Tet 1968 Understanding the Surprise

"In a well-documented study, drawing on recent Vietnamese Communist post-mortems (largely unnoticed in the West), new US documents, as well as interviews with senior Americans, Ford fills in some major gaps in the Tet story. It is a tale of high-level muddle and misperceptions, in both Hanoi and Washington, but with Hanoi having the stronger will....What Ford makes shockingly clear is that LBJ's ambivalent Vietnam policy and his aides' eagerness to find a cheap way out played right into North Vietnamese hands before Tet. Happily for the Allied troops, Hanoi found it somewhat harder to fool Westmoreland than to fool McNamara, Rusk, and LBJ. Even so, Ford says, it was a near thing.Ford, Ronnie E. is the author of 'Tet 1968 Understanding the Surprise', published 1995 under ISBN 9780714641669 and ISBN 0714641669.