For those younger than 35 or 40 years old, it is hard to imagine just how influential Walter Cronkite was. He ruled the airwaves every evening for 30 minutes, when he told families all over the nation "the way it is." There was no CNN, MSNBC, or FoxNews. The Internet existed only in the imagination of a handful of IT visionaries in the private sector and Department of Defense. For news, there were the daily papers, and there were CBS, NBC, and ABC. When it came to TV news, the latter two networks paled next to CBS.
It wasn't just Cronkite, of course, who made the CBS Evening News so dominant. He had a great team of supporting players, including the great Eric Severeid, Daniel Schorr, Dan Rather, Roger Mudd, Mike Wallace, and others. Cronkite had great support from his own management as well, especially from CBS president William Paley, and the president of CBS News, Fred Friendly. Cronkite's great success was definitely a team effort.
Cronkite and his team were so dominant that they could actually impact history. One might argue that the news media still has that kind of power, but it is not the same. Sure, a highly opinionated network like FoxNews can mold the opinions of its viewers. But the percentage of the viewing public watching Fox, or any other news program, is just a small fraction of the percentage of Americans who watched Cronkite every night.
Cronkite did not editorialize often. That was not his style or his mission. His goal was usually quite simple: just deliver the facts in a clear and concise manner. Occasionally, however, he strayed from that mission. He allowed Eric Severeid to give a brief news analysis about once a week or so which entailed editorial comment. But rarely did Cronkite himself engage in similar punditry.
That changed soon after the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War, when he delivered this message on February 27, 1968:
To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory conclusion.
He did not say we were losing the war. He only said we would not win it. How influential was that broadcast? Consider the polling numbers. In mid-February, in the immediate aftermath of the Tet Offensive, both Gallup and Harris noted a surge in American support for the war. Both pollsters said 61% of Americans favored a stronger military response against the North Vietnamese Army. 70% of Americans favored increased bombing of North Vietnamese targets, which was up from 63% in the previous December.
Then came Cronkite's February 27 commentary. In early March, just a few days later, 49% of Americans said it was a mistake to have entered the Vietnam conflict. Only 35% believed the war would end within two years. 69% now approved of a phased withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam.*
The tide of public opinion had definitely shifted, and Cronkite was a big reason for it. President Johnson, of course, knew that as well as anyone. Soon after Cronkite's broadcast, Johnson told some of his advisors, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America."
Truer words were never spoken. Walter Cronkite was Middle America's source for the news of the world. After he gave his commentary on February 27, Cronkite closed his broadcast in the usual way, saying, "And that's the way it is..." And when he said that, America believed him.
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*Polling data quoted from Robert Dallek's Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times 1961 - 1973.
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That is an internet hoax. It's been going around since the 04 election, and is entirely false.
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_general_giap.htm
And that's the way it is, McG.
I like so many remember watching every night, knowing that what he was reporting was true, unfiltered and just the facts. At the close when you heard his famous, “that’s the way it is” you knew that all was well and tomorrow would be a new day.
Thanks, also, for honoring his incredible fellow journalist… for they, too, made the ‘nightly news’ rich with facts, adventure and authenticity.
-rated
There will never be another like him. Today's talking heads are just that, talking heads.
He did it all. Wireman, Radio, TV. Writer. We have lost agreat one.
We wiped out most of the NVA irregulars during Tet and could have finished the North off. While some quotes attributed to Giap have been fabricated, his actual quote clearly states our scumbag lefty media prolonged the war. And that's the way it is...................
LBJ was also a pussy (read about how he actually got his bronze star) who had to micromanage the war. Once Nixon started bombing the crap out of Hanoi, the North realized it was time hit the negotiating table, though Nixon also botched the end of the game.
I do remember how influential this man was.
I guess it all worked out in the end, though, since several of the largest employers in the city where I live now have manufacturing facilities in Communist Vietnam. Maybe that's why 58,000 Americans died, and millions of Southeast Asians.
Thanks for coming through my friend.
Maybe Edward R. Murrow and he are reviewing a few things as we type. . .
If we turn to the US, Procopius's own post says that US support for the war went up after Tet. So, facts Cronkite had at his disposal were:
-VC/NVA causalties were huge (30,000 by one estimate I found),
-the general uprising that Tet was supposed to inspire didn't occur, and
-Americans were now more pro-war.
That would have been the news.
