By David K. Shipler
Fifty years
ago this week, Americans who had believed their leaders’ optimistic lies were
stunned by the Tet Offensive, North Vietnam’s lightning assault on scores of South
Vietnamese towns and cities. An enemy squad even managed to enter the US
Embassy compound in Saigon, giving Hanoi and its Vietcong surrogates a
propaganda victory—but not the military victory they had sought. Their forces
took heavy casualties as the Americans and South Vietnamese pounded them back.
Furthermore,
the expectations of the North Vietnamese commander, General Vo Nguyen Giap,
were not fulfilled. As he later revealed, he had predicted that the South
Vietnamese army would collapse, the civilian population would rise up in
rebellion, and the United States would scale back sharply.
Yet the
American public was not struck by the collision between Hanoi’s goals and the results
on the ground. Rather, what pushed much of the country to the threshold of
disillusionment and outrage was the collision between American officials’ rosy assessments
and the North’s capacity to mount countrywide attacks. Just weeks before the
Tet Offensive, the US commander, General William Westmoreland, declared boldly,
“We have reached an important point, when the end begins to come into view.”
Then the disastrous reality came into view—the prospect of a grinding stalemate
at best. It was a psychological turning point in the war.
That
threshold of outrage has risen in recent decades; it now takes a higher dose of
deception and corruption to generate sufficient disgust to produce change.
President Trump’s chronic lying—he uttered some 2,000 blatant falsehoods and
misleading claims during his first year in office—cost him nothing during his
campaign. Nor did his boast on tape about grabbing women “by the pussy.” His
obvious racism—commending some “fine people” who marched with white
supremacists in Charlottesville, and preferring immigration from Norway instead
of “shithole” countries in Africa—has not crushed his support among Republicans
in Congress or his core of voters.
