist nerve. Only easy knockouts like Grenada seem tolerable, and then only if done so quickly that television has no time to bring the carnage into the house. But for the experience of Viet Nam, the U.S. might have invaded Nicaragua by now; the threat there is more immediate, the logistics easier. Instead, the battle is waged by proxy, sloppily and tentatively and erratically. "Involvement" and "commitment" have become dangerous words, alive with the demons of 1968.