And my book, this time we win. A question i frequently get is where did you get this title, this time we win . Actually, it came from vietnam veterans. I would talk to them about what i was doing and say im writing a book on the tet offensive, and many times they would say, do we win this time . Hence the title, this time we win. It goes along with the other old cliche that you hear from the vets, that we were winning when i left, they say. So, yeah, part of the reason i wrote the book was to try to get the truth out about what happened in vietnam, and to honor the men and women who won that war for us, before the politicians threw it away. You frequently see tet in the headlines these days. Wherever anything bad happens in the world, terrorists do some kind of attack, insurgents have some kind of spectacular bombing or something, youll see a pundit or a commentator say, this is just like the tet offensive. Iraq, afghanistan, wherever. I saw a headline about tet referring to northern mexico that some kind of tet offensive was going on there. Time magazine said that the wikileaks document dump was just like the tet offensive. You know, i dont quite see how you can make the analogy, but anyway, the point is that tet is out there. And the problem with this is that every time you say tet, what youre really saying is defeat. What youre saying is that whatever were involved in is like vietnam, its a quagmire. We cant win and so forth. And, in fact, the bad guys out there, the terrorists and the insurgents, talk openly about the tet offensive and vietnam as their model. This is how they want to win. Because terrorists and insurgents are weak. They cant really defeat us on battlefields. They cant defeat our forces militarily. Thats why theyre terrorists. Thats why theyre insurgents. If they could fight us head to head, they would do it, but they cant. So, instead, what they have to do is try to attack our national will. They have to try to attack the thinking of Decision Makers. Because in the end, like in vietnam, if you can get the Decision Makers to conclude that the war is no longer worth it, then theyll leave. And Osama Bin Laden and other people like that have made explicit statements saying this is what theyre trying to do. So whenever they do something thats spectacular, and then whenever somebody on our side says, this is just like the tet offensive, were really playing into their hands. So part of what i wanted to do in this project was get people to stop doing that. Because it doesnt help us, number one, and number two, its not really true when people compare things to the tet offensive. Most of the time, it has nothing to do with the tet offensive. Now what most educated people know about tet, and what you see in most history books, is that it was a surprise attack by the north vietnamese and vietcong against largely symbolic targets in vietnam intended to turn the American People against the war and drive Lyndon Johnson to the bargaining table. And of those four things, i found out that none of them are true. So let me just go down some of those with respect to the tet myth, for example, that it was a surprise attack. It certainly took a lot of people by surprise when it happened, but mainly the journalists in washington and folks in the United States who werent paying attention. They were taken by surprise. But people on the ground in South Vietnam knew it was coming. We had captured documents months in advance that detailed what the enemy was planning. The u. S. Embassy, a month before the attack, gave a briefing in which they talked about what they thought was coming. If you go through january 1968, which was the month before the attack happened, which took place right at the end of january, our forces went on progressively greater states of alert. Our Decision Makers talked about the coming attack. There was a story three days before the attack in the Washington Post saying, talking about the expected spring offensive that was coming. And then, furthermore, the enemy when they finally launched their attack, because of miscommunication, some of their guys attacked two days too early. Some of their guys attacked the day before they were supposed to attack. When the attack finally came the day it was supposed to come, the whole country of South Vietnam was on alert. So how do you get a surprise attack out of that . Well the point is that the press , settled on a storyline. They decided since some of the people in washington were surprised, everybody must have been surprised. They asked the Johnson Administration, if you knew about it in advance, why didnt you tell us . And the Johnson Administration said, well, you know, the fact that we knew the enemys plans doesnt mean were going to tell you guys. Then the enemy will know what were up to. We were planning a trap for them. But because of the credibility gap they said, oh, Lyndon Johnson, youre just lying to us. So you didnt really know anything. It was an intelligence failure, and so they stuck with that storyline, that we were surprised. In fact, we werent. The second point about symbolic targets, the tet offensive was a largescale, last ditch attempt by the north vietnamese and the vietcong to win the vietnam war involving tens of thousands of their troops and going over a number of days. The plan was to foment this massed uprising in South Vietnam because they thought the South Vietnamese people were raring to go and would join the communist revolution if only they had the encouragement. So theyre going to take the cities, foment this uprising, and then the rationale for the american presence in South Vietnam would be undercut, and we would have to leave. That was their plan. And it was a very bad plan. It had no chance of succeeding. It was based on a lot of flawed premises, particularly that the South