When Americans stopped trusting the government

This surreal nugget is from Mark Bowden’s magnificent and meticulous history, which tells, with excruciating detail, a story that is both inspiring and infuriating. His subtitle is an understatement. As the epicenter of North Vietnam’s Tet offensive throughout South Vietnam, the swift capture of Hue, the country’s third-largest city, by communist forces — and of the 24 days of ferocious fighting that expelled them — became a hinge of American history. A month later, President Lyndon Johnson announced he would not seek reelection in an America where opposition to the war and trust in the government were moving inversely.

After the battle’s first day, Jan. 31, Westmoreland told Washington that the enemy had about 500 men in Hue’s Citadel. “He was,” Bowden writes, “off by a factor of 20.” So it went with U.S. intelligence. A few months earlier, Walt Rostow, Johnson’s national security adviser, had told a Hue-bound reporter on “deep background” that the war was essentially already won because a crop called “IR8 rice” was going to stymie the communists’ revolution with a green revolution. Rostow’s theory was slain by this fact: The Vietnamese disliked the taste of IR8 rice.