Presidential Advisor Harry McPherson Describes Reactions to the Tet Offensive (1981)

Interviewer: Okay? What were the uh factors that prompted Johnson to begin de-escalating Vietnam and...what impact did the Tet Offensive have, what was the mood of the White House when it broke? McPherson: I guess the mood of the White House after the Tet Offensive uh was a mixed one. For the most part, shocked that it could have happened. Shortly thereafter, though, uh running upstream. The news began to come from Saigon, from, in the cables...uh, that the North Vietnamese, the Viet Cong had surfaced their assets, as the expression went. McPherson: Their secret agents, their people working in the villages had come out and had been uh...killed, eliminated, thousands of them, that while the enemy had shown that he could hit a number of South Vietnamese cities, hard, even after years of bombing, and...of search and destroy missions and all the rest of it, that he could still come out...that...that, that was terribly depressing uh, to me, at any rate. McPherson: But the word came back from the embassy that, in fact, it had been a great victory for our side. The, the enemy had lost these assets, the South Vietnamese had shown that they would not crumble totally uh when attacked...

McPherson: And, uh, so you had two strands running, from the National Security Council staff where Walt Rostow was headquartered. The cables flowed through from the military headquarters and from the Embassy in Saigon saying that we’re, we have survived, the South Vietnamese have survived, the enemy has suffered a terrible defeat, he made a great miscalculation. McPherson: From, for the rest of us who were not in the National Security Council Staff, even though we were reading many of those cables uh and going down there for such reassurance as we could get, we were also watching the American television. And American television was showing a different sight, for the American embassy compound invaded uh by Viet Cong. The terrible sight of General Loan raising his revolver to the head of a captured Viet Cong and killing him. McPherson: Uh...that...uh, sense of the awfulness, the endlessness of the war, and the, the um, if you’ll pardon what sounds maybe like a naïve expression, the, the uh unethical quality of the war that, the terrible uh quality of the war that, the terrible uh quality that did not recognize if when a man was taken prisoner he was not to be shot at uh point blank range. That...they were awful contradictions, the cables on the one side, the television on the other. It, it was very disturbing. Interviewer: Did you get a chance to observe... Interviewer: Stop.

McPherson: Yeah, that would be sensible, it would tell ‘em where the hell...