‘We do not suffer in the world from such an excess of friends’

Abstract

At the end of January 1968, violating a truce they had themselves pledged to observe during Tet, seventy thousand North Vietnamese regular soldiers and Viet Cong guerillas launched their great offensive in South Vietnam. The result was a military defeat for the communists, from which they took months to recover, but a strategic victory. The offensive showed that the North Vietnamese could match any increase in US forces. It appeared to many in the United States that the war was unwinnable. President Johnson nearly was defeated by the peace candidate, Eugene McCarthy, in the New Hampshire primary. Four days later Robert Kennedy declared his candidature. On 31 March, Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection.