In the fall of 1967, General Westmoreland returned to the United States in hopes of increasing support for the Johnson Administration’s continued involvement in Vietnam. He testified before Congress and spoke to the National Press Club in Washington, where he insisted that "a new phase” was starting to take shape in Vietnam, claiming that we “have reached an important point where the end begins to come into view."

This affirmation of U.S. policy would prove to be catastrophic less than 3 months later when the NLF and their army of Viet Cong revolutionaries, launched a military offensive throughout the country at the onset of the Vietnamese New Year of Tet. Although the “Tet Offensive” was acknowledged as a tremendous blow to the Viet Cong and ultimately viewed as a military victory for the United States, the surprise attack gave enormous credence to the voices claiming that U.S. government progress reports had been largely fictionalized, debunking the government’s claims that the majority of the country had been “pacified” and free of communist subversion. The U.S. military itself later acknowledged this when it was revealed in the Pentagon Papers that, “progress in many ways had been illusory”, and that from this point, “military victory was probably not possible.”