Walter Cronkite's Ridiculous Spin on the 1968 Tet Offensive in South Vietnam

[Hector12]

The communists LOST the war. They signed the Paris Peace accords that gave them nothing that they went to war for. They won the next war that they started several years later after receiving massive Soviet and and retraining,

Can you document your assertion about massive Soviet aid and retraining after the Paris Peace Accords?

 

[Hector12]

The communists LOST the war. They signed the Paris Peace accords that gave them nothing that they went to war for. They won the next war that they started several years later after receiving massive Soviet and and retraining,

From the Paris Peace Accords the Communists achieved the withdrawal of American troops from South Vietnam.

 

[Hector12]

Are you kidding? China and the USSR totally supported the PRVN. They provided military and economic support that was vital to the PRVN’s survival. The proof of that is how quickly the PRVN signed surrender documents ending the war with no gains whatsoever once the USA under Nixon severed all the road and rail links from China and mined Haiphong harbor preventing the endless stream of Soviet merchant ships carrying everything from aspirin to SAMs. North Vietnam couldn’t even produce small arms ammo or despite being an agrarian country feed its own population. The actual dollar amount of the communist aid was probably fifty to a hundred times what the USA gave to the RVN. A single SA2 SAM probably cost over $100,000.00 and the Soviets gave the PRVN tens of thousands of them. An AK47 probably cost the Soviets fifty bucks to produce and they gave the PRVN millions of them. Plus hundreds of tanks, thousands of trucks, radars. The Soviets gave the PRVN 180 MiG 17s, 54 MiG19s and over a hundred MiG21s.

I have been trying to find a comparison of Soviet and Chinese aid for North Vietnam, and American aid for South Vietnam. This is the best I could find. If you have information, please post it.

------------

Duc Quyen
·
Follow
Lived in Vietnam 6y
Related
How much did the Vietnam War cost the USSR?
It cost the USSR very little, like surprisingly little.
According to Nigel Cawthorne in the book “Vietnam, a war lost and won”, the total cost of the Soviet Union's support to the North Vietnam was only 1.66 billion dollars.
However, this CIA report claimed that from 1964 to 1967, the Soviet Union provided over 1.5 billion dollars in both military and economic aid to North Vietnam. The number for the entire war would likely be much higher.

This article estimated that the number should be between 3.66 and 8 billion dollars. Since I’m in a generous mood, I’ll take the upper estimate as the true number: 8 billion dollars.
Now compare that number to the U.S. spending throughout the war which is widely known to be 145 billion dollars (in 1974 dollars). This number has not yet taken into account other hidden costs such as inflation, lost production, continual benefits for veterans, … Nigel Cawthorne estimated the true cost for the U.S. to be close to 300 billion dollars.

Even if we take the lower estimate for U.S. spending and the upper estimate for Soviet spending, the U.S. still outspent its opponent 18 times. And guess what, the U.S.-backed South Vietnam lost the war, and the Soviet-backed North Vietnam won.

Of course, the difference in spending had to be made up for in blood as the North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong guerrilla force suffered horrendous casualties with over 900,000 dead while the U.S. and South Vietnamese Army had 58,000 and 250,000 dead, respectively. But hey, that was Vietnamese blood. The Soviet Union got off lightly with only 13-16 men lost in action.
Supporting Communist North Vietnam was indeed a very wise investment for the USSR.

How much did the Soviet Union spend supporting North Vietnam in their war against the United States of America?

Answer (1 of 3): “The Soviet leadership at the beginning of 1965 decided to provide the Democratic Republic of Vietnam with large-scale military technical assistance. According to the chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, Alexei Kosygin, assistance to Vietnam during the war cost the S...

www.quora.com

 

[SavannahMann]

Imagine if shortly after the start of the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, an American newsman had announced on TV that perhaps we needed to seek a negotiated end to WWII because the Germans had launched a massive attack that no one thought possible?

