Posted on 01/29/2018 6:26:36 PM PST by DJ Taylor
Outstanding. More info on this than I’ve ever read before.
If we had struck then, the war would have been over. But the communist filth in this country, from the peace movement to Walter Cronkite and his verminous brethren, so crippled our war effort psychologically that what was essentially a victory for our side turned into the beginning of the end.
Bkmk
Welcome back Redcatcher ! If you get to the Brigade HQ at Benning, they have the Brigade photographer albums at HQ. I went in 2012, was well worth the trip.
My father in law was there in 1967 and 1968. I havent asked him awhole lot about it. But in talking about media bias, he uses Cronkite as an example of the news altering the news and changing perceptions.
I in my opinion think it was a mistake for Lyndon Johnson to run his trap about how victory was in site for the year or two before this. He needed to prepare the American people for unpredictability of war. He never did. More worried about his great society another other garbage.
My father in law was there in 1967 and 1968. I havent asked him awhole lot about it. But in talking about media bias, he uses Cronkite as an example of the news altering the news and changing perceptions.
I in my opinion think it was a mistake for Lyndon Johnson to run his trap about how victory was in site for the year or two before this. He needed to prepare the American people for unpredictability of war. He never did. More worried about his great society another other garbage.
Thanks for sharing your story.
Thanks DJ...
I was there also. I was back home in March. As I recall in my feeble memory, I read that the North Vietnam head General later wrote a book(His name Giap or similar)and he stated that he was preparing to surrender because they lost a lot during Tet, but then he read some of our news(Cronkite, etc) and he held on to the conclusion.
This is the problem right here. Two week vacations is not warfare. I don't know what it is, but its not war. It is pretend war. You are either in war or you're not. Thanks LBJ.
I always thought the same thing. Imagine if we took an island at the mouth of the Red River in Haiphong like MacArthur did at Inchon?
Scumbag Dems followed by scumbag Kissinger. Kissinger sold out South Vietnam by forcing the 1973 “peace” agreement that he knew would result in the NVA succeeding, because he knew the commies couldn’t be trusted. He also made false promises of air support should the NVA break the treaty, knowing that Congress would not support further expenditures in Vietnam. Had Nixon not been kneecapped by Watergate he might have been able to muster sufficient resolve to protect South Vietnam, but President Ford all too gladly played Pontius Pilate and let the great betrayal unfold without a whimper.
The US Embassy was NOT destroyed. The Embassy Complex were entered but the 19 man VC team was decimated after fierce fighting that cost us some good Marine guards and soldiers.
See Don Oberdorfer’s massive book “TET” - The Turning Point in the Vietnam War”.
Also, go to the website of Vietnam Veterans for Factual History (www.vvfh.org) to read other personal reports about Tet at their onsite library.
They also have published and are continuing to publish “Yellow Books” for each year of the war (1963-1975), written by those who were there (military, diplomats and journalists) for specific subjects.
TET destroyed the VC as a full-fledged military force, their depleted ranks being filled by NVA from then on. I interviewed a coupled captured PAVN young soldiers in Cambodia in 1970, who thought they were fighting the Americans. They really didn’t know that they were in Cambodia. They belonged to the 6th Division, which later showed up at An Loc in 1972 where it was decimated.
TET also exposed the Viet Cong Infrastructure, their underground parallel government or shadow government, but civil and military. They lost a majority of their best cadre during the fighting and subsequent “offensives” of April-May 1968, summer 68 and the Spring Offensive of 1969/Fall Offensive (designed to aid the anti-Vietnam movement in the US by running up US casualties in the weeks before the demonstrations).
By 1970, the VCI in the Mekong Delta was collapsing to the point that top Provincial VCI leaders were defecting, which caused lower ranking VCI to conclude that the war was lost, and they defected (Choi Hoi program).
Very interesting story. Thanks for writing it.
Indeed. Blessed are they that do his commandments [manifesting saving faith], that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city. For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie . (Revelation 22:14-15)
Talk about fake news:
The Vietnam War, in which America was the victor in military battles, is perhaps the most manifest modern example of how propaganda affected the outcome of a war, with much of the mainstream media being an all too willing instrument of such, especially CBS News with Walter Cronkite.
In an exchange during one of his liaison trips to Hanoi, Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. told his North Vietnamese counterpart, Colonel Tu, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield," Colonel Tu responded, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."[28]
The Tet Offensive was portrayed by the New York liberal media as a defeat for the U.S., while in fact, it was an almost disastrous defeat for the North Vietnamese, as General Westmoreland and historians agree. The Viet Cong not only lost half of the 90,000 troops they had committed to battle, but it was virtually destroyed as an army.[29] British "Encounter" journalist Robert Elegant stated,
For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page and television screens - never before Vietnam had the collective policy of the media sought, by graphic and unremitting distortion, the victory of the enemies of the correspondent's own side.[30]
Some journalists have admitted that their reporting was decidedly biased, and had profound effects on history. West German correspondent Uwe Siemon-Netto confessed, "Having covered the Viet Nam war over a period of five years for West German publications, I am now haunted by the role we journalists have played over there." In relation to not reporting the true nature of the Hanoi regime and its actions resulting from the American withdrawal, he asked,
What prompted us to make our readers believe that the Communists, once in power in all of Viet Nam, would behave benignly? What made us, first and foremost Anthony Lewis, belittle warnings by U.S. officials that a Communist victory would result in a massacre?... Are we journalists not in part responsible for the death of the tens of thousands who drowned? And are we not in part responsible for the hostile reception accorded to those who survive?...However, the media have been rather coy; they have not declared that they played a key role in the conflict. They have not proudly trumpeted Hanoi's repeated expressions of gratitude to the mass media of the non-Communist world, although Hanoi has indeed affirmed that it could not have won "without the Western press."[31] Ironically, it was also because of the bias from the Western press, in particular The New York Times, that caused the NVA to undergo their Tet Offensive with overconfidence that they would cause the entire South Vietnamese to embrace Communism and go against Capitalism and Saigon.[32]
CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite regularly carried news reports from its Moscow Bureau Chief, Bernard Redmont. When peace negotiations commenced with North Vietnam in Paris, Redmont became CBS News Paris Bureau Chief. What Redmont never reported during the ten year conflict was that he had been a KGB operative since the 1930s, and member of the notorious Silvermaster group.[33] Redmont was the only journalist to whom his fellow Comintern party member, and North Vietnamese chief negotiator, Mai Van Bo, granted an interview to bring the Communist point of view into American living rooms in what has been called "the living room war."
The single most explicit example of such biased reporting is typically seen to be the portrayal of the Tet offensive, as mentioned above, in which Western media was charged with inspiring and aiding the propaganda war of the communists.
Truong Nhu Tang, a founder of the National Liberation Front, and a minister of justice for the Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government - one of the most determined adversaries of the US during the war - stated years later,
The Tet Offensive proved catastrophic to our plans. It is a major irony of the Vietnam War that our propaganda transformed this debacle into a brilliant victory. The truth was that Tet cost us half our forces. Our losses were so immense that we were unable to replace them with new recruits. (Truong Nhu Tang, The New York Review, October 21, 1982)
In addition to Cronkite's biased reporting, FBI documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by Yahoo! News offer evidence that legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite collaborated with anti-Vietnam War activists in the 1960s, going so far as to offer advice on how to raise the public profile of protests and even promising that CBS News would rent a helicopter to take liberal Senator Edmund Muskie to and from the site of an anti-war rally.[34] http://www.conservapedia.com/Liberal_bias#Vietnam_War
Bkmk
I was stationed 56 Air Commando Wing Nakhon Phanom, NE Thailand then.
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