Those pictures and words marked the beginning of the biggest media event of America’s first television war. Television film footage of the assault was shipped by plane to Asian cities where it was processed and then transmitted by satellite to the New York headquarters of the three networks. Teletype bulletins went out on the Associated Press and United Press International wire services. In his classic 1971 account, “Tet,” the author and journalist Don Oberdorfer described how the brief battle in Saigon was reported back to the U.S, in print and even more so on television. The attack was repelled but the consequences in the U.S. Embassy in the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon. The most dramatic was an assault on the compound of the U.S. ![]() It was against this drum beat of official optimism that the communist attacks unfolded. Some of President Johnson’s top advisers had been even more upbeat: one told an American journalist en route to Vietnam to concentrate on covering civilian rebuilding programs because the military part of the effort was being wrapped up. Westmoreland had told Congress - as recently as late November 1967 - that victory was in sight. ![]() William Westmoreland was caught by surprise. Many South Vietnamese soldiers were away from their units, home with their families for the holiday. In the last two days of January 1968, the North Vietnamese army and its communist guerrilla allies in the South, the Viet Cong, launched attacks across the South during what was supposed to be the Asian lunar New Year holiday, known as “Tet” in Vietnam. Like everything else about the decade-plus American war effort in Vietnam, Tet has been a focal point of controversy and heated arguments.
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