by Max Boot
And then he went back to sleep.
Edward Lansdale and his team at 194 Cong Ly—Charlie Sweet, Cal Mehlert, and Dave Hudson—were just as startled when they were woken out of a slumber around that same time by what Lansdale described as “some loud bangs nearby, followed by automatic weapons fire.”
The Tet holiday is the biggest one on the Vietnamese calendar, and Lansdale and his colleagues had been up until four o’clock in the morning on the previous day reveling with Vietnamese friends. “We shot off giant strings of firecrackers . . . we ate Tet cakes and watermelons, and we drank rice and ginseng wine,” Lansdale recalled, completely unconscious of the chaos that would envelop the city in a few hours. Then they had spent the afternoon of January 30 “delivering Tet gifts to various Vietnamese friends.” Everyone was “a bit tuckered out when night came again.”2
Roused out of bed around 3 a.m., Lansdale and the others grabbed weapons and went on guard duty in case the villa was attacked. It wasn’t. But numerous other locations were. At 6 a.m., Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker’s office called to say the embassy was under attack and not to go there. The two team secretaries, Reggie Miskovish and Martha Devlin (Lansdale referred to them, in the patronizing vernacular of the day, as “our two FS [Foreign Service] girls”), lived at the Park Hotel next to the embassy and called to report “heavy fighting next door.” At virtually the same time, a South Vietnamese senator called to say that the Joint General Staff compound, the Vietnamese military headquarters located next to MACV at the airport, was under “infantry assault.” Other frantic calls informed the team of “fighting all through the western part of Saigon–Cholon.” It was, as Lansdale noted, “a booming way to start the day.”3
Eighty thousand Vietcong troops had attacked 36 out of 44 provincial capitals, 64 of 242 district capitals, 5 of 6 autonomous cities, and numerous hamlets and villages.4 Much of Hue, the nineteenth-century capital of Vietnam under the Nguyen dynasty, was seized by Communist forces, who systematically massacred at least 2,500 “class enemies”—mainly South Vietnamese military and political officials and their relatives. It would take U.S. Marines weeks of hard house-to-house fighting to dislodge the Vietcong from their final stronghold in Hue’s Citadel, built in the style of Beijing’s Forbidden City. Not until February 25 was the city declared secure.
Saigon had been infiltrated by more than four thousand Vietcong guerrillas in civilian clothes indistinguishable from the general population, hiding their weapons inside shipments of firewood, rice, and tomatoes. In the predawn darkness of January 31, they fanned out to attack the government radio station, the South Vietnamese military headquarters, the presidential palace, the U.S. embassy, and other targets. Their objective was to hold these locations for forty-eight hours until Main Force reinforcements could arrive in the city. At the six-story U.S. embassy on Thong Nhut (Reunification) Boulevard, completed only three months earlier, nineteen sappers wearing black pajamas and red armbands and armed with AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades, and satchel charges managed to blast their way inside the perimeter, although they failed to penetrate the chancellery building itself. By morning, all the attackers had been killed or captured.
Lansdale and his team set out for the embassy shortly after the fighting ended. In scenes reminiscent of the battle with the sects in 1955, they drove down deserted streets, passing bullet-riddled cars; “one of them, a sedan with doors ajar, had a body sprawling from the seat onto the pavement,” Lansdale noted. “An American in civilian clothes, dead.”5 At the embassy itself, he found that “broken glass and bits of masonry crunched underfoot. Along with holes in the new Embassy building and wall from VC rockets and a satchel charge . . . , the few cars in the parking lot had smashed windows, flat tires and bullet holes.”6
Lansdale hoped to fetch his two secretaries at the Park Hotel but found himself unable to get through. A Vietcong sapper squad that had been repelled in an attack on the presidential palace had retreated to a nearby building under construction and held off one assault after another throughout the day. Finally the insurgents were cleared out, and Lansdale was able to rescue Miskovish and Devlin.
Back at Cong Ly, the team members took turns standing guard along with their two Philippine security men, Amador Maik and Joe Olan. As the siege continued day after day, the house took on, in Lansdale’s words, a “gypsy air.” Most of the household staff were not around because of the Tet holiday, so the Americans had to scrounge for food and cook for themselves. Cal Mehlert liberated a load of bread from the Brink’s Hotel, which was being used as American bachelor officers’ quarters. Most Saigon residents were trapped inside their houses, too afraid to go out, so Lansdale and his men visited their Vietnamese friends to bring them the contraband bread. Among those they saw was the family of General Nguyen Duc Thang, who were living in the garage, the most secure part of the house in case of a mortar hit. Mrs. Thang refused Lansdale’s offer to move to the Cong Ly house, as did the family of Trinh Minh Thé, which had a new baby in an “amazingly brief period” after the big wedding the previous summer.
General Thang, who was spending his days helping to direct the defense of the capital, would drop by 194 Cong Ly at night, driving his own jeep, with “his old sergeant-driver sitting in the passenger seat, fondling a carbine, and looking glum,” Lansdale noted. “I tell Thang that his sergeant looks that way thanks to Thang’s driving, at which Thang whacks me on the back with such forceful good humor that I wonder why I don’t learn to shut my mouth in time.”7
Even without the Thang and Thé families, there was no shortage of newcomers at the Cong Ly house. Ambassador Bunker came with his security detail to spend a night after his own residence was deemed insecure. Lansdale noted that the ambassador, after taking a nap, “became acquainted with our FOV cognac from Hong Kong for the first time.” Then came three Filipinos, one of them a friend of Amador Maik’s, who had been driven out of their house by the fighting. Then Charlie Sweet spotted an old cook of his among a group of Vietnamese refugees, and she moved into the house along with her young daughter and niece, carrying their meager belongings on their backs. Lansdale and the rest of the team took up a collection to help these refugees make a fresh start.
“By the second day of alarums and excursions in Saigon,” Lansdale wrote, “194 Cong Ly had started returning to its former habits of being a sort of Grand Central Station, with folks wandering in and out.” To celebrate Ed’s sixtieth birthday on February 6, Helen sent smoked oysters and other snacks from the Woodward & Lothrop department store in Washington, and his son Ted dispatched a “mammoth salami from California,” while Filipino friends at the Eastern Construction Company delivered a plate of flan and San Miguel beer and Vietnamese friends presented him with “sugar baby” watermelons. “So,” Ed wrote, “some of the meetings at Cong Ly lacked the usual Vietnamese spirit of grand tragedy, looking more like old-fashioned picnics.”8
The Cong Ly house was relatively secure, given its proximity to various MACV offices “full of Americans and automatic weapons,” and given the ample supply of munitions stockpiled in the house.9 In addition, Lansdale had organized all of the Vietnamese families in a three- or four-block area into an intelligence network to warn him of strangers in the neighborhood.10 The tragic dimensions of the offensive became apparent only when the team left the safety of their house to check on developments across the sprawling metropolis, where fighting continued for weeks. When Charlie Sweet ventured out to Saigon’s District Eight, a seven-square-mile working-class area on the southern edge of the city, he found a war zone: “smoke billowed from burning houses ignited by rockets; fire trucks, ambulances and police cars made frequent runs to and from the combat area; helicopters hovered overhead; and scattered refugees emerged on foot and camped near the base of the Binh An bridge.”11
In the end, the Tet Offensive did not succeed in igniting a general uprising against the South Vietnamese government. Official U.S. statistics showed 58,373 enemy dead between January 29 and March 1, 1968,
compared with 3,895 American combat deaths, 214 allied troops (Australians, South Koreans, New Zealanders, Thais), 4,954 South Vietnamese troops, and 14,300 South Vietnamese civilians.12 By coming out into the open, the Vietcong lost a great deal of their infrastructure in the South.
Lansdale noted that the enemy “has been crushed militarily,”13 but, unlike more conventional military men, he warned Bunker that the offensive had the potential to achieve Hanoi’s objectives: it could strike “fear into the hearts of the urban population by demonstrating the inability of the government to provide adequate security,” and it could increase “pressure on the U.S. at home and abroad to withdraw, by seeking to demonstrate the hopelessness of victory and the immorality of our cause (for example, the image of U.S. firepower destroying friendly Vietnamese cities).”14 “The emotional factor in the Viet-Nam war has grown to immense size since the shock of the Tet offensive,” he wrote. “In the months ahead . . . it promises to become the real pivot factor.”15
To counteract this psychological blow, Lansdale wanted the South Vietnamese government to stage a public relations “campaign built around the battle-cry of ‘Remember Hue!’ ” modeled on American slogans such as “Remember the Alamo” and “Remember the Maine.” President Thieu admitted that Lansdale’s idea “had merit,” given popular outrage over Vietcong massacres of civilians in Hue, but did not implement it.16 It would be Hanoi, not Saigon, that would reap the psychological benefits of the Tet Offensive.
“ED, WE are going through a tremendously traumatic experience here in the States,” Bill Connell, Vice President Humphrey’s chief aide, wrote to Lansdale on March 20, 1968. “The success of the Tet offensive has been most dramatic here at home. Many who were with us have fallen away, and the television stations and newspapers are in full cry against the President and his policies.”17
In a sense, the Johnson administration was a victim of its own clumsy and overeager efforts to bolster public support for the war effort. Throughout 1967, the administration had rolled out General Westmoreland to reassure Americans that “we are making progress” and “the end begins to come into view.” In his most memorable phrase, Westy claimed to see “some light at the end of the tunnel.”18
Such Pollyannaish views appeared impossible to reconcile with the capabilities the Vietcong had displayed in the Tet Offensive. “What the hell is going on?” Walter Cronkite of CBS News exclaimed. “I thought we were winning the war.”19 In the aftermath of the Tet Offensive, Cronkite journeyed to Vietnam and produced a bleak half-hour special report that aired on CBS on February 27, 1968. “It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate,” he proclaimed with his typical gravity. Imperturbable, bland, and authoritative, Cronkite was, according to polls, the most trusted man in America. “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America,” Lyndon Johnson said.20
Always desperate for affection and approbation, LBJ was finding his growing unpopularity to be literally unbearable. The energy that had infused him when he had assumed the presidency in 1963 was now draining out, almost as if he were a wind-up toy frozen in midgesture. In the week after the Tet Offensive began, he hardly slept. In a private meeting with Senator Richard Russell, he cried “uncontrollably.”21 “The pressure grew so intense,” wrote the new secretary of defense, Clark Clifford, “that at times I felt the government itself might come apart at the seams.”22
On February 28, 1968, Westmoreland had requested 206,000 more troops, in addition to the 492,000 who were already in Vietnam. Johnson asked Clifford what he should do. Clifford, a onetime hawk who was beginning to change his ornithological coloration, believed that the best course was to “cut losses & get out.”23 That was also the dominant view of the Wise Men, a group of elder statesmen whom Johnson convened to advise him on the war. Johnson accordingly rejected Westmoreland’s request for 206,000 more troops and decided to bring the general back to Washington to become Army chief of staff. He would be replaced in Saigon by his gruff and cerebral deputy, General Creighton Abrams, who had never liked Westy’s big-unit search-and-destroy strategy; Abrams preferred employing smaller-size units for a “clear and hold” strategy focused on securing the population rather than chasing the enemy’s forces around the jungles.
Johnson’s refusal to send any more reinforcements, coupled with his announced intention to reduce bombing of the North while launching peace talks, represented a turning point in the war. There would be no more hopes of an American military victory. The only question now was the terms and pace of withdrawal. Like the French in 1953, the Americans were simply looking for “an honorable way out.” It would be a long goodbye: the war would drag on for five more years, and more Americans would be killed after the Tet Offensive than before it.
LBJ WAS acutely aware that the steps he was taking, however momentous, might come too late to rescue him politically. The leak of Westmoreland’s request for 206,000 troops, which appeared on the front page of the New York Times on March 10, 1968, reinforced public perceptions that the war was being lost. (Why would Westy need more troops if he was winning?) Two days later, on March 12, an antiwar challenger, Senator Eugene McCarthy, took 42 percent of the vote in the Democratic New Hampshire primary. When Senator Robert F. Kennedy entered the race four days later, Johnson realized he would have a bruising fight on his hands simply to secure the Democratic nomination.
Johnson tried to regain the initiative by announcing that he would deliver a televised address to the nation on Sunday evening, March 31, 1968. That morning, he stopped by Vice President Humphrey’s residence—a modest two-bedroom apartment in southwest Washington overlooking the Potomac River—and showed him the text of a speech announcing that he would stop bombing most of North Vietnam and appoint Averell Harriman as special envoy for peace talks.
Then Johnson whipped out an alternative ending: “I shall not seek, nor will I accept, the nomination of my party for the Presidency of the United States.”
“You’re kidding, Mr. President,” a shocked Humphrey exclaimed. “You can’t do this, you can’t just resign from office. You’re going to be reelected.”
Johnson said that he hadn’t made up his mind, but he was afraid that unless he bowed out of the race “nobody will believe that I’m trying to end this war.”
The vice president then left for a scheduled trip to Mexico City. Not until just minutes before Johnson began delivering his speech on live television from the Oval Office did Humphrey receive word of which ending he would use. When Hubert’s wife, Muriel, heard the news, she burst into tears. Both Humphreys were “very shaken and emotionally upset.”24
Much of the country, having had nary a hint that this was not to be more of Johnson’s usual truculence about the war, was equally shaken—yet hardly upset. From Berkeley, California, to Madison, Wisconsin, students spilled out into the streets, honking horns and celebrating the imminent departure of the man they had come to hate over the past two years.25 The president received more praise than he had seen since the heady early days of his presidency for what Bobby Kennedy called his “truly magnanimous” decision.26
YET DESPITE Johnson’s announcement, the war went on, with troop levels peaking later in the year at 536,000. So, too, the antiwar movement continued, as vociferous as ever. Columbia University was shut down from April 23 to April 30, 1968, by demonstrators seizing the offices of top administrators. Meanwhile, an epidemic of political violence was convulsing the land. On April 4, 1968, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, triggering riots in 110 cities around the country, including Washington. On June 5, 1968, it was Robert F. Kennedy’s turn: he was gunned down in Los Angeles in the wee morning hours shortly after winning the California primary. “Pressures here have mounted almost hour by hour, as the U.S. seems to be crumbling as a nation,” Lansdale wrote, “and as the Vietnamese start wondering if we’re going to abandon millions of people to be enslaved or murdered.” The Cong Ly house was “filling with Vietn
amese who needed some hand-holding and encouragement.”27
On May 4, 1968, the Vietcong struck again across the South in what came to be known as mini-Tet. “As during the Tet attacks,” Lansdale wrote, “all the flowering trees and shrubs are still in bloom. Somehow, their beauty just makes the rest of it more ugly than ever.”28 This time, American and South Vietnamese forces were better prepared. The Vietcong lost thirty-six thousand men without achieving any of their objectives, while American and South Vietnamese forces lost nine thousand. The Vietcong suffered even more heavily during another wave of attacks in August, losing another seventeen thousand fighters. These multiple waves of attacks were, in the words of the historian John Prados, “a military disaster” for Hanoi.29 They were also a disaster for the South Vietnamese civilians caught in the crossfire.
On May 11, 1968, just a week after the start of mini-Tet, Charlie Sweet visited his old friends in District Eight. He was startled by “the deep anger against all Americans” because of the heavy firepower that U.S. forces were employing against the two hundred or so Vietcong guerrillas who had infiltrated their neighborhood and were launching mortar attacks against central Saigon. “Two hundred houses were being destroyed for every Viet Cong killed,” one man complained. The fighting in District Eight would destroy more than five thousand buildings, kill more than two hundred civilians, wound two thousand more, and create forty thousand refugees.30 “I hope we never use these tactics in riots in the U.S.,” Lansdale wrote, “or we will lose all of our cities.”31
Sweet’s memo about District Eight “resonated,” Defense Secretary Clark Clifford later wrote, with the president and with him. The defense secretary sent Sweet’s memorandum to General Earle “Bus” Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with his endorsement, noting “that we must find a way to reduce civilian deaths without increasing American casualties.” After an initial spasm of pique, General “Abe” Abrams decreed there would be no more air or artillery strikes inside Saigon without his personal authorization. As a result, there were far fewer civilian casualties during the mini-Tet of May than there had been during the original Tet Offensive.32
