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Walter Cronkite: A Voice That Defined an Era
Some people can never see the name “Walter Cronkite” in any context without thinking, “He and the rest of the liberal media made us lose in Vietnam.” Yes, even now, 35 years and huge uncountable numbers of books, articles, films, declassified primary sources, original research, conferences, scholarly papers, eyewitness accounts, et al., later, there still exist media pundits, writers, and political observers who think that the U.S. failure in Vietnam happened because Walter Cronkite told the nation, in an on-air editorial opinion, that the war could not be won. Or that CBS News and the media in general lied about the Tet Offensive and thus helped to ensure defeat of the U.S. war effort. Because “they” all acted like Tet was a defeat for the U.S., when it was really a stunning military success. I mean, this just blows my mind, but you can still hear and read, even today, supposedly informed individuals insist that the U.S. could have succeeded in Vietnam on military might alone, and that because we ended every battle with more Americans left alive than North Vietnamese, that means we could have won the war if only the media and the politicians had gotten out of the way and let the generals do their job.
I don’t understand how anyone can still believe this, but some still do. John Podhoretz, for one:
Cronkite was a key figure in many ways, but foremost among them, perhaps, was the fact that he cleared the way for the mainstream media and the Establishment to join what Lionel Trilling called “the adversary culture.” Cronkite, the gravelly voice of accepted American wisdom, whose comportment suggested he kept his money in bonds and would never even have considered exceeding the speed limit, devastated President Lyndon Johnson in the wake of the 1968 Tet Offensive by declaring that the United States “was mired in stalemate” in Vietnam—when Johnson knew that Tet had been a military triumph.
This on-air editorial, spoken during the most-watched newscast in the country when that meant 30 million people were watching (as opposed to 7 million today, with the nation having added more than 100 million in population), was a transformational moment in American history.
“If I’ve lost Cronkite,” Johnson was reputed to have said, “I’ve lost middle America,” and shortly thereafter he announced he would not run for reelection. This was a mark of Johnson’s own poor political instincts—a president who thought a rich and powerful anchorman living the high life in New York city was the voice of the silent majority was a man out of touch with reality—but it was a leading indicator of how the media were changing. Cronkite didn’t know what he was talking about when it came to Tet, as the late Peter Braestrup demonstrated in his colossal expose of the scandalous media coverage of the battle, Big Story. But he knew that among the people who mattered to him, and who were the leading edge of ideological fashion, Tet was a failure because the war in Vietnam was bad, and he took to the airwaves to say so.
As much as I respect and admire Walter Cronkite, I doubt that he alone, in a single on-air editorial, could have brought Johnson to such a fever pitch of despair — if Johnson had not already been hearing similar talk inside his own administration (Robert McNamara, for instance), and in Congress — not to mention millions of Americans. Both of them hid their doubts from the public and ignored them in their actions, but the doubts were there. It’s not like Johnson thought the war was going just swimmingly and Walter Cronkite went and dropped a black fly in his Chardonnay (sorry, Alanis).
You won’t find any Chardonnay at Macsmind. Just the spilled contents of a poison pen. “Pinko Cronkite bites the dust,” he announces:
And good riddance. The original “surrendercrat” is dead.
“Walter Cronkite, an iconic CBS News journalist who defined the role of anchorman for a generation of television viewers, died Friday at the age of 92, his family said.
“My father, Walter Cronkite, died,” his son Chip said just before 8 p.m. Eastern. CBS interrupted prime time programming to show an obituary for the man who defined the network’s news division for decades.”
Walter Cronkite along with congress caused us to lose in Vietnam. I have nothing but distain for him, as other veterans of that era. Indeed while he uttered the unqualified words, “We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds” and added that, “we are mired in a stalemate that could only be ended by negotiation, not victory.”, the majority of Americans disagreed.
It was not a time for surrender, but to rally for a victory. Real Americans knew that.
Here are some cruelty-free thoughts on Cronkite’s life and career from two conservatives with whom one can disagree without having to question their basic humanity.
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EEllis
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JSpencer
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Father_Time
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DaGoat
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jchem
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SteveK
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ddadm09
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kathykattenburg
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EEllis
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kritt11
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DLS
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DLS
