"As the TET offensive continued into February, the anchorman for the CBS evening news, Walter Cronkite, traveled to Vietnam and filed several reports. Upon his return, Cronkite took an unprecedented step of presenting his "editorial opinion" at the end of the news broadcast on February 27th. "For it seems now more certain than ever," Cronkite said, "that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate." After watching Cronkite's broadcast, LBJ was quoted as saying. "That's it. If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America."
You weren’t in the US, but what caused the public and popular support to decline rapidly was not only the Tet offensive, but, even more importantly, the end of student deferments. Once middle class and upper class kids lost their exemption from military service, their parents started asking much more serious questions about just what was going on in Vietnam. That was the beginning of the end of the war.
I didn't spend the entire time in Vietnam during my 7 years of service, 1965-72--just one year in country and another 8 months off the coast. I was aware of what was going on in the US, including having two brothers who got student deferments. The reality is that student deferments ended in 1971 almost at the end of the war.
The Military Selective Service Act of 1967 expanded the ages of conscription to the ages of 18 to 35. It still granted student deferments, but ended them upon either the student's completion of a four-year degree or his 24th birthday, whichever came first. The act was amended in 1971 ending student deferments except for Divinity students, who received a 2-D Selective Service classification.
According to the Veteran's Administration, 9.2 million men served in the military between 1964 and 1975. Nearly 3.5 million men served in the Vietnam theater of operations. From a pool of approximately 27 million, the draft raised 2,215,000 men for military service during the Vietnam era. It has also been credited with "encouraging" many of the 8.7 million "volunteers" to join rather than risk being drafted.
Of the nearly 16 million men not engaged in active military service, 96% were exempted (typically because of jobs including other military service), deferred (usually for educational reasons), or disqualified (usually for physical and mental deficiencies but also for criminal records to include draft violations). Draft offenders in the last category numbered nearly 500,000 but less than 10,000 were convicted or imprisoned for draft violations. Finally, as many as 100,000 draft eligible males fled the country.
With the end of active U.S. ground participation in Vietnam, December 1972 saw the last men conscripted, who were born in 1952 and who reported for duty in June 1973. On February 2, 1972, a drawing was held to determine draft priority numbers for men born in 1953, but in early 1973 it was announced that no further draft orders would be issued. In March 1973, 1974, and 1975 the Selective Service assigned draft priority numbers for all men born in 1954, 1955, and 1956, in case the draft was extended, but it never was
In Australia, the draft affected comparatively few people, yet the social impact was immense.
One still meets Vietnam vets. They often have that “look”. What a war ...
As to the draft, I forgot when it ended, but I remember very clearly the drawing in December 1969 when myself and millions of other draft age college students were assigned their numbers, in preparation for the end of deferments. I got a high number and the draft board skipped over me, but for the first time, millions of “safe” college students no longer felt safe. We were in the mix. I noticed a big difference in the antiwar demonstrations thereafter. Whereas before, the demonstrators were pretty much the more radical elements of the campus, by 1970 and 1971, the support was much broader, (I was at the University of Texas). Now who can say with any certainty why that was? I obviously have my opinion, which I have stated already. In fact that experience led me to the conclusion that we should not abandon the draft in favor of a volunteer armed forces, because I felt that if the general public were exempted from serving in our wars, then we would be more likely to get involved in them when we shouldn't, or stay in those future wars longer than we should. (My belief is that it should be politically costly to fight wars when the general population is not willing to fight in them.) By the way, most accounts indicate that Nixon came to the same conclusion, feeling that if he did away with the draft, the opposition to the war would drop.
One last comment about Cronkite. When LBJ was quoted as saying “If I lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America” I attributed that to LBJ's six sense politically. To me, Cronkite was a little slow intellectually, not as interesting as Huntley/Brinkley who I preferred, but he was the very archetype of the bedrock middle American. He was the embodiment of their values, their hopes and dreams and their reaction to the world. LBJ was right to look out of his bubble in D.C. and see what Cronkite made of what was going on. Because when he lost Cronkite after Tet, he had also lost much of middle America. But Cronkite was not the cause.
As to the reporting on the Tet offensive, how would you expect the media to report on such a massive attack? What was shocking at the time was that the communists were capable of launching a simultaneous attack against more than 100 cities and towns in Vietnam, and almost overrunning our embassy. That was what shocked us at the time, that they had the capability to launch such attacks. I suppose the media could have just reported, “There were some communist attacks in Vietnam yesterday, but they were quickly subdued.” But, really, that's not why we have a free press. They have an obligation to tell us what's going on, regardless. At least, I hope they feel that way.
Well, that's my take on what happened.