Tet – with its images of firefights at the U.S. embassy compound, besieged soldiers at Khe Sanh, and the public execution of a VC guerrilla by an ARVN officer – had brought the already unpopular war home to Americans more starkly than ever. As a result, and as virtually every high-level policy maker recognized, Lyndon Johnson had to reject new attempts to expand the war. Escalation, never terribly effective as a military strategy, had finally become politically impossible as well. Even though Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon, would continue fighting for five more years – leading to 20,000 additional American combat deaths and causing untold destruction throughout Indochina – the events of early 1968 had effectively dashed U.S. hopes for success in Vietnam. The Communist offensive, the dollar-gold crisis, and the massive reinforcement request had converged to create a sense of doom only surpassed by the Cuban Missile Crisis in postwar America.