Two stories about the same war
The title of this article calls 1967 a turning point, and in one sense it was, though not in the way officials hoped at the time. In late 1967 the administration of Lyndon Johnson set out to persuade the public that the United States was making progress. At the same time, inside the intelligence community, analysts were arguing about how large the enemy really was. The gap between those two stories, one public and optimistic and one private and uncertain, helps explain why the Tet Offensive of early 1968 landed with such force.
The visit of General Westmoreland to Washington has its own account elsewhere on this site. Here the focus is on the wider effort to project confidence and on the dispute about numbers.
The case for progress
By autumn 1967, public support for the war was slipping, and the White House was concerned about it. Johnson responded with what was sometimes called a progress campaign. The senior American officials in Saigon, including Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker and General Westmoreland, were asked to come home and speak publicly. Other officials gave briefings and interviews, and the message was consistent: the enemy was being worn down, the South Vietnamese government was becoming more stable and the war, though not over, was moving in the right direction.
On 21 November 1967 Westmoreland addressed the National Press Club in Washington. He said that the situation had improved substantially, and he suggested that the point had been reached at which the end of the war was beginning to come into view. Reports of the time quoted him in terms like these, though readers who want his exact wording should check the published text. He also spoke of a time when American forces might start to be withdrawn, if progress continued.
The evidence cited was mostly statistical. Officials pointed to enemy losses, to the share of the population said to be under government control and to the number of enemy defectors. The pacification programme was presented as improving security in the countryside. Large operations such as the Junction City operation early in the year, and later battles such as Dak To, were described as costly to the enemy. These indicators were not invented, but each was open to question, and the way they were combined gave a hopeful picture.
The order of battle dispute
The most important disagreement concerned the “order of battle”, the estimate of how many enemy fighters there were and of what kinds. The estimate mattered because the strategy of attrition depended on it. If the enemy had far fewer men than thought, or was losing more than it could replace, then the war of attrition might be working. If there were many more, the same casualty figures meant much less.
The dispute turned on categories. Military intelligence in Saigon counted main force and regional units, and administrative personnel and guerrillas. Less clear were part-time village guerrillas, local militia and the political infrastructure, sometimes called the secret self-defence forces. A CIA analyst, Sam Adams, argued that the militia and similar groups had been undercounted for years and that the true total was substantially higher than the official figure. Military intelligence resisted, in part because adding such categories could produce a much larger number and a result that seemed to contradict the claim of progress.
The disagreement was argued over in the course of 1967, including at a conference in Saigon in September, where the CIA and the military tried to agree on figures for a national estimate. According to accounts by participants, the compromise left out some categories from the headline total, so that the official figure remained lower than some analysts believed it should be. Estimates of the gap are given in different numbers in different sources, so no single figure should be treated as settled. The key point is that the disagreement was real, was at the level of senior intelligence officials, and was largely settled by finding a form of words rather than by agreeing on the facts.
Why the numbers mattered
Westmoreland and his staff, and Washington, faced real pressure. A large increase in the estimated enemy strength would have implied a longer war. It would also have invited questions about earlier claims and about whether more troops were needed at a time when public patience was running low. The politics therefore pushed toward the lower figures, and critics later argued that this pressure shaped the analysis. Defenders of the military, then and since, answered that the categories in dispute were of little military significance, and that the dispute was about definitions more than about hidden armies. Historians still discuss which side had the better argument, and the question is not fully settled.
From optimism to shock
In January 1968 the enemy launched the attacks of the Tet Offensive, striking cities and towns across South Vietnam at once. The offensive was a military setback for North Vietnam and its allies in many places, and the allied forces recovered quickly. But the scale and coordination surprised the American public. Having been told in November that the end was coming into view, many Americans saw the fighting in Saigon and Hue as a contradiction.
The result was not a collapse of military position but a collapse of credibility. The phrase “credibility gap”, already used earlier in the war, had new force. Public opinion polls moved against the war, and the political effects included Eugene McCarthy’s strong showing in the New Hampshire primary in March 1968 and, later that month, Johnson’s decision not to run again. The intelligence dispute of 1967 did not cause these events, but it shows that doubts about the official picture existed inside the government well before they became public.