Forty years on from Tet: how the US won Vietnam

For the last few days they have been putting the flags and bunting up in the streets of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in preparation for the nationwide celebrations which will mark the Lunar New Year or Tet. Forty years ago, on the night of 30–31 January 1968, the Liberation Army, as it is now known here, launched its famous Tet offensive with a series of co-ordinated surprise attacks on a wide range of targets south of the 17th parallel. In and around Saigon, mortars pounded the US airbase at Tan Son Nhut, as well as the US embassy, the Presidential Palace, the General Staff Headquarters of the South Vietnamese Army and the Navy Command.

In the United States, the Tet offensive had a devastating impact on public opinion. President Lyndon Johnson might have proclaimed: ‘We cannot be defeated by force of arms. We will stand in Vietnam.’ But at the end of April 1968, he announced — in a televised addressed to the nation — that he would not run again for President. Robert McNamara, Secretary of State for Defense and one of the principal architects of the war, left to run the World Bank. The 1968 Tet offensive marked the beginning of the end of American efforts to ‘win’ the war in Vietnam. After that, the only way out lay at the negotiating table.

I first visited the now reunified Vietnam in 1991 when I toured the country as a guest of the Vietnam National Women’s Revolutionary Committee. Hanoi then was still a delightful backwater. You could buy a meal from a street vendor for 20 American cents. The bicycle was the principal, often the only, mode of transport. Decent places to stay were few and far between. The Metropolitan Hotel, one of the loveliest relics of the French colonial era, had survived the bombing but it needed a substantial upgrade.