Military police got back into the compound of the two and a half million dollar embassy complex at dawn.

Before that, a platoon of Viet Cong were in control.

The Tet Offensive, launched in the pre-dawn hours of January 31, 1968, would prove to be a major turning point in the Vietnam War.

This is where the Viet Cong Raiders broke in. They had explosives, their purpose apparently to destroy the embassy. What exactly had happened and what it meant would take some time to sort

out? All that was clear at that time was that something startling had occurred and that the

U.S. was up against a way more

formidable opponent than most Americans had previously believed.

I'm David Brown and from Public Radio International. This is LBJ's War, an effort to understand why Lyndon Johnson, a president

of enormous talent and skill, failed to extricate himself and the nation from a war he knew

to be a quagmire in the making, almost from his first days in office. In this sixth and final

episode, what happens when a president with a pension for secrecy

wages war without the full knowledge and consent of the public?

It's Tet, the Oriental New Year, and it's a new war.

The Viet Cong simultaneously attacked just about every major city in town in South Vietnam.

In one day, it increased the scope of the war dramatically.

With the stalemate that had descended on the ground in South Vietnam, leaders in Hanoid concluded

that they needed to do something to break that stalemate. Lee and Hangti-Wen teaches the history

of the Vietnam War at Columbia University. And in Vietnamese communist words, they called that they needed to score a decisive victory

in 1968 before Washington could expand and escalate the war to Hanoi's detriment.

I really don't think in any realistic way that anybody on the top figured that they could

throw 500,000 Americans into the sea.

Sam Adams was a CIA analyst stationed in Vietnam.

...