Chapter 10
The Tet Offensive and the Turnaround
—BY E. W. KENWORTHY
Amid the shock and turmoil of the Tet offensive in February, 1968, the Pentagon study of the Vietnam war discloses, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Gen. William C. Westmoreland sought to force President Lyndon B. Johnson a long way toward national mobilization in an effort to win victory in Vietnam.
But, the study shows, this pressure by the Joint Chiefs of the commanding general in the field set off a last, bitter policy debate in the Administration that culminated in the opposite of the military’s desires.
For the first time, the study explains, President Johnson squarely faced the prospect that he had sought adamantly to avoid during three years of steadily widening war: “A full-scale call-up of reserves” and “putting the country economically on a semiwar footing.” And, the Pentagon study goes on, Mr. Johnson confronted this prospect “at a time of great domestic dissent, disatisfaction and disillusionment about both the purposes and the conduct of the war.”
Finally the President relieved General Westmoreland of his command in late February, and on March 31, 1968, exactly two months after the opening blows of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese offensive at Tet, Mr. Johnson announced his decision to limit the American operation in Vietnam. He cut back the bombing of North Vietnam to the 20th Parallel and sent to South Vietnam a token troop increase: one-tenth of the 206,000 men his generals had requested to achieve “victory.”
Having announced these steps as a hopeful prelude to a negotiated settlement of the war, the President, citing a wish to ease the “partisan division” racking the country, said he would not seek re-election.
The enemy offensive during Tet, the Lunar New Year, began on Jan. 31 with an attack on the United States Embassy in Saigon; for a day enemy guerrillas held the embassy compound. The attacks spread rapidly to almost all the cities and major towns of South Vietnam. Hue, the ancient capital of central Vietnam, was captured and not retaken until Feb. 24 in the last days of the offensive.
On Feb. 2, three days after the initial assault, President Johnson summoned White House reporters to the Cabinet Room. The enemy attack, he said, had been “anticipated, prepared for and met.” Militarily, the enemy had suffered “a complete failure.” As for a “psychological victory,” the enemy’s second objective, the President said that “when the American people know the facts,” they would see that here, too, the enemy had failed.
In reply to questions, the President said that General Westmoreland had been given “every single thing” he “believed that he needed at this time,” and that therefore no change was contemplated in the planned level of 525,000 American soldiers nor was there likely to be “any change of great consequence” in strategy.
The Pentagon study, however, says that the offensive took the White House and the Joint Chiefs “by surprise, and its strength, length and intensity prolonged this shock.”
For the President, the study makes plain, the shock and disappointment were particularly severe, because throughout much of 1967 he had discounted “negative analyses” of United States strategy by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon offices of International Security Affairs and Systems Analysis. Instead, the study says, Mr. Johnson had seized upon the “optimistic reports” from General Westmoreland to counteract what many Pentagon civilians sensed was a growing public disillusionment with the war.
As an example of an unheeded warning, the Pentagon analyst cites at length a bombing study by the Government-subsidized Institute for Defense Analyses that was submitted to Secretary McNamara in mid-December, 1967. In this study—on which Mr. McNamara was to draw heavily in his farewell statement on defense posture to the Senate Armed Services Committee on Feb. 1—the institute said that the bombing of North Vietnam had had “no measurable effect on Hanoi’s ability to mount and support military operations in the South” and had “not discernibly weakened” Hanoi’s will to support the insurgency.
As an example of the reports that the President did heed, the analyst cites the year-end assessment of General Westmoreland, which was delivered on Jan. 27, four days before the Tet offensive. The general said:
“Interdiction of the enemy’s logistics train in Laos and NVN [North Vietnam] by our indispensable air efforts has imposed significant difficulties on him. In many areas the enemy has been driven away from the population centers; in others he has been compelled to disperse and evade contact, thus nullifying much of his potential. The year ended with the enemy increasingly resorting to desperation tactics in attempting to achieve military/psychological victory; and he has experienced only failure in these attempts.”
