![\"Ed](\"http:\/\/clemson.world\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2018\/03\/Ed-Moise.jpg\")
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At the end of January 1968, <\/span>the Tet Offensive began in Vietnam. During a time in which American politicians and the military were presenting an optimistic view of the war, this wave of attacks by the Viet Cong and People\u2019s Army of Vietnam shocked many Americans and undermined support for the war. Fifty years later, Edwin Mo\u00efse, Vietnam scholar and Clemson history professor, explores the Military Assistance Command Vietnam\u2019s (MACV) communication tactics and the Tet Offensive\u2019s size and impact in his book, The Myths of Tet: The Most Misunderstood Event o<\/i>f the Vietnam War <\/i>(University Press of Kansas).<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of books say the Tet Offensive was a brief episode, that the heavy fighting was mostly over before the end of February. What I found was that it was not just February that saw a higher number of Americans killed in action than any month of the war before the Tet Offensive. The same was true for March, April and May. And it was May, not February, that had the highest death toll of the four.\u201d<\/p>\n While acknowledging the journalists and historians who have correctly reported various parts of the story, Mo\u00efse points out widespread misunderstandings about the strength of communist forces in Vietnam, the disputes among American intelligence agencies over estimates of enemy strength, the actual pattern of combat in 1968, the effects of Tet on American policy and the American media\u2019s coverage of all these issues.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe Communist campaign was shocking, not because of American media exaggerations, but because it was a massive, prolonged campaign by a large enemy force,\u201d said Mo\u00efse. \u201cThe offensive would not have even been possible if the enemy forces had been the size MACV was reporting.\u201d<\/p>\n Mo\u00efse shines a light on the impact of the American media and government on public perception through the analysis of declassified documents and testimony from Westmoreland v. CBS, the<\/span> \u201cThe impact of Tet, going forward, was that people who believed that the American media described the Tet Offensive as much worse than it actually had been, expected the media to make things look worse than they were in later wars. The media\u2019s handling of Tet was far from perfect, but not nearly as bad as many authors have suggested.\u201d<\/p>\n Mo\u00efse is also the author of Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War<\/i>, the Historical Dictionary of the Vietnam War <\/i>and other works.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At the end of January 1968, the Tet Offensive began in Vietnam. During a time in which American politicians and the military were presenting an optimistic view of the war, this wave of attacks by the Viet Cong and People\u2019s Army of Vietnam shocked many Americans and undermined support for the war. Fifty years later, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":78,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[29,57,56,55,54],"coauthors":[16],"class_list":["post-31","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research-news","tag-2018-research-news","tag-media-coverage","tag-myths","tag-tet-offensive","tag-vietnam-war"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2018\/03\/Ed-Moise.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9IEky-v","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Myths-of-TET-Book\"](\"http:\/\/clemson.world\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2018\/03\/Myths-of-TET-Book.png\")
\u201cThis topic caught my attention when the CBS documentary \u2018The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception\u2019 was broadcast in 1982. I published a little bit about it, set it aside and always thought that someday I would go back to it,\u201d said Mo\u00efse. \u201cI\u2019m not sure what triggered my interest again, but I looked at casualty figures and found things I hadn\u2019t seen before.<\/p>\n
\nmultimillion dollar libel suit originally filed in South Carolina by Gen. William Westmoreland against CBS Inc. for broadcasting \u201cThe Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception.\u201d<\/p>\n