Tet!

New York: Avon Books, 1972. First Avon Printing [stated]. Mass market paperback. Good. Jean Paul Tremblay (Maps). 397, [3] pages. Illustrations. Chronology. Maps. Chapter Notes. Sources. Index. Cover has wear, soiling, and corner chipped. Donald "Don" Oberdorfer Jr. (May 28, 1931 - July 23, 2015) was an American professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University with a specialty in Korea, and was a journalist for 38 years, 25 of them with The Washington Post. He is the author of five books and several academic papers. His book, Senator Mansfield: The Extraordinary Life of a Great American Statesman and Diplomat, won the D.B. Hardeman Prize in 2003. Oberdorfer graduated from Princeton University and went to South Korea as a U.S. Army lieutenant after the signing of the armistice that ended the Korean War. In 1955 he joined The Charlotte Observer, and eventually found a job with The Washington Post. During the next 25 years, he worked for The Post, serving as White House correspondent, Northeast Asia correspondent, and diplomatic correspondent. Derived from a Kirkus review: A journalistic narrative of the Tet watershed. It begins with the decision, which Oberdorfer says the North Vietnamese made in July 1967, to launch a General Offensive and General Uprising, while Americans kept hearing of imminent triumph. Oberdorfer was a Vietnam correspondent, spending Tet in Saigon; to his own experiences he has added a lot of research. The Viet Cong's failure to take the cities is emphasized and atrocity reports are underlined. There are some interesting observations on the changing perspective of the news media: the ground had been softened for the post-Tet burst of anti-war sentiment by an incremental skepticism in the last half of 1967 among key newspapers, magazines, and television commentators Though Oberdorfer went along with the newly ecumenical anti-war sentiment, he did not explore the origins of the war, the escalations, or, except through quotations, the U.S. failure. The book has a "it-all-ended-well" tone and, as a whole. It is useful.