Clad in a bush jacket and standing amid Saigon's ruins of war, America's most respected television journalist, Walter Cronkite, began the most famous assessment of the Tet Offensive. Cronkite, the anchor of the CBS Evening News, spent a week in Vietnam in mid-February 1968 and expressed his conclusions in a half-hour special on February 27. Reporting from “a burned and blasted and weary land,” Cronkite made himself the surrogate for millions of perplexed American viewers who were trying to figure out how the North Vietnamese and the National Liberation Front (NLF) could have launched their most powerful and ambitious offensive of the war at a time when President Lyndon B. Johnson and many of his top advisers had repeatedly insisted that the United States was making tremendous progress in Vietnam.

Even after talking to high-level U.S. and Vietnamese officials, visiting refugee centers, and observing the fighting, Cronkite could only say in answer to the question of who had prevailed, “I'm not sure. The Vietcong did not win by a knockout, but neither did we.” The enemy fell short of inciting a massive uprising of South Vietnamese against their government, but they succeeded in destroying the illusion of security that existed in the cities and in setting back pacification in the countryside.