“And That’s the Way It Is…”
After the Tet offensive in early 1968, the Most Trusted Man in America announced the war in Vietnam could not be won. “If I’ve lost Cronkite,” the President of the United States said, “I’ve lost America” and conceded by announcing he wouldn’t run for reelection.
Walter Cronkite is 91, and George W. Bush is no Lyndon Johnson, but America’s news nanny, who tucked us in every evening for two decades by ending the CBS Evening News with “And that’s the way it is,” has now declared “Our Troops Must Leave Iraq.”
In a piece co-written and appearing in print, Cronkite’s voice is still being heard. In the Japan Times, on the eve of Pearl Harbor day, he concludes:
“Congress must act. Although Congress never declared war, as required by the Constitution, they did give the president the authority to invade Iraq. Congress must now withdraw that authority and cease its funding of the war.
“It is not likely, however, that Congress will act unless the American people make their voices heard with unmistakable clarity. That is the way the Vietnam War was brought to an end. It is the way that the Iraq War will also be brought to an end. The only question is whether it will be now, or whether the war will drag on, with all the suffering that implies, to an even more tragic, costly and degrading defeat. We will be a better, stronger and more decent country to bring the troops home now.”
Trust is not what it used to be, and age has diminished the reach of Cronkite’s voice, but he is still trying to tell America how it is.
Cross-posted from my blog.
11 Responses to ““And That’s the Way It Is…””
I once saw a documentary on the Cold War, and the one quote I remember from the chapter about the Cuban Missile Crisis was Cronkite delivering the news on CBS:
It was the only thing he said that I remember, but he definitely had a knack for reporting, and it would have been great if I could watch him work on CBS News nowadays.
Instead, I now get to watch Bill O’Reilly dismiss Cronkite as “far left”. Bill, this man never looked at his job as a ratings race, or as a haven to boast, lie, and confront guests. That’s why you’ll never go down as being as great a TV news legend as he was.
Bill’o isn’t fit to lick Cronkite’s boots. He’s not even in the same profession. Bill’o is no more a great journalist than Jerry Springer is- because he doesn’t care about the truth and it shows in his broadcast. He would have been an embarassment to CBS. How cowardly of him to now put a great man down by telling his viewers Cronkite was too far left to be believable. As though OReilly is believable!!
Actually, Jerry Springer has been both a legitimate journalist and an elected official.
Oh, well, in that case my apologies for insulting his reputation by comparing him to OR.
“It is not likely, however, that Congress will act unless the American people make their voices heard with unmistakable clarity
———————–
That’s the problem in a nutshell.
The American people have near zero clarity
They only parrot what the latest spin is by MSM screamers.
The internet is not the antidote everyone hoped for.
It takes a lot of time and thought to ferredt out the good, religable informations sources from those with spin of their own. Thare are not many Cronkites on the Internet, and they’re much harder to find.
The departure of voices like Cronkite has left an information void that spin and disinformation have rushed in to fill.
What kind of clarity can you expect from a people of whom high numbers still believe that Saddam Hussen attacked the Twin Towers?
Cronkite is liberal (old-line New Deal Democrat, no doubt, like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., was), who has tarnished his post-network reputation somewhat.
However, it’s Dan Rather (more than any other top network “journalist”) who was the most notorious example of the liberal media while in his top network position, and who discredited himself in addition to his network and the media at the end in a way I don’t believe anyone would conceive Cronkite would do. I believe Cronkite on the air would show some bias but wouldn’t be godawful about it when (mainly) questioning, and even criticizing Bush. Plenty of us non-liberals have grounds for doing so. (The first time I said that, a liberal responded, no doubt with a gasp: “The awakening!”)
Been a while since I felt compelled to post, but this is just too much.
Since when should the MSM drive foreign policy? And you couldn’t pick a better example of why they shouldn’t.
Cronkite got it wrong. Tet was a major military failure for the North, and almost destroyed the North’s army. Had the political fallout in the US, driven in no small part by Cronkite’s announcement combined with images that the MSM could not put in context, changed the CW attitudes towards our efforts, we likely could have prevailed (with a ‘surge’!)
But, speculative revisionist history is just that, and we will never know for sure.
Of course, another indirect result of the Cronkite Proclamation was the election of Richard Nixon. Ironic, huh?
Finally, as we are talking about the press, another speculation. If Fox refused for political reasons to run a neutral ad by a left-leaning organization, do you think there would be some indignant posts and comments here, rather than the deafening sound of silence towards NBC we are witnessing for hte same thing towards a right-leaning group?
It would have been grounds for laughter at the proposition and derision of it as well as the man and the media were Bush to have said that about Dan Rather (especially; also Peter Jennings, the 1994-election-result elitist “temper tantrum” slanderer, Tom Brokaw, et cetera), not to mention his laughable and notoriously liberal and news-vapid replacement, Katie Couric.
The media and journalists were held in esteem then; the biased media with frequent “crusader” journalists (when not engaging instead in info-tainment, even re-enacted news events) enjoy no esteem now. They are considered frequent adversaries of Americans, not only of politicians.
Oh, and we Americans don’t admire the talking heads and DC-politically-based-celebrity and parasite crowd any more than we do “journalists.”
Most bloggers are no better (they are tech-hyping self-absorbed kids who are amateur columnists, for the most part) but at least opinion(!) and discussion groups like this (as with reader remarks on on-line news postings) are more free-form, open, truly liberal (“liberative,” as I was saying earlier today about something related to contemporary Cuban music, is probably a better word), and interesting.
East-Coast-style talking-head shows often are as mind-numbingly boring as those stupid soap operas — pro sports are more intelligent as well as much more interesting and exciting than any soap opera, for crying out loud! — and the host shows are just DC celeb-parasite-junk now (e.g., Chris Matthews, so stupid his first name is displayed larger than his last name, and in all lower case, true nose-picker dumbed-down English for boors who wrongly believe they’re hip or too lazy and stupid to capitalize when and whereit’s required in English), or (where politicians appear) they are cynically exploited as bonus press conferences, party propaganda opportunities, politician limelight-seeking, and even quasi-campaign commercials. And some of them feature constant interruptions and shouting above one another that reminds me of dogs fighting over a food bowl.
Cronkite got it wrong.
He had his own agenda. But he’s worse than those who would spit on returning soldiers or would riot. The accounts of the anger felt by helicopter pilots in Vietnam toward the protestors and such things as “when you go home on leave, do not wear your uniform as it may give offense to many, such as the protestors” aroused bitter resentment, along with the realization that there were many in the USA (who to this day dishonestly and stupidly glorify themselves) who were deliberately undermining the effort in Vietnam and wanted to see us leave, or to see us fail, and at times because seditionist and even treasonous. (The loser-copycat Vietnam stuff, complete with the self-glorifying attitude by the people responsible, about Iraq as “another Vietnam” offends those of us who know and are better, especially because of what it truly represents. Jane Fonda had company then and now.)
He’s a Democrat, of course. It’s what we’d expect.
Vietnam would never have worked because we propped up an undemocratic, corrupt government in the South, and the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were willing to live in filthy holes for years to defeat us. We didn’t understand the enemy or our allies, which was also true in Iraq.