Abstract
Addressing the nation from his desk in the Oval Office on March 31, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson updated the American public on the state of the Vietnam War. Two months earlier the North Vietnamese had launched the Tet Offensive in an effort to trigger a popular uprising that would lead to the collapse of the South Vietnamese government and the withdrawal of American troops from the region. Early on January 31, some eighty thousand Viet Cong fighters had initiated coordinated attacks on cities across South Vietnam. Their targets included the U.S. embassy in South Vietnam’s capital city, Saigon, where nineteen