This is not too drastically different from what Walter Cronkite did on February 27, 1968, less than four weeks after the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong subordinates launched their disastrous Tet Offensive on January 30. Here are the two most often-quoted statements from Cronkite's commentary:

To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.

But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could.

You would never guess from Cronkite's spin that the Communists had suffered a horrendous military defeat, suffering staggering losses while failing to seize nearly all of the towns and cities they had targeted (and the few places they did manage to seize were retaken in a matter of weeks).

We now know from North Vietnamese sources that the Tet Offensive was a desperate gamble that Hanoi's leaders took because they realized they were losing the war. Also, the North Vietnamese had assumed that once the offensive began, the majority of South Vietnamese would rise up and help them overthrow the Saigon government, but the vast majority of South Vietnamese remained loyal to their government.

Walter Cronkite and most of the rest of the news media turned the Communists' crushing military defeat into a key propaganda victory for the Communist war effort.

The Tet Offensive Revisited: Media's Big Lie

I do love Revisionist History.

Your post and the article that inspired it fails to consider several points.

First. For some time the Americans were promising that the war was winding down. The war was essentially over. The Tet offensive showed it wasn’t over. Not by a long shot.

Second. The method of declaring victory after battles was in body counts. Supposedly we were killing hundreds or thousands of enemy every day. Yet the enemy still had time, supplies, and manpower to launch a massive series of coordinated attacks throughout the nation.

The next issue was the abject failure of intelligence. You had Military Intelligence, the CIA, the State Department, the Vietnamese CIA, and Vietnamese Military Intelligence. Probably more. And none of them got a whiff of this massive coordinated attack across the whole nation. Thousands of people who claimed to have a good understanding of the enemy and their plans and the North achieved complete surprise.

But your post utterly ignores the Pentagon Papers. The Government Leaders knew the war was a lost cause before the Tet Offensive. They knew it for years. They were unwilling to stand in front of the American People and admit that.

Blaming the press for losing the war in Vietnam is like blaming the Janitor for the Apollo One fire.

 

[Hector12]

 

[AZrailwhale]

Can you document your assertion about massive Soviet aid and retraining after the Paris Peace Accords?

Read a history book. Or just look at contemporary photos. The NVA was almost exclusively a light infantry army during the war. The force that invaded South Vietnam was a modern combined, armor heavy army. The PRVN was bankrupt after the war, it certainly couldn't afford the billions to buy the tanks, artillery and SAMS that equipped its new army or pay the Russian advisors who trained it.

 

[AZrailwhale]

I have been trying to find a comparison of Soviet and Chinese aid for North Vietnam, and American aid for South Vietnam. This is the best I could find. If you have information, please post it.

------------

Duc Quyen
·
Follow
Lived in Vietnam 6y
Related
How much did the Vietnam War cost the USSR?
It cost the USSR very little, like surprisingly little.
According to Nigel Cawthorne in the book “Vietnam, a war lost and won”, the total cost of the Soviet Union's support to the North Vietnam was only 1.66 billion dollars.
However, this CIA report claimed that from 1964 to 1967, the Soviet Union provided over 1.5 billion dollars in both military and economic aid to North Vietnam. The number for the entire war would likely be much higher.

This article estimated that the number should be between 3.66 and 8 billion dollars. Since I’m in a generous mood, I’ll take the upper estimate as the true number: 8 billion dollars.
Now compare that number to the U.S. spending throughout the war which is widely known to be 145 billion dollars (in 1974 dollars). This number has not yet taken into account other hidden costs such as inflation, lost production, continual benefits for veterans, … Nigel Cawthorne estimated the true cost for the U.S. to be close to 300 billion dollars.

Even if we take the lower estimate for U.S. spending and the upper estimate for Soviet spending, the U.S. still outspent its opponent 18 times. And guess what, the U.S.-backed South Vietnam lost the war, and the Soviet-backed North Vietnam won.

Of course, the difference in spending had to be made up for in blood as the North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong guerrilla force suffered horrendous casualties with over 900,000 dead while the U.S. and South Vietnamese Army had 58,000 and 250,000 dead, respectively. But hey, that was Vietnamese blood. The Soviet Union got off lightly with only 13-16 men lost in action.
Supporting Communist North Vietnam was indeed a very wise investment for the USSR.

How much did the Soviet Union spend supporting North Vietnam in their war against the United States of America?

Answer (1 of 3): “The Soviet leadership at the beginning of 1965 decided to provide the Democratic Republic of Vietnam with large-scale military technical assistance. According to the chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, Alexei Kosygin, assistance to Vietnam during the war cost the S...

www.quora.com

That's ignoring all the economic aid, foodstuffs, plus the fact that Russian and Chinese equipment cost whatever the government said it cost. I remember reading that according to the Soviet government a T-54 cost less than a tenth of what the US government said they cost when the materials and actual labor involved were calculated. You are comparing apple to cucumbers. Those figures also leave out the shipping costs and massive infrastructure cost that the Russians and Chinese paid for. All those concrete airbases and the massive expansion of Haiphong Harbor were all not paid for by the PRVN government.

 

[Hector12]

[

 

[Hector12]

 

[Tom Paine 1949]

That's ignoring all the economic aid, foodstuffs, plus the fact that Russian and Chinese equipment cost whatever the government said it cost. I remember reading that according to the Soviet government a T-54 cost less than a tenth of what the US government said they cost when the materials and actual labor involved were calculated. You are comparing apple to cucumbers. Those figures also leave out the shipping costs and massive infrastructure cost that the Russians and Chinese paid for. All those concrete airbases and the massive expansion of Haiphong Harbor were all not paid for by the PRVN government.

North Vietnam of course depended on help from Russia and China! A poor peasant country bombed along with their Vietcong allies in the South Vietnam countryside — did you expect them to build or “pay for” SAM missiles by themselves?

What naïveté! Did South Vietnam “pay for” the salaries, bombs, planes, ships, ammunition, VA benefits, transportation and burial costs of Uncle Sam shipping and equipping some 3 million U.S. soldiers into and out of Vietnam? Did South Vietnam even pay for its own army, its own ammunition? Might as well ask who payed for the legions of Vietnamese prostitutes who “entertained” the U.S. military in Saigon and elsewhere!

This is one of those utterly dumb discussions I hate, which I have already commented on. Yeah, Walter Cronkite was a communist traitor “ridiculously” spinning the news to you fools. He had no experience whatever covering the war in World War II, it’s a lie that he ever covered in person the real “Battle of the Bulge,” and of course he didn’t report fairly and honestly on the “Great Victory” the U.S. won when the U.S. public — after being lied to for years — was utterly surprised by the Tet Offensive. Yeah, it was just a “stab in the back” by one isolated reporter that made the U.S. lose that war!

Germany was “about to win” World War I also, except those damn democrats and socialists (and of course Jews) stabbed Germany in the back in 1919. Hell, the war hadn’t even reached German soil when the German military surrendered. Clearly a betrayal!

 

[Hector12]

North Vietnam of course depended on help from Russia and China! A poor peasant country bombed along with their Vietcong allies in the South Vietnam countryside — did you expect them to build or “pay for” SAM missiles by themselves?

What naïveté! Did South Vietnam “pay for” the salaries, bombs, planes, ships, ammunition, VA benefits, transportation and burial costs of Uncle Sam shipping and equipping some 3 million U.S. soldiers into and out of Vietnam? Did South Vietnam even pay for its own army, its own ammunition? Might as well ask who payed for the legions of Vietnamese prostitutes who “entertained” the U.S. military in Saigon and elsewhere!

This is one of those utterly dumb discussions I hate, which I have already commented on. Yeah, Walter Cronkite was a communist traitor “ridiculously” spinning the news to you fools. He had no experience whatever covering the war in World War Two, didn’t really cover the real “Battle of the Bulge,” and of course didn’t report fairly and honestly on the “Great victory” the U.S. won when the U.S. public — after being lied to for years — was utterly surprised by the Tet Offensive. Yeah, it was just a “stab in the back” by one isolated reporter that made the U.S. lose that war!