New Troop Needs
A far different assessment came on Feb. 12, with the Tet offensive at its height. General Westmoreland reported then to the Joint Chiefs and Secretary McNamara that, as of Feb. 11, the enemy had attacked “34 provincial towns, 64 district towns and all of the autonomous cities.” This, the general said, the enemy had been able to do while committing “only 20 to 35 per cent of his North Vietnamese forces . . . employed as gap fillers where VC [Viet-cong] strength was apparently not adequate to carry out his initial thrust on the cities and towns.”
The first formal reaction of the Joint Chiefs to the offensive came on Feb. 3 when they asked Mr. McNamara to reduce the radius of the zone in which bombing was prohibited in Hanoi and in the port of Haiphong. In Hanoi, they sought to cut the radius from 10 nautical miles from the city’s center to 3, and in Haiphong from 4 nautical miles to 1.5, thus enlarging the outer “restricted” zones in which bombing of selected targets was permitted upon Presidential approval. The Joint Chiefs also asked that blanket authority be given to air commanders to bomb in these outer zones.
The Joint Chiefs said in their memorandum that this extension was necessary to reduce “the enemy capability for waging war in the South”—a reason that the Pentagon analyst dismisses as “a nonsequitur,” in view of “the evident ineffectiveness of the bombing in preventing the offensive.”
Paul C. Warnke, who had succeeded the late John T. McNaughton as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, opposed the request on the ground that enlargement of the zones would allow strikes on “only a couple of fixed targets not previously authorized.” The President did not approve the request.
In any event, the Pentagon analyst notes, the primary focus of Washington’s reaction to the Tet offensive was inevitably centered on General Westmoreland’s possible troop requirements. At this point, however, the Pentagon study does not take account of several messages between Gen. Earle G. Wheeler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and General Westmoreland. These messages, which have been quoted verbatim by Marvin Kalb and Elie Abel in their 1971 book “Roots of Involvement,” throw considerable light on what was to become a matter of contention; whether the President and General Wheeler pressed General Westmoreland to ask for more troops or whether, as Mr. Johnson was to insist, the President merely asked for General Westmoreland’s “recommendations.”
In the first of these cablegrams, on Feb. 3, four days after the offensive began, General Wheeler said: “The President asks me if there is any reinforcement or help that we can give you.”
General Westmoreland had not replied by Feb. 8, and General Wheeler, according to the book, sent a second cablegram then that did not mention the President: “Query: Do you need reinforcement? Our capabilities are limited. We can provide 82d Airborne Division and about one-half a Marine Corps division, both loaded with Vietnam veterans. However, if you consider reinforcements imperative, you should not be bound by earlier agreements. United States Government is not prepared to accept defeat in Vietnam. In summary, if you need more troops, ask for them.”
“Earlier agreements” referred to the authorized level of 525,000 troops in 1968, of whom about 500,000 had reached South Vietnam.
That same day General Westmoreland replied, requesting the proffered units and asking, according
to the Kalb-Abel book, that the President authorize an amphibious assault by the marines into North Vietnam as a diversionary move. The next day, Feb. 9, he followed up with this message:
“Needless to say, I would welcome reinforcements at any time they can be made available. A. To put me in a stronger position to contain the enemy’s major campaign in the DMZ-Quangtri-Thuathien area and to go on the offensive as soon as his attack is spent. B. To permit me to carry out my campaign plans despite enemy’s reinforcements from North Vietnam, which have influenced my deployment plans. C. To offset the weakened [South] Vietnamese forcs resulting from casualties and Tet desertions. Realistically, we must assume that it will take them at least six weeks to regain the military posture of several weeks ago. . . . D. To take advantage of the enemy’s weakened posture by taking the offensive against him.”