Vietnamese people would join in their attack, which they didnt want to do and, in fact, didnt do. But because the plan was so flawed, people on our side, analysts in the cia said looked at it and said this plan has no chance of succeeding. Therefore, they must be up to something else. What else could they be up to . Well, it must be a symbolic attack on our, on our will. Like, theyre just trying to make a point. And actually the cia analysis on the first day of the attack said they arent really trying to win. Theyre just trying to make a point. And so this got into the Johnson Administrations talking points, and the president and secretary of defense mcnamara made this point before the press. They said, well, the enemy is just attempting a symbolic attack. So the press said, ok, fine, its symbolic. Now that is really critical because if you do an attack if , youre the enemy, and you attack and youre defeated, its easy to see that youre defeated. Youre not holding the ground, you didnt reach your objective and so forth. But if you say an attack is just supposed to be symbolic, youre just trying to make a point, whos to say who won and lost . How do you judge winning and losing if its all up in the air, if its all up to perceptions . See, thats a battlefield they can win on because theyre just arguing about the perceptions of it. And so, for example, when they attacked the u. S. Embassy in saigon, which was the major news story of the tet offensive, in the overall enemy plan, it was hardly relevant. It was just this little attack. But in terms of the news coverage, in terms of the symbolism of the u. S. Embassy being attacked by 19 vietcong staffers, that became a big deal. Now, their objective, their orders were seize the embassy, hold it, and wait for reinforcements. Thank you. And they didnt. I mean, they didnt seize the embassy. Reinforcements werent coming. Most of them were killed, and that was the end of that. But because of this argument over the symbolism of it, it became a great victory for them because, you know, in symbolic terms it was an attack on u. S. Prestige. Also, an argument erupted over did they actually seize the Embassy Building proper, or were they just on the grounds . They actually did not get in the building. Peter arnett said he overheard someone say they were, so he reported that, and then the administration denied it, and people just said, well, its just Lyndon Johnson lying again, and so this great debate broke out. So instead of covering the fact that the enemy were wiped out, there was this argument over did they hold the building . There was this argument over what was the symbolism and so forth. And so things like that made this symbolic attack storyline solidify. And, again, it sort of handed them a victory because if youre , arguing on the basis of symbolism, whos to say who won and lost . Now, the press coverage of tet was highly negative. Before tet i have some data for you 79 of editorial comments regarding the war were positive. After tet 72 were negative. And during tet, 100 of editorial comments regarding the war were negative. So the press was not too interested in touting the Administration Line on tet. Now, its easy to blame the media for the loss in the vietnam, but not everybody in the press was against the war. For example, howard k. Smith of abc news was a very prowar guy in his private views. His son actually fought in the , which mayberang you have seen the mel gibson movie we were soldiers that dramatized that battle. His son was in a unit in which he was ambushed and most of the people were killed, and he had to play dead to survive, and the north vietnamese used him as a sandbag in their emplacement in a pile of bodies, and his nickname later was sandbag smith. But Walter Cronkite became the symbol of the reporter who became you have been in favor of the war who became an opponent of the administration policies. And from his reporting from saigon and from wei, he basically came out against the war and against the conduct of the war and said we should negotiate a peace and get out of there. And Lyndon Johnson allegedly said upon seeing this report, if ive lost cronkite, ive lost middle america. And theres a great power in that story because if youre a journalist, its really something to say, wow, i wrote a story, or i did a report, and suddenly Administration Policy changed, you know . I disheartened the president , or or i moved things on a grand scale. Journalists love that story. But, again, is it true . Probably not. The images that we get from that time are that the American People turned against the war and that you had protests in the streets and so forth. One really interesting thing i found from the study, if you look back at the polls, and looking at the people, of support of the war by age group, actually the group that most supported johnsons policies and supported the war were young people. Isnt that interesting . I found this in gallup poll, harris poll, and internal white house polling that young people were actually more supportive of the war. Youll never get that from the Cultural Representations of the time, you know, the forest gump view of history or, you know, whatever you want to call it. Probably because the people who were out there wearing love beads and smoking dope and carrying signs were the ones who then became professors and then wrote books. So, you know, all of their friends were out there doing it so, you know, of course, thats the way it was. But if you look at the data, actually young people were more supportive of the war, and the group i found that was more supportive than any were draft age young men for some reason were the most supportive of the war effort in vietnam. You know, itll take a while to rewrite that part of the history, but its just worthy of note. But the myth of tet is that because of this symbolism of tet, the American People gave up on the war, and that is simply not true. If you look at opinion polls that ask, do you support johnsons policies, there was a slight dip after tet. But if you go to the next level and say, ok, if you dont like what Lyndon Johnson is doing, what should we do . Should we escalate or should we get out . The majority of americans wanted to escalate the war at this point. They understood that the tet offensive was a major defeat for the enemy, and it was the enemy was wounded, and if we just put a little more effort into this, we could win the war. Over 60 of americans selfidentified as hawks, you know, as proponents of escalation. And this number had actually increased from before tet to after tet, not gone down. The number who identified themselves as doves, people who wanted to pull out, actually declined after tet. So its wrong to say that tet, the effect of tet was to make people in the United States want to give up. It made people want to win because they saw there was an opportunity. And, in fact, the number of people who wanted to pull out, the doves, was actually smaller than the number of people who said lets use Nuclear Weapons to end it, which was about 25 . It was about 24 wanted to pull out, but over a quarter wanted to use Nuclear Weapons. Thats pretty strong. Im not saying thats what we should have done. Im saying as an indicator of Public Opinion. Its very significant that the number of people who were Nuclear Hawks who just said, you know, just finish it, was actually greater than the number who wanted to pull out which history has represented as being the majority. In fact, they were not the majority. They were a minority. And the final bit of the myth is the notion that tet drove johnson to the bargaining table. Johnson did not need to be driven to the bargaining table. He built the table. He was there all along from 1964 on. The United States proffered 70 different peace initiatives to the north, attempting to get them to talk. Every one of them was refused. We tried bombing halts, we tried offers of aid, we tried everything, and the north vietnamese refused to talk. So when walter contrite Walter Cronkite said it is now time to go to the bargaining table johnson was already there. , it was the north vietnamese who did not want to talk. But after tet they agreed to talk because after tet they really had nothing left. They were militarily weakened, and they were in danger of the u. S. Escalating and attacking them, so they agreed to talk to try to forestall that. But johnson wasnt going to escalate anyway. General wheeler, the chairman of the joint chiefs, had suggested this. General westmoreland had called for more troops. The debate broke out in the administration should we, shouldnt we . It went on for a long time. If we do escalate, how many troops . Do we go over our troop caps . I mean all of these little bureaucratic things. Basically, for two months they argued it to death, and ultimately, johnson after news of this debate leaked to the new york times, their great headlines about, you know, a secret escalation in the works, you know this kind of , thing, and can johnson just said to heck with it. Well just call for more peace talks. And this time they had them. So it wasnt that tet demoralized the United States, tet just demoralized Lyndon Johnson. And it wasnt that johnson lost middle america. Middle america lost the president. And thats why tet was sacrificed. It wasnt just the press. It was mainly Lyndon Johnson. He gave up on himself. So the lessons, i guess, from tet that apply to today are things like, dont give the enemy credit for having a better plan than they have. Sometimes today youll see people talk about terrorists like theyre some kind of geniuses, longterm planners with this sophisticated plan that we cant understand, and everything they do is part of this unfolding of history. Well, maybe theyre just making mistakes. Ill tell you, i dont think that Osama Bin Laden thought that 10 years after 9 11, hed be holed up in some cave somewhere, you know, wondering when a hellfire missile was going to come down on his head. I dont think that was part of the plan. I think he thought hed be the head of saudi arabia right now. You know, that was the plan, not whats going on right now. So, you know, dont give em credit for being these geniuses because theyre not. Secondly, dont redefine their objectives down to a point where they meet them. I mean, the terrorists and the bad guys, they want to win. They want to take power. They want to rule. They dont want to remain terrorists all their lives. So when theyre not taking over countries and when theyre not achieving victories, dont give them credit for oh, they blew up a guy with a suicide test. They made a small scale attack on a police station. These are not significant victories, even if they pull them off. Theyre no big deal in the grand scheme of things, so dont give them more credit than they deserve. Another lesson is that in unconventional wars, press coverage is going to tend to be negative, and theres not a lot you can do about it, because in conventional wars you can, like look at a map. Have we advanced closer to the enemy capital . Have we destroyed their armies, have we you know, seized our , objectives, and you can report good news. But in unconventional news, youre fighting in the same place, youre, you know, defending the same village, it just goes on and on. Theres really no indicator of progress. So bad news tends to dominate, and theres really no way around that. Another point that Public Opinion is not as malleable as people think. You know, the notion that the press reported negative things on vietnam, and then the public turned against it and we lost is just not true. The public was going during tet,