Germany was “about to win” World War I also, except those damn democrats and socialists (and of course Jews) stabbed Germany in the back in 1919. Hell, the war hadn’t even reached German soil when the German military surrendered. Clearly a betrayal!

In Vietnam the Communists won fairly against enormous odds.

 

[Tom Paine 1949]

P.S. Walter Cronkite’s reporting on Tet actually was rather balanced, in a “patriotic” if wishy-washy sort of way. He had supported the war and most American foreign policy for decades. His was really an argument not for “surrender” but just for “serious negotiations,” for “peace with honor” — he seemed to believe such a thing might still be possible. This was later the line, taken up much more cynically, of Nixon and Kissinger, and it was Nixon himself who signed the agreements, including the U.S. Chase/Church bill, all of which led to the fall of Saigon under Republican President Ford.

Here is Cronkite’s news report broadcast right after Tet in its entirety:

We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. They may be right, that Hanoi's winter-spring offensive has been forced by the Communist realization that they could not win the longer war of attrition, and that the Communists hope that any success in the offensive will improve their position for eventual negotiations.
It would improve their position, and it would also require our realization, that we should have had all along, that any negotiations must be that – negotiations, not the dictation of peace terms.

For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. This summer's almost certain standoff will either end in real give-and-take negotiations or terrible escalation; and for every means we have to escalate, the enemy can match us, and that applies to invasion of the North, the use of nuclear weapons, or the mere commitment of one hundred, or two hundred, or three hundred thousand more American troops to the battle. And with each escalation, the world comes closer to the brink of cosmic disaster.

To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.

On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy's intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.[45]

The civil war continued and in some ways even intensified right after the defeat of Tet, the difficult negotiations proved to simply allow a short “time out” and “saving face” for the U.S. which had already decided on withdrawing most of its troops,

As I pointed out earllier Tet was partly undertaken by the North out of fear that the Sino-Soviet split and the Soviet policy of “Peaceful Coexistence” and China’s Cultural Revolution might lead to the isolation of their struggle. But the U.S.S.R. continued its aid while insisting on negotiations.

Tet was not really intended as such, but it ended up objectively as a a huge propaganda victory, even if in strictly military terms it did not meet its hoped for military objectives.

 

[Soupnazi630]

This page from President Eisenhower's Memoires, Mandate for Change, page 372, shows that he believed Ho Chi Minh would have won any free election in Vietnam in 1954. This is certainly why the U.S. did not permit such an election, though the Geneva Convention of 1954 required it.

I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 per cent of the populations would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bao Dai

Selection from Eisenhower's Memoires

msuweb.montclair.edu

Wrong it shows he was told that ming would win

There was no permission needed or given by the US

Your claim that the us did not permit is bald face chiildish LIE

 

[Soupnazi630]

That is the gthird time you have posted that video and it is crap

No one knows who that guy is and or if his claims of being a veteran is true

Not a valid piece of evidence for your argument

 

[Tom Paine 1949]

Wrong it shows he [Eisenhower] was told that ming would win …

You keep making this ridiculous point. Name anybody knowledgeable or prominent in Vietnam in 1954 who thought HoChiMinh would not win a legitimate national vote!

The French certainly knew that was the case … at that time.

As for a separate vote in South Vietnam years later when the U.S. was pouring troops and money into the area, and the strongly anti-Communist Catholic minority had fled to the South where they had established — with much French and U.S. help — their own anti-communist puppet government, this is a separate and today completely moot question, as neither side would allow or even consider having a free or fair election outside of areas it controlled.

The simple fact is that since Ho (and his CP-led coalition with other groups) had declared Vietnamese Independence and run the Hanoi-Haiphong Red River Delta area and defended it against the re-insertion of British and French troops after WWII, since they had subsequently proven their ability by winning victory over the re-introduced U.S.-financed French colonial troops at Dien Bien Phu on May 7th 1954, nobody else had anything like their popularity or name recognition in the country as a whole.

