In spite of the vigorous antiwar movement, not until early 1968 did the administration and large portions of the American public cease to believe that victory was possible.  Much of this owed to the Viet Cong's launching of major offensive that January during Tet, the Vietnamese holiday of the lunar new year.  This offensive, though not successful in a military sense, effectively destroyed all hope for victory in America and led to a reversal of Johnson's policy.

The Tet Offensive

On January 31, more that 70,000 Viet Cong guerrillas and North Vietnamese regulars struck at a hundred or more South Vietnamese cities and towns, including half the provincial capitals and a dozen American military bases.  At Hué, the old capital, they took the Citadel, the ancient fortress in the city's center, and then proceeded to systematically to murder people identified as "cruel tyrants and reactionary elements."  Communist agents shot, clubbed to death, or buried alive more than 300 people.  Not until February did the U. S. Marines root them out of the city in vicious house-to-house fighting.  At Ben Tre in the Mekong delta, three Viet Cong batallions captured the town and had to be blasted out by artillery and bombs at the cost of half the town's structures.  In one of the more deplorable remarks of the war, an Ameican officer explained afterward:  "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it."  

Psychologically, the Viet Cong attack on the U. S. embassy in Saigon was the most telling blow.  There, 19 Viet Cong commandos, smuggled into Saigon months before, broke into the embassy compound and tried to blast their way into the embassy building itself.  They did not succeed.  Nevertheless, the attack shocked Americans by showing the enemy's ability to penetrate to the very core of American power in Vietnam.

Everywhere the communists attacked, they were defeated, but that had not been their priamry goal.  The goal of the Tet Offiensive was to demonstrate their prowess and inflict a moral defeat on the Americans and South Vietnamese.  They succeeded.  To an American public fed a steady diet of optimism, the Tet Offensive was profoundly disillusioning.  Walter Cronkite, the respected CBS anchorman, went to South Vietnam just after the offensive to see what had happened.  Hitherto a "hawk" on the war, he reported to the American people that it now seemed "more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam" would "end in a stalemate."

The president himself put on a brave front, but he too was shaken.  Soon after Tet, Gen. Westmoreland asked for an additional 298,000 troops.  This request precipitated a crisis within the administration.  To grant it would be to continue the escalation process, committing even more U. S. resources to the prolonged struggle.  To refuse it would require a major reconsideration of American goals.  Johnson asked his close military and foreign advisors to review the whole Vietnam invovlement.  The advice of almost all those experienced men was to stop the escalation in Vietnam and by slow stages turn the fighting over to the South Vietnamese.  The United States must try to get out.

The War and the 1968 Election

Growing public opposition to the war brought two peace candidates--senators Eugene McCarthy of Wisconsin and Robert Kennedy of New York--into the lists against Johnson for the 1968 Democratic nomination.  Johnson's moral defeat in the New Hampshire primary and the likelihood that he would lose in Wisconsin led to his decision at the end of March not to run for another full term.  In that same speech, he also announced his offer to stop bombing North Vietnam  above the 20th parallel--most of the country's area--in exchange for peace negotiations.  Soon thereafter, the North Vietnamese announced they were ready to meet, and on May 10, 1968, talks began in Paris.  They would drag on for five years.

Johnson's withdrawal from the Democratic race left the two peace candidates, Kennedy and McCarthy, but none representing the traditional Democratic establishment--the unions and the big city mayors who wielded such power within the party.  They turned to Johnson's vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, as the "establishment" candidate.  This now placed the Democrats in a three-way contest for primary voters during the long campaign season.  The biggest prize was California, the nation's largest state.  Whoever won there would be able to go into the Democratic National Convention in Chicago with the greatest momentum.

In California, on June 4, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy, brother of the late president, emerged victorious in a narrow victory over his rivals.  In a speech before his campaign supporters at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5 (it was after midnight), Kennedy thanked them for their hard work, ending with the injunction:  "Now it's on to Chicago and let's win there."  He turned to exit, but found his way blocked by happy supporters.  His aides turned him around, pointing out an alternative route that led through the hotel's kitchen.  As the entourage exited through the kitchen, five shots rang out and Kennedy fell to the floor, mortally wounded.  Cradled by aides and attended by his wife, Kennedy managed to ask if anyone else was hurt.  Frantic campaign workers went back into the hall and asked for any doctors in the house to come forward to help.  Upstairs in the Kennedy suite, Robert's young son, David, watched the entire event unfold on television.  Robert F. Kennedy died the next day.


Left:  Robert F. Kennedy lies mortally wounded with a rosary in his hands.








Kennedy's assasination left  Hubert Humphrey as the front runner.  Humphrey was in a difficult position.  As Johnson's vice-president, he was identified with the pro-war forces as well as the Democratic establishment.  Anti-war protesters had already announced their intention to launch a massive demonstration at the Chicago convention.  Fearing that the chaos of the demonstrations would disgrace the city, Chicago's mayor, Richard Daley, Sr., refused permits for the protestors that would have allowed them to march or use the city's parks.

Backed by the party's power brokders, Humphrey easily won the Democratic nomination and named Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine as his vice-presidential candidate.  However, a stall in the Paris peace talks hurt the Democrats.  Johnson refused to accede to North Vietnam's demands that the U. S. halt all bombing unconditionally, seeing it as an admission that his policies were wrong.  South Vietnamese president Thieu, believing that Humphrey's Republican opponent, Richard Nixon, was a stronger partisan of South Vietnam than Humphrey, also refused to go along with any halt in the bombing.  Still, the election was close, with Nixon pulling off a narrow victory.







Sources:

Irwin and Debi Unger, Postwar America:  The United States Since 1945 (New York, 1990).

The Assassination

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Nixon and Vietnam