1. There's the military perspective: Tet was a huge setback for the North Vietnamese. They were badly defeated, took huge losses, were operationally crippled, and achieved none of their objectives.



2. There's the liberal media perspective: Even though we won, the left-wing press spun it as a defeat. That's why the public lost faith in the war.



3. There's the government mendacity perspective: For some time, LBJ had been assuring us that the war was going well and the Viet Cong were on the verge of collapse. Tet demonstrated that he was either lying or else completely divorced from reality.

I've always sided with #3. There's no question that #1 is technically correct, but in practice it simply meant that Giáp was vindicated in his preference for guerrilla warfare over conventional offensives. North Vietnam was fully able to continue prosecuting the war. And while the press was indeed gloomy about U.S. prospects after Tet, that was almost certainly because of #3, not #2. Walter Cronkite, the most famous of the pessimists, stated this clearly: "We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest cloud." He concluded — correctly — not that we had lost, but that we were "mired in a stalemate."

What Kevin perhaps misses is that #2, the media's (and not the "left wing press", as such a thing as that did not then and does not now exist in America, except in unimportant, underfunded and uninfluential pockets of dreary half-baked ideological infighting) disenchantment with the war after Tet was a directly consequence of #3, being told so often that things were going swimmingly. Cronkite's remark makes this quite clear. After so many times of being told that everything was OK, or on the verge of being OK, Tet made it much more difficult to continue to believe in that particular fairy tale, which lead to the press starting to take a much more pessimistic attitude toward the war.

P.S. This post is an example of something I do with some frequency here, which is to respond to an entry from another weblog on this weblog instead of posting my reaction in the comments thread on the original blog. There's a reason for this: on high-volume sites like Washington Monthly or Daily Kos, being the 167th or 374th or 1283rd comment in a thread that's 65% troll-related (counting both toll-spew and troll-baiting) and 30% infighting among the regulars and abuse of the blogger isn't such an interesting thing, even if your comment has a much better chance of being read by more people. I still post on those sites occasionally, but mostly I prefer to put my reactions here, where only 10 people willl read it, and none of them will comment on it.