Just because we do not like the fact Ho was a communist and in fact believed it was necessary to establish essentially a “revolutionary one party dictatorship,” the fact of his overwhelmingly popularity at that time (Eisenhower was referring to 1954) is undoubted.

You are a fool to argue this point.

 

[Soupnazi630]

You keep making this ridiculous point. Name anybody knowledgeable or prominent in Vietnam in 1954 who thought HoChiMinh would not win a legitimate national vote!

The French certainly knew that was the case … at that time.

As for a separate vote in South Vietnam years later when the U.S. was pouring troops and money into the area, the strongly anti-Communist Catholic population had all fled to the South where they had established — with U.S. help — their own anti-communist generals’ government, this is a separate and today completely moot question, as neither side would allow or even consider having a free or fair election outside of areas it controlled.

The simple fact is that since Ho (and his CP-led coalition with other groups) had declared Vietnamese Independence and run the Hanoi-Haiphong Red River Delta area and defended it against the re-insertion of British and French troops after WWII, since they had subsequently proven their ability by winning victory over the re-introduced U.S.-financed French colonial troops at Dien Bien Phu on May 7th 1954, nobody else had anything like his popularity or name recognition throughout the country.

Just because we do not like the fact Ho was a communist and believed in establishing a “revolutionary dictatorship,” the fact of his overwhelmingly popularity at that time (Eisenhower was referring to 1954) is undoubted. Indeed, nobody in the country had anything like his and General Giáp’s name recognition.

You are a fool to argue this point.

Wrong


It is irrelevant what Ike thought and irrelevant what his advisors thought. It is irrelevant what anyone thought. These were simplty opinions based on scant information.


The fact is most vietnamese did not support us or minh. Most of them were illterate farmers and mountain people who just wanted to be left alone. Those screaming about minhs popularity ignore that fact,

Furthermore popularity means NOTHING. if we chose national leaders based on popularity Taylor swift would be our ruler.

Being popular is not justification for launching a war which is what minh DID.


He was the aggressors we were not and idiots like you jsutify it because he had name recognition

Do not call others fool when you are a moronic idiot who cannot even follow simply logic

 

[Hector12]

That is the gthird time you have posted that video and it is crap

No one knows who that guy is and or if his claims of being a veteran is true

Not a valid piece of evidence for your argument

Two million people heard him talk. If he was not a combat veteran of Vietnam someone would have said something.

Plenty of people who had similar stories joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

Notable VVAW-sponsored events​

Winter Soldier investigation[edit]​

Main article: Winter Soldier Investigation
In January 1971, VVAW sponsored the Winter Soldier Investigation to gather and present testimony from soldiers about war crimes being committed in Southeast Asia; they intended to demonstrate these resulted from American war policies. The event was boycotted by much of the mainstream media, although the Detroit Free Press covered it daily; its journalists began their own investigations to follow the testimony. They found no fraudulent participants or fraudulent testimony.[31]

Dewey Canyon III – Washington, D.C., April 1971​

On April 21, more than 50 veterans marched to The Pentagon, attempting to surrender as war criminals.

On Friday, April 23, more than 800 veterans individually tossed their medals, ribbons, discharge papers, and other war mementos on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, rejecting the Vietnam War and the significance of those awards. Among those that threw medals were Sen. John Kerry.[43]

Several hearings in Congress were held that week regarding atrocities committed in Vietnam and the U.S. media's inaccurate coverage of the war. There were also hearings on proposals to end the United States' participation in the war...

Senators George McGovern and Mark Hatfield helped arrange at least $50,000 in fundraising for Dewey Canyon III. The VVAW paid $94,000 to advertise this event in the April 11, 1971 New York Times.[39]

Walter Reed Memorial Service[edit]​

In May 1971, the VVAW and former Army chaplain Reverend Jackson Day conducted a service for veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Patients were brought into the chapel in wheelchairs. The service included time for individual prayers or public confession, and many veterans took the floor to recount things they had done or seen for which they felt guilt or anger...