But, it was not good enough for Cronkite to be a newsman. He instead gets on TV, when there were almost no other places for national communications, and speaks an opinion as if he is on a political side (after all, there were numerous politicians arguing against the war). That was irresponsible. Imagine if he had just reported the news and then gave the US government time to work an information campaign in Vietnam about how many of their sons had just been sacrificed for nothing. Recruiting was perceived to already be down for the VC and likely would have been much worse. But, luckily for the NV, they had media in the US willing to editorialize against the facts.
Now, it was also irresponsible of LBJ to give too much weight to Cronkite and fold. But, given what a horrible President he was on so many issues (and I'm from Texas... many disown him here), it is consistent with his other failures.
I am grateful that technology has evolved and now there are many ways for people to get facts and opinion out so that none of these anchors can ever again abuse what is essentially a job where success is based on communications talent.
I remember him in his field jacket, was he outside of Hue?, stating, for the first time of which I was aware, an opinion, his opinion, THE opinion. I was 17 and had been arguing all winter with a friend whose brother-in-law was a founder of SNCC. I really liked my friend but what he said about the war... it was like he insulted my mother. Then, Mr. Cronkite's commentary... it was like hearing Dad say, 'There is no Santa Clause.' [sigh] They don't make 'em like that anymore.
Johnson gave a press conference on Feb. 2, when he repeatedly said the NVA military campaign was no surprise and it had been "a complete failure" That's the message that was being delivered to the American public.
But...on Feb. 12 the Joint Chiefs asked Johnson for an additional 206,000 troops, half of which would be placed in Vietnam, the remainder held in reserve or placed in other potential hot spots. The size of this request implied that the Tet offensive was perhaps not the great victory it had been portrayed as. In fact, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said that the alternative to this huge force buildup would be to cede 1 or 2 of South Vietnam's northern provinces to the NVA, something he predicted would cause the collapse of the South Vietamese army.
On Feb. 20, in a meeting between Dean Rusk, Joe Califano, and Bill Bundy, Bundy described South Vietnam as very weak, and that "our position may be truly untenable."
Maybe we were, in fact, on the verge of a great military victory immediately after Tet. But that's not, apparently, what the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs thought, nor what the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor thought. It's reasonable to assume Cronkite knew the doubts being expressed by Johnson's inner circle, and saw the contrast with their public statements. He would have shirked his duties as a journalist to report only the public statements, when they seemed to contradict reality so drastically.
Google "Lamar Waldron" and "Legacy of Secrecy" for some seriously eye-popping information regarding the recently released materials from 1968.
Tactically speaking, the NLF was decimated.
Even Giap said 1969 was the most difficult year of the war.
Of course, if we had a achieved a Korean solution by crushing the NVA offensive from the air in spring 1975, which was likely militarily but impossible politically, we might have a North Vietnamese missile problem to deal with too.
I didn't get giddy debunking that old Cronkite, etal rumor. Your economic theories that deny reality get me giddy. That you arrived at the hoax's same conclusion is a coincidence, I guess.
War is about breaking one side or the other's will. Always has been.
You can call Cronkite irresponsible all day long but - he was right.
We went on with the war, and lost. Not because Walter spoke. Not because we didn't bomb enough.
Nor can we lay the public's negative perspective at Walter's feet. His contribution was important, but didn't bring the outrage that the draft did. And, most importantly, the casualties.
We were smashing ants with a sledge hammer. Works very well on an ant-by-ant basis, but wasn't a winning strategy. There was no real winning strategy. That's why we call it a quagmire.
tet exhausted the vc, it was almost extinguished by the losses. if america had continued to support the svn government, they might well have won.
but the trouble with feeding a nation with lies is, eventually they believe anything. so, when a news reader said, 'all is either lost or too expensive', lbj couldn't keep the money flowing, much less the men. there is a certain justice in a government of lies being undone by just a whiff of reality creeping in.
but the corporations gradually brought the media into the tent. nowadays, 'reporters' are mere government shills. and the people who watch them are cattle.
My grandfather was one of those in the vast majority who knew that Cronkite had integrity and had the trust of his network to say the right thing and the accurate thing. I am one of those who loved Dan Rather as well. Murrow, Cronkite, Rather were real Americans. By "real", I don't mean that Sarah Palin, patriotic real, I mean REAL every day kind of guys with extraordinary ethics and journalistic integrity.
To digress a second, it leads me to think of the way Rather had to leave CBS. He told the truth. We ALL know it. CBS caved on him. If you watched and loved the film "The Insider" with Russell Crowