A larger war with no clear end
By the start of 1967 the United States had been bombing North Vietnam for nearly two years and had been fighting on the ground in the South since Marines came ashore at Da Nang in March 1965. What changed in 1967 was scale and visibility. The number of American personnel in South Vietnam rose from roughly 385,000 at the end of 1966 to somewhere near 485,000 at the end of 1967, and further increases were approved during the year. The detailed picture of Vietnam troop levels and public opinion belongs to a separate article, but the direction was clear: each new commitment was followed by a request for more.
The reasoning behind this was a strategy of attrition. General Westmoreland, who commanded US forces in Vietnam, aimed to find and destroy enemy units faster than they could be replaced. Success was measured partly by body counts, a statistic that critics later argued was unreliable and encouraged inflated reporting. Large sweeps such as the operations in the Iron Triangle and War Zone C early in the year killed or displaced many people and uncovered supplies and tunnels, yet the enemy could usually withdraw across a border or into the countryside and return when conditions suited it.
The air war and its limits
Bombing of the North under Rolling Thunder continued through 1967, and in some phases targets nearer Hanoi and Haiphong were added. Senior military figures argued for fewer restrictions. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, by contrast, had become sceptical that bombing could force Hanoi to negotiate or could cut the flow of men and supplies southward. Hearings in the Senate during the summer exposed this disagreement in public. In late November it was announced that McNamara would leave the Pentagon, and he departed early in 1968. The American air campaign also cost aircraft and airmen, and it gave North Vietnam a powerful argument for continued resistance.
Diplomacy offered little. In a September speech in San Antonio, President Johnson set out terms under which the bombing might stop, but Hanoi did not accept them, and contacts through intermediaries produced no breakthrough. In South Vietnam, elections held that September brought Nguyen Van Thieu to the presidency, with Nguyen Cao Ky as vice president. American officials presented this as political progress, though critics noted the limits on who could run and the continuing dominance of the military.
The year of the “progress” campaign
By autumn the Johnson administration was concerned that public support was slipping and sought to show that the war was moving in the right direction. Westmoreland returned to Washington in November and spoke publicly in optimistic terms, reportedly saying that the end of the war was beginning to come into view. The message was meant to reassure. Within weeks the contrast with the fighting at places such as Dak To and along the northern frontier, and then with the events of January 1968, would damage the credibility of such claims. Observers had already begun to speak of a “credibility gap” between official statements and what reporters and soldiers described.
The human and political cost
The fighting was costly for everyone involved. American deaths in Vietnam in 1967 were reportedly above 11,000, a larger annual total than in 1966, and the number of wounded was considerably higher. South Vietnamese military losses were larger still, and civilians suffered heavily from bombing, artillery, forced relocation and the guerrilla war in the villages. Totals for Vietnamese deaths are uncertain and estimates differ widely, so they are best treated as approximate. Many American families learned of the war through a telegram or a funeral, and in small towns the local casualties were highly visible.
The war also exposed a basic political problem: Washington was trying to build a stable and popular South Vietnamese government at the same time as it was fighting for it. American advisers pushed for land reform, anti-corruption measures and civilian programmes known as pacification, but these were uneven, and the dependence on American military power made it hard for Saigon to claim independence. Much of the reporting from Vietnam, in newspapers and on the evening television news, concentrated on this gap between aims and results. Soldiers’ letters and reporters’ accounts often seemed to describe a different war from the one in the official statistics.
The backlash at home
Opposition grew in several forms. The Selective Service draft made the war personal for young men and their families, and resistance ranged from deferment-seeking to burning draft cards to refusing induction. The boxer Muhammad Ali refused induction in April. Martin Luther King spoke against the war at Riverside Church the same month. Large marches in New York and San Francisco in April and the demonstration at the Pentagon in October showed the scale of organised protest, and the movement itself was increasingly split between those who wanted to pressure policy and those who wanted to challenge the political system. Each of these has its own article in this section; together they show how the argument moved from the edges of politics toward the centre.
Public opinion shifted more slowly than the headlines suggest. Polls during 1967 reportedly showed a growing share of Americans saying that sending troops had been a mistake, and by the autumn those doubting the war may have outnumbered those fully supporting it for the first time. Yet many who doubted the war were not protesters and some wanted a tougher approach rather than withdrawal. Dissatisfaction was therefore broad but not unified.
The war also strained domestic politics and the budget. The costs competed with Great Society programmes, and Johnson asked Congress for a tax increase in order to limit deficits, which complicated his relations with legislators. Inflation concerns and the broader American economy were increasingly tied to Vietnam spending, though the exact weight of the war among other pressures is a matter for economists. Within the Democratic Party, activists began a search for a challenger, and in late November Senator Eugene McCarthy announced he would run against the president in the primaries.
Toward Tet
The year ended with the war neither won nor clearly lost. Communist forces had suffered heavy casualties and were short of some supplies, but they retained the ability to choose when and where to fight, and they were preparing a much larger effort. The Tet Offensive began in the last days of January 1968, with attacks on cities and towns across South Vietnam, including a raid on the US embassy compound in Saigon. Militarily, the assault failed to hold ground and cost the attackers dearly. Politically, it undercut the claim that the end was in sight, and it coincided with the siege at Khe Sanh, which was followed closely on American television, and it helped prepare the ground for McCarthy’s strong showing in New Hampshire, and for Johnson’s decision in March 1968 not to seek re-election.
For readers trying to understand 1967, the useful point is that escalation and protest fed each other. More troops and more bombing produced more casualties and more questions, and those questions turned a distant conflict into a daily argument in American homes and on campuses, and in other countries as well.