Three decades of American policy in Vietnam had failed. According to Michael Lind, he concludes in his book, Vietnam: The Necessary War, “the United States may have won tactically in the Tet Offensive, but the excessive costs of winning badly by means of an ill-conceived attrition strategy in South Vietnam made a U.S. withdrawal as a result of domestic pressure inevitable.” The threat of Tet helped define and limit America’s international behavior. Clearly, control over the historical recollection of Vietnam had become a foreign policy strategy as well, for, as George Orwell had cautioned, those who define the past can control the present and thus the future. The legacy of Vietnam is much more complex than the revisionists would have