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in rural areas, withdrew most of its field workers in early 1968 because of “security conditions.” A volunteer reported in February: “The number of locations at which we can safely place a volunteer have significantly decreased in recent months”; another added that “we all knew that security in the countryside was getting worse and worse,” contrary to the optimistic evaluations of the U.S. high command and Washington, which were relayed with little skepticism by the media in the pre-Tet period. A South Vietnamese senator estimated that after Tet, the government controlled “only one third of the country,” the remaining two-thirds being in the hands of the NLF, an estimate consistent with U.S. intelligence reports.111

The Tet offensive left Washington in a state of “troubled confusion and uncertainty,” Undersecretary of the Air Force Townsend Hoopes observed, and “performed the curious service of fully revealing the doubters and dissenters to each other, in a lightning flash,” within the Pentagon. While General Westmoreland persisted with the optimistic assessments that had been undermined by this dramatic demonstration that the NLF remained firmly rooted in the South despite the devastating American attack on the rural society, the reaction in official Washington circles was quite different. Summarizing the impact in Washington, George Herring observes that in private,

Johnson and his advisers were shocked by the suddenness and magnitude of the offensive . . . and intelligence estimates were much more pessimistic than Westmoreland . . . An “air of gloom” hung over White House discussions, [General Maxwell] Taylor later observed, and [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] General [Earle] Wheeler likened the mood to that following the first Battle of Bull Run.112

General Wheeler reported that “to a large extent the VC now control the countryside,” the situation being particularly bad in the Mekong Delta, and the Pentagon systems-analysis group concluded that “our control of the countryside and the defense of the urban areas is now essentially at pre-August 1965 levels,” when the U.S. war was being lost, according to General Westmoreland. A U.S. government military-historical summary of the offensive in the Mekong Delta, completed in April 1968, concluded that “The Tet offensive in IV Corps had a devastating effect on the Revolutionary Development [pacification] Program.” As we shall see, these internal assessments are considerably more “pessimistic” than those of the media that are denounced for the crime of excessive pessimism by Freedom House standards.

We might incidentally note that in IV Corps (including the Mekong Delta), there were “no regular North Vietnam units” according to Defense Secretary McNamara; the Freedom House study states that “In the southernmost Delta, it was an ARVN-Vietcong [actually, U.S.-Vietcong] guerrilla struggle,” and more generally, Hanoi “had yet to commit sizable (multi-division) forces in sustained, concerted attacks” anywhere in South Vietnam (I, 24).113 These assessments are what motivated the mass-slaughter campaign carried out in the rural areas of the delta and elsewhere in the post-Tet accelerated pacification campaign, discussed earlier.

Even before the Tet offensive, Defense Secretary McNamara had privately concluded that military victory was an unreasonable objective and that the course of the war should be changed. Clark Clifford, who was brought in to replace him after Tet, had long shared such doubts, and they were reinforced by the evidence available to him and by the conclusions of the “Wise Men” whom Johnson called in to assess the situation.114 Dean Acheson, who headed this group of longtime hawks drawn from business and political elites, agreed with Clifford’s pessimism and “advised Johnson to scale down ground operations, reduce the bombing, and seek every means of terminating hostilities without abandoning South Vietnam.” The “Wise Men,” “after full briefings from diplomatic and military officials, confirmed Acheson’s findings . . . the consensus, as summed up by one