General Wheeler responded: “. . . It occurs to me that the deployment of the 82d Airborne Division and marine elements might be desirable earlier than April to assist in defense and pursuit operations. . . . Please understand that I am not trying to sell you on the deployment of additional forces which in any event I cannot guarantee. . . . However, my sensing is that the critical phase of the war is upon us, and I do not believe that you should refrain from asking for what you believe is required under the circumstances.”
At this point the Pentagon study turns to the issue of troop levels. On Feb. 9, it says, Mr. McNamara asked the Joint Chiefs to furnish plans for General Westmoreland’s emergency reinforcement. The study says that on Feb. 12, after extensive communication with General Westmoreland, the Joint Chiefs submitted to the Secretary three plans, all of which they said would leave the strategic reserve in the United States so thin as to seriously compromise the nation’s worldwide commitments.
Therefore, the Joint Chiefs recommended in their memorandum that “a decision to deploy reinforcements to Vietnam be deferred at this time,” but that preparatory “measures be taken now” for possible later deployment of the 82d Airborne Division and two-thirds of a Marine division air wing team.
The Pentagon study says: “The tactic the Chiefs were using was clear: by refusing to scrape the bottom of the barrel any further for Vietnam, they hoped to force the President to ‘bite the bullet’ on the call-up of the reserves—a step they had long thought essential, and that they were determined would not now be avoided.”
Despite the Joint Chiefs’ recommendation against deployments without calling up the reserves, the next day, Feb. 13, Secretary McNamara approved immediate emergency deployment of 10,500 men—a brigade of the 82d Airborne and a Marine regimental landing team—above the 525,000 ceiling.
The Joint Chiefs reacted immediately by sending the Secretary a memorandum recommending a call-up of reserves to replace and sustain the new deployment—32,000 Army reservists, 12,000 marines and 2,300 Navy men, a total of 46,300 former servicemen.
Mr. McNamara’s action and the Joint Chiefs’ response were only a foretaste of the struggle to come as a result of the Tet offensive, the Pentagon study says, since General Westmoreland was preparing to raise his sights with the full support of the Joint Chiefs.
On Feb. 14, President Johnson went to Fort Bragg, N. C., to say good-by to the brigade of the 82d Airborne going to South Vietnam. The Pentagon narrative recalls the scene:
“The experience proved for him to be one of the most profoundly moving and troubling of the entire Vietnam war. The men, many of whom had only recently returned from Vietnam, were grim. They were not young men going off to adventure but seasoned veterans returning to an ugly conflict from which they knew some would not return. The film clips of the President shaking hands with the solemn but determined paratroopers on the ramps of their aircraft revealed a deeply troubled leader. He was confronting the men he was asking to make the sacrifice and they displayed no enthusiasm. It may well be that the dramatic decisions of the succeeding month and a half that reversed the direction of American policy in the war had their genesis in those troubled handshakes.”
“A Fork in the Road”
In late February, the President sent General Wheeler to Saigon to consult with General Westmoreland on precisely how many more men he wanted. General Wheeler returned on Feb. 28 and immediately delivered a written report to the President. The report began by saying that General Westmoreland had frustrated the enemy’s objective of provoking a general uprising. But it went on to say that the offensive had been “a very near thing” for the allies and then ranged in bleak fashion over the situation in Vietnam:
Despite 40,000 killed, at least 3,000 captured and perhaps 5,000 disabled or dead of wounds, the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong now had the initiative. They were “operating with relative freedom in the countryside” and had driven the Saigon Government forces back into a “defensive posture around towns and cities.” The pacification program “in many places . . . has been set back badly.” To hold the northernmost provinces, General Westmoreland had been forced to send half of his American maneuver battalions there, “stripping the rest of the country of adequate reserves” and robbing himself of “an offensive capability. [See Document #132.]
“Under these circumstances,” General Wheeler warned, “we must be prepared to accept some reverses.”
However, once the enemy offensive is decisively defeated, General Wheeler said, “the situation over all will be greatly improved over the pre-Tet condition.” But to accomplish this and to “regain the initiative through offensive operations,” General Westmoreland would require more men.
The 500,000 soldiers then in South Vietnam and the 25,000 others who had been approved for eventual deployment under the ceiling established in the summer of 1967 were now “inadequate in numbers,” General Wheeler said.
“To contend with, and defeat the new enemy threat,” he continued, General Westmoreland “has stated requirements for forces over the 525,000 ceiling. . . . The add-on requested totals 206,756 spaces for a new proposed ceiling of 731,756.” All of the additional 206,756 soldiers were to be in the war zone by the end of 1968. General Westmoreland wanted roughly half of them, the study notes, as early as May 1.
“Principal forces included in the add-on are three division equivalents, 15 tactical fighter squadrons and augmentation for current Navy programs,” General Wheeler explained.
To provide this many troops by the end of the year, the President would have had to call up from civilian life 280,000 military reservists to replenish the strategic reserve in the United States and to sustain the units newly sent to Vietnam.
“A fork in the road had been reached,” the Pentagon study comments. “Now the alternatives stood out in stark reality. To accept and meet General Wheeler’s request for troops would mean a total U.S. military commitment to SVN [South Vietnam]—an Americanization of the war, a call-up of reserve forces, vastly increased expenditures. To deny the request for troops, or to attempt to again cut it to a size which could be sustained by the thinly stretched active forces, would just as surely signify that an upper limit to the U.S. military commitment in SVN had been reached.”
The issue was immediately joined at the highest level of the Pentagon.
Clark M. Clifford, an old friend and adviser of President Johnson and an unwavering supporter of his Vietnam policy, had been designated to succeed Mr. McNamara as Secretary of Defense. He was not to be sworn in until March 1, but had begun to work at his job many days earlier. On Feb. 28, when the Wheeler-Westmoreland report was delivered, the President asked Mr. Clifford to gather a senior group of advisers for a complete review of United States policy in Vietnam.
The next day, Mr. Clifford convened what came to be known as the Clifford Group. The principals were Mr. McNamara; Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor, President Johnson’s personal military adviser, as he had been President Kennedy’s; Paul H. Nitze, Deputy Secretary of Defense; Henry H. Fowler, Secretary of the Treasury; Nicholas deB, Katzenbach, Under Secretary of State; Walt W. Rostow, the President’s adviser on national security; R
ichard Helms, Director of Central Intelligence; William P. Bundy, Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs; Mr. Warnke, the head of the Pentagon’s politico-military policy office, International Security Affairs, and Philip C. Habib, Mr. Bundy’s deputy.
At the first meeting of the group, the Pentagon Study says, Mr. Clifford said that the real problem was “not whether we should send 200,000 additional troops to Vietnam,” but whether if “we follow the present course in SVN, could it ever prove successful even if vastly more than 200,000 troops were sent?”
Mr. Clifford stipulated that the various papers he assigned on United States strategy should consider four options, ranging from granting General Westmoreland’s full request to sending him no additional troops.
“The work [of drafting papers] became so intensive,” the study states, “that it was carried out in teams within . . . International Security Affairs.”
The dominant voice in the consideration of alternatives was the civilian hierarchy in the Pentagon. And the most influential force there, according to the study, was Mr. Warnke, whose young civilian assistants, including Morton H. Halperin and Richard C. Steadman, had become disenchanted with Vietnam policy since 1967 and were now among the leading dissenters in the Administration. The position of the dissenters was strengthened by intelligence estimates from the C.I.A., which submitted papers to the working group.
The most important of these, submitted on March 1, suggested strongly that the most likely prospect for the future—under any course of proposed action—was more stalemate. These, as quoted in the Pentagon study, were the answers it gave to questions by Mr. Clifford:
Q. What is the likely course of events in South Vietnam over the next 10 months, assuming no change in U.S. policy or force levels?
A. . . . It is manifestly impossible for the Communists to drive U.S. forces out of the country. It is equally out of the question for U.S./GVN forces to clear South Vietnam of Communist forces.