The War Is Over concert and peace rally[edit]​

On May 11, 1975, the VVAW staged The War Is Over concert and rally in New York City Central Park's Sheep Meadow.[54][8] The New York Times reported that the concert had 50,000 attendees,[55] which the VVAW described as "peaceniks" (a play on beatniks).[8]

Performers included Phil Ochs,[56] Joan Baez,[57] Pete Seeger, Tom Paxton, Paul Simon, Patti Smith,[58] Richie Havens, Harry Belafonte and Peter Yarrow.[8] Among its most prominent organizers was VVAW co-founder Carl Douglas Rogers.[8] American photographer Allan Tannenbaum documented the event, and it was broadcast on WBAI.[59]

Vietnam Veterans Against the War - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Soupnazi630]

Two million people heard him talk. If he was not a combat veteran of Vietnam someone would have said something.

Plenty of people who had similar stories joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

View attachment 904312

Notable VVAW-sponsored events​

Winter Soldier investigation[edit]​

Main article: Winter Soldier Investigation
In January 1971, VVAW sponsored the Winter Soldier Investigation to gather and present testimony from soldiers about war crimes being committed in Southeast Asia; they intended to demonstrate these resulted from American war policies. The event was boycotted by much of the mainstream media, although the Detroit Free Press covered it daily; its journalists began their own investigations to follow the testimony. They found no fraudulent participants or fraudulent testimony.[31]

Dewey Canyon III – Washington, D.C., April 1971​

On April 21, more than 50 veterans marched to The Pentagon, attempting to surrender as war criminals.

On Friday, April 23, more than 800 veterans individually tossed their medals, ribbons, discharge papers, and other war mementos on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, rejecting the Vietnam War and the significance of those awards. Among those that threw medals were Sen. John Kerry.[43]

Several hearings in Congress were held that week regarding atrocities committed in Vietnam and the U.S. media's inaccurate coverage of the war. There were also hearings on proposals to end the United States' participation in the war...

Senators George McGovern and Mark Hatfield helped arrange at least $50,000 in fundraising for Dewey Canyon III. The VVAW paid $94,000 to advertise this event in the April 11, 1971 New York Times.[39]

Walter Reed Memorial Service[edit]​

In May 1971, the VVAW and former Army chaplain Reverend Jackson Day conducted a service for veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Patients were brought into the chapel in wheelchairs. The service included time for individual prayers or public confession, and many veterans took the floor to recount things they had done or seen for which they felt guilt or anger...

The War Is Over concert and peace rally[edit]​

On May 11, 1975, the VVAW staged The War Is Over concert and rally in New York City Central Park's Sheep Meadow.[54][8] The New York Times reported that the concert had 50,000 attendees,[55] which the VVAW described as "peaceniks" (a play on beatniks).[8]

Performers included Phil Ochs,[56] Joan Baez,[57] Pete Seeger, Tom Paxton, Paul Simon, Patti Smith,[58] Richie Havens, Harry Belafonte and Peter Yarrow.[8] Among its most prominent organizers was VVAW co-founder Carl Douglas Rogers.[8] American photographer Allan Tannenbaum documented the event, and it was broadcast on WBAI.[59]

Vietnam Veterans Against the War - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

WRONG
The media would have ignored anuoone questioning his background.


No one would have heard a thing.

VVAW was overwhelming filled with frauds and fakes who never served,

 

[Hector12]

WRONG
The media would have ignored anuoone questioning his background.


No one would have heard a thing.

VVAW was overwhelming filled with frauds and fakes who never served,

Your last sentence needs to be documented. Otherwise it is a slander against men who had the courage to serve in combat and the courage to admit that they often committed war crimes.

 

[Hector12]

WRONG
The media would have ignored anuoone questioning his background.


No one would have heard a thing.

VVAW was overwhelming filled with frauds and fakes who never served,

If they were frauds, where did they get the medals they threw away at the Dewey Canon III demonstration?