How Did The Tet Offensive Affect Public Opinion In Vietnam

However, the impression that there was a drastic shift in the public opinion after the Tet Offensive and its negative reporting is viewed as superficial and rejected by many historians such as Hallin, Hammond and Schmitz. Even though the public opinion polls of Lyndon Johnson's have significantly dropped after Tet, the public opinion polls of people who thought that the intervention in Vietnam was a mistake in April 1968 indicated now only 40%, this is only a difference of 4% after Tet, hence very marginal. It is worth noting that the biggest shift in public opinion towards intervention in Vietnam was in fact between the 1st of September 1965 and the 5th of May 1966 with a change of 12% with the amount of people who thought that the intervention was a mistake, which is evidence of that perhaps there is no empirical data that could directly link media coverage after Tet with the sudden changes in public opinion. The historian David F. Schmitz holds that the Tet Offensive was a decisive moment in the Vietnam …show more content…
After Tet, the majority of officials in Johnson's administration, most notably Clark Clifford, began to question the U.S goal to maintain a noncommunist government in Vietnam in a reasonable time frame and at acceptable costs. As Clifford had stated ''the thrust which was that we should not continue to pour blood and treasure into Vietnam'', therefore the Tet Offensive had demonstrated to the senior officials that U.S. could not win a limited war of attrition in Vietnam, and concluded to the the change in policy was