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four thousand village officials in that year alone. There was also the constant indoctrination of the young people and new recruits who were told they had to expel foreign invaders and tyrants from their land. Communist propaganda stressed how the kindly “Uncle Ho” would look after them as a grandfather might after the capitalist devils were driven off. All lies of course. After the communist takeover there was murder and imprisonment on a grand scale. Even though Ho Chi Minh died before South Vietnam fell, it is clear his followers did exactly what he would have done.

Tet Offensive

1968

In 1968, communist leaders Ho Chi Minh and General Giap[379] decided to launch a massive offensive with the goal of capturing the cities of South Vietnam and causing a popular uprising against the unpopular South Vietnamese government. The communists assembled their forces and managed to move them south without being detected by American intelligence. On January 30, 1968, Giap launched the Tet Offensive which managed to capture some cities in South Vietnam (most notably Hue), but no popular uprising resulted. In the end, Ho’s offensive was a decisive and multiphase defeat. The local Vietcong organizations were wiped out, effectively ceasing to exist, while the regular divisions sent from North Vietnam were extensively damaged. As a military operation the Tet Offensive was an unmitigated disaster for the communists.

But something else was in play during the Tet Offensive. The American press corps had decided the Vietnam War was wrongheaded, and their reporting became nothing more than communist propaganda. The TV networks (ABC, CBS, NBC), the major newspapers (New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, etc.), and liberal weekly news magazines (Time, Newsweek) all reported the Tet Offensive was a comprehensive American defeat. To do this, the reporters had to lie about what they saw all around them, and they had to disregard US Army reports about the extent of the enemy defeat. In essence, they denounced the reports from the US Army and State Department while publishing communist propaganda from North Vietnam as true.

Figure 82 Marines in Vietnam

These press reports discouraged the American public. In any war, if the press tells of defeat the general population becomes demoralized. At the start of WWII the press reports were repeats of American propaganda, but as the war went on, with the cooperation of the US Military, the press reports became more realistic. The turning point was Guadalcanal where the navy decided to report just how things were really going there, and the possibility that the Americans might lose to the Japanese. The American public responded well to the truth, and it became common to report what was actually going on.

The activities and reporting of the mainstream news outlets about Vietnam unnerved the American military. Being negative was bad enough, but outright lying and repeating communist propaganda was outrageous. Mistrust began to grow between the military and the mainstream press organizations. The gap grew wider as the war went on, and at war’s end the military abhorred the press and began systematically excluding the mainstream press from obtaining operational information. This mistrust continues to this day as US military leadership thinks the mainstream media is uniformly liberal, anti-military, and opposed to ideals the military reveres. History tells us that a lack belief in the nation results in defeat for the armed forces (Austria-Hungarian empire, Rome, France 1940). The media consistently leak secret or classified information to the world endangering military lives. The media also downplay military accomplishments. This current lack of trust between the military and the media started with how the War in Vietnam was reported.

President Johnson was toppled because his Vietnam War strategy failed. As major voices in the Democratic Party came forward and objected to the war, challengers appeared in 1968 to run against President Johnson for the nomination of the Democratic Party.