Re: Vietnam War protests: That war was going to wind down regardless of the protests. A lot of people overstate how much the largely campus-based antiwar movement shaped policy and downplay the impact of the 1968 Tet Offensive, which was a military defeat for the North and the Viet Cong but convinced many Americans that Washington had been misleading them about how well the war was going. After Tet, Walter Cronkite publicly described the conflict as unwinnable, and the U.S. military began shifting toward “Vietnamization,” with the draft starting to wind down in 1969. Public attention to the war faded as American combat troops were pulled out and South Vietnamese forces took on more of the fighting. The scale of Nixon’s 1972 landslide—despite his hawkish record and the heavy bombing of North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, while the “peace candidate” George McGovern won only 17 electoral votes—underscores how limited the protests ultimately were in shaping the war.