He said that there was some real reason to expect that a civilian government in South Vietnam, with the burden of a military war and leadership lifted from it, could well come to some sort of agreement with the National Liberation Front. I asked him and pressed him about what would happen after an agreement in the South. Unification, he felt, would ultimately come. After all Vietnam was one country; Vietnamese were fundamentally one people.

This man felt that what you would have is a socialization of the South and a liberalizing of the North. He felt there would be this interaction.

He was wealthy, he was a part of the mandranate, he was French educated, he was part of a former government, and yet for him this was a chance which he saw every well worth taking.

Allright. If the cream of Vietnamese civilian leadership is willing to take this chance, if their major message--and he made it very clear that the message he wanted me and others to bring back to America was that the war had to be stopped and the U.S. had to get out and that Vietnam had to be turned back to civilian rule to work out their problems--if he's willing to take all these risks, we should be willing to go with him.

They put it very bluntly. It's hard to know whether to believe them or not. They said they doubted that I would find a single major Vietnamese civilian individual who was not intimately tied to the current government, or enormously profiting from the war, who would not now be in favor of ending it. They said that nothing that any of them could conceive of happening in the future was worse than what was happening now under U.S. protection.

Were the attacks a surprise?

I would say that they came as an absolute and complete surprise. The American military claim they knew about them. If they did know about them why they were thoroughly unprepared for them, and in a sense are culpable because of that. My guess is they really didn't know about them, or that they didn't believe the attacks could be as widespread, as well coordinated, as strong as they were. I mean I think the American military command in South Vietnam has suffered from what one newsman called an enormous dose of self-deceit. They had begun to believe their own statistics, which is terribly dangerous when the statistics are fundamentally in error. There was no sign that these attacks were expected. Americans were on leave all over the country. The South Vietnamese Army was spread out going home for Tet.

We drove down from Quang Ngai the day before Tet in a plane filled with men who had left the barracks in Quang Ngai going home to their families in Sagion. Well, if you are expecting a major attack within a day or two, you keep your army ready and you don't let them go home on leave. This just wasn't the case. The guard at the U.S. Embassy was lighter that night than it had been for months. The gate of the U.S. Embassy was standing open. You don't have all these things open if you expect an attack.

There was a lot of stew in the days just after the attack. General Westmoreland got on the Armed Forces Vietnam network to tell us all that this was the greatest defeat that the enemy had ever suffered. Ambassador Bunker got on to tell us that American forces and their gallant allies were having their greatest victory. They even had a brief dub-in from President Johnson in Washington telling us that this was a great defeat for the Viet Cong and a victory for America and South Vietnam. And that this was an act of last desperation on the part of the Viet Cong.

One of the reporters in Saigon was so appalled at all this deceit that in the middle of all this he filed a report to his newspaper with the lead, "The Viet Cong, in an act of desperation, today took over most of South Vietman." This is about the way it looked to those of us who were there.

What effect did the raids have?

It had several very dramatic effects. It demonstrated to every Vietnamese citizen, that the government of South Vietnam and the enormous military power of the United States, were unable to provide them with the one thing which they thought they could get, security in the cities. Every major city in South Vietnam was broached. Every major city was invaded and attacked, sometimes by small groups, sometimes by much larger ones. If you want to undercut the authority of the government, if you want to undercut confidence in it, this was done with real ferocity.

We know that the pacification program is now over. The villages have been lost completely. There's another set of secondary effects which have come which I think are perhaps of even longer range importance. And this was the inability of both the United States and the South Vietnamese to cope with the attacks. We watched the government of South Vietnam and the American military call in air strikes against their own cities and their own civilians. We watched the whole Eastern industrial suburbs of Saigon, Gia Dinh, burned out, sector after sector, for five days running. And the thousands--hundreds of thousands of refugees pouring out of the area. We watched the whole of the area just south of the Ton Son Nhut Airport being burned out segment after segment for four and five days running. When we left they were still bombing out sections of the Pho To around the race track. Read for that the area around Fenway Park and the density of the population around it.

And we watched them burning out sections of Cholon, the Chinese section of the city, which to this day still has fighting going on in it. There are parts of it still being burned out. What you did was to create hundreds of thousands of new refugees. And the indignation here against a government calling air strikes on its own residential sections, its own cities and its own population, is something which the Vietnamese had emblazened in their minds as they fled from their homes, many of them being killed, many others being wounded.

We visited a couple of the refugee camps in the days just after the initial fighting and the indignation was very high. They pointed the finger directly at the United States and the government of South Vietnam.