I have heard and seen that Giap quote many times. Does anyone know if this is really what is written in the book? Or is a ready for snopes.com story?
Ed Moise has already tackled this one [in a review of] Vo Nguyen Giap and Van Tien Dung, How We Won the War. Philadelphia: Recon Publications, 1976. 63 pp.
This book has been the subject of several unfounded rumors on the Internet. The first one began in the late 1990s. Supposedly, General Giap had written in How We Won the War that in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive of 1968, the Communist leaders in Vietnam had been ready to abandon the war, but that a broadcast by Walter Cronkite, declaring the Tet Offensive a Communist victory, persuaded them to change their minds and fight on. This rumor was entirely false. Giap had not mentioned Cronkite, and had not said the Communists had ever considered giving up on the war.
Several variants of this rumor appeared in 2004. In these, Giap is supposed to have credited either the American anti-war movement in general, or John Kerry's organization (Vietnam Veterans Against the War) in particular, for persuading the Communist leaders to change their minds and not give up on the war. Giap is sometimes said to have made this statement in How We Won the War, sometimes in an unnamed 1985 memoir. All versions of the rumor are false. Neither in How We Won the War, nor in any other book (the 1985 memoir is entirely imaginary), has Giap mentioned Kerry or Vietnam Veterans Against the War, or said that the Communist leaders had ever considered giving up on the war."
http://hnn.us/roundup/archives/16/2004/10/#8232
Of course, even if the Giap quotes are bogus it takes nothing away from the main point: the media helped pull defeat from the jaws of victory.
“I have heard and seen that Giap quote many times. Does anyone know if this is really what is written in the book? Or is a ready for snopes.com story?”
Don’t know if it’s true or not, but I do remember an interview with Giap that was included in the old BBC series “The Ten Thousand Days War” where Giap said that the North Vietnamese Government spent three times as much supporting the antiwar movement in the United States as they did on actual fighting in Viet Nam.