It wasn’t about Walter Cronkite. It was seeing that the enemy was still capable of mounting attacks simultaneously across the entire country, and nearly overrunning our embassy that made people stop and wonder.
You weren’t in the US, but what caused the public and popular support to decline rapidly was not only the Tet offensive, but, even more importantly, the end of student deferments. Once middle class and upper class kids lost their exemption from military service, their parents started asking much more serious questions about just what was going on in Vietnam. That was the beginning of the end of the war.
"As the TET offensive continued into February, the anchorman for the CBS evening news, Walter Cronkite, traveled to Vietnam and filed several reports. Upon his return, Cronkite took an unprecedented step of presenting his "editorial opinion" at the end of the news broadcast on February 27th. "For it seems now more certain than ever," Cronkite said, "that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate." After watching Cronkite's broadcast, LBJ was quoted as saying. "That's it. If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America."
You weren’t in the US, but what caused the public and popular support to decline rapidly was not only the Tet offensive, but, even more importantly, the end of student deferments. Once middle class and upper class kids lost their exemption from military service, their parents started asking much more serious questions about just what was going on in Vietnam. That was the beginning of the end of the war.
I didn't spend the entire time in Vietnam during my 7 years of service, 1965-72--just one year in country and another 8 months off the coast. I was aware of what was going on in the US, including having two brothers who got student deferments. The reality is that student deferments ended in 1971 almost at the end of the war.
The Military Selective Service Act of 1967 expanded the ages of conscription to the ages of 18 to 35. It still granted student deferments, but ended them upon either the student's completion of a four-year degree or his 24th birthday, whichever came first. The act was amended in 1971 ending student deferments except for Divinity students, who received a 2-D Selective Service classification.
According to the Veteran's Administration, 9.2 million men served in the military between 1964 and 1975. Nearly 3.5 million men served in the Vietnam theater of operations. From a pool of approximately 27 million, the draft raised 2,215,000 men for military service during the Vietnam era. It has also been credited with "encouraging" many of the 8.7 million "volunteers" to join rather than risk being drafted.
Of the nearly 16 million men not engaged in active military service, 96% were exempted (typically because of jobs including other military service), deferred (usually for educational reasons), or disqualified (usually for physical and mental deficiencies but also for criminal records to include draft violations). Draft offenders in the last category numbered nearly 500,000 but less than 10,000 were convicted or imprisoned for draft violations. Finally, as many as 100,000 draft eligible males fled the country.
With the end of active U.S. ground participation in Vietnam, December 1972 saw the last men conscripted, who were born in 1952 and who reported for duty in June 1973. On February 2, 1972, a drawing was held to determine draft priority numbers for men born in 1953, but in early 1973 it was announced that no further draft orders would be issued. In March 1973, 1974, and 1975 the Selective Service assigned draft priority numbers for all men born in 1954, 1955, and 1956, in case the draft was extended, but it never was
Interesting memories. I was a little kid during the Tet offensive. It was on tv. My father, a WW2 vet and an old Indo-China hand, commented on how well the journalists were covering it.
He shook his head, and brought up the topic of Den Bein Fu. He always said it would go no better for the Americans than it did for the French. He said this although he loved US servicemen - he said they saved everyone in Aust during WW2.
He lived long enough to see the Soviets invade Afghanistan, and of course he was easily able to predict that would be a disaster.