What was intolerable, the national security advisor continued, was North Vietnam’s “entire policy” being directed “against the domestic structure of the United States.” This peculiar complaint echoed previous suggestions that the North Vietnamese offensive was designed to “humiliate” Nixon in an election year. To outsiders this might be nonsense. However, for the president and his chief advisor it contained a psychological truth: for them the war in Vietnam had ceased to be a Cold War contest, if indeed it ever was, and had become instead a domestic challenge.
