Stanley Karnow, a reporter for the Washington Post during the Tet Offensive, in his account of the war, Vietnam: A History, describes the reaction of the Johnson Administration and the American media.
On the evening of January 31, 1968, the spectacle suddenly changed. Now, Americans saw a drastically different kind of war. The night before, nearly seventy thousand Communist soldiers had launched a surprise offensive of extraordinary intensity and astonishing scope. Violating a truce that they themselves had pledged to observe during Tet, the lunar New Year, they surged into more than a hundred cities and towns, including Saigon, audaciously shifting the war for the first time from its rural setting to new arena — South Vietnam's supposedly impregnable urban areas.
The Tet offensive stunned Johnson. Having swallowed most of the reports claiming that the Communists had been defanged, he had never imagined that they could attack the U.S. embassy in Saigon or assault the cities of South Vietnam. But he concealed his emotions. On the morning of January 31, after a fitful night of checking the torrent of messages from Saigon, his first reaction, typically, was to orchestrate a public-relations drive designed to promote optimism. He ordered Westmoreland to hold daily briefings for U.S. correspondents in Vietnam in order to “reassure the public here that you have the situation under control,” and he told the White House press corps that the Communist operation had been a “complete failure.” He also instructed Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, Walt Rostow, and other prominent aids to trump the same theme in newspaper and television interviews during the ensuing weeks.
Art Buchwald satirically flattened the news-management campaign from the start. His syndicated column portrayed a confident General Armstrong Custer boasting that “the battle of Little Big Horn had just turned the corner,” and the Sioux were “on the run.” Other press comments were more somber. An unusually blunt editorial in the usually subdued Wall Street Journal warned that “the American people should be getting ready to accept, if they haven't already, the prospect that the whole Vietnam effort may be doomed.” But the news media were yet to strike an even worse blow against Johnson.
Walter Cronkite was the nation's most reliable journalistic personality — a figure who “by a mere inflection of his deep baritone voice or by a lifting of his well-known bushy eyebrows…might well change the vote of thousands of people,” as one politician had extravagantly put it. Moreover, Cronkite was apple-pie American, a Missouri boy who expressed the mood of the heartland as much as he presumably influenced its pulse beat. His views on the war had mostly been balanced, nearly bland. Now he delivered a fresh verdict. Just back from Saigon, he rejected the official forecast of victory, predicting instead that it seemed “more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.”
(This article can also be found on National Review Online).
