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The U.S. military “resistance”—to borrow the Freedom House terminology—took the same form elsewhere. Robert Shaplen reported from the scene that in Saigon,

A dozen separate areas, comprising perhaps sixty or seventy blocks, had been totally burned out. These were almost all residential areas . . . Most of the damage was the result of rocket attacks by American armed helicopters or other planes, though some of it had been caused by artillery or ground fighting . . . A modern ten-million-dollar textile plant, containing forty thousand spindles, was entirely destroyed by bombs because it was suspected of being a Vietcong hideout.124

Le Monde correspondent Jean-Claude Pomonti observed that

in the popular suburbs, the Front [NLF] has proven that the only way to eliminate its control is through systematic destruction. To dislodge it, the air force had to level many residential areas. Fleeing the bombardments, tens of thousands of refugees have poured into the center of the city.125

Charles Mohr, whom Freedom House singles out for “perhaps the consistently best reporting from Vietnam,” reported that “in towns such as Hué, Vinhlong, Bentre and Mytho appalling destruction was wrought when encircled allied forces took the decision to destroy the attacking Vietcong forces by destroying the places they had occupied.” He quotes an American official in Saigon as stating: “The Government won the recent battles, but it is important to consider how they won. At first the Vietcong had won and held everything in some towns except the American military compound and a South Vietnamese position.”126 By “the Government,” he means the reader to understand the GVN, who “won” thanks to U.S. firepower and troops.

As in this example, the U.S. government claim that the Tet offensive was a military defeat for the Communists was widely reported, although the U.S. government official’s perception of an initial Viet Cong victory goes well beyond the typical media accounts in the crime of “pessimism.” “Journalists generally accepted the official claim that Tet was a military defeat for the North Vietnamese and NLF,” Daniel Hallin concludes in his review of the press and television; for example, Walter Cronkite, who said at once over CBS—on February 14—that “first, and simplest, the Vietcong suffered a military defeat.”127 Clear and forthright.

These facts do not comport well with what remains of the Freedom House thesis: the charge that until late February, the media portrayed the enemy’s defeat as “a defeat for the allies” in “clamourous shouts,” only conceding from late February in a “whisper” that this was not quite accurate, television being the worst offender, with Walter Cronkite the arch-criminal.128 It was this gross incompetence or malevolence that illustrates most dramatically the “mindless readiness . . . to believe the worst of the government or of authority in general.” In the real world, the facts were quite the opposite, and the last remnants of the Freedom House thesis thus disappear, apart from the charge, to be evaluated in the appendix, that the reporting was technically incompetent.

Some would contend that the issue of “how they won,” which concerned the American official cited earlier, is as important as “who won” in evaluating the significance of the Tet offensive. This idea never penetrated the minds of Braestrup or his Freedom House associates, however, at the time or in their study. Consider political scientist Milton Sacks, a specialist on Vietnam and a GVN adviser, thanked for “providing historical perspective” for the Freedom House Study (I, xxiii). In February 1968, he wrote, with no further comment:

In conventional terms, it now seems clear that the Communists have suffered a military defeat in their Tet offensive. They have expended the lives of thousands of their soldiers without securing a single province or district town of significance.129

U.S. officials, in contrast, were impressed with the fact that the NLF and NVA occupied vast areas previously thought to be “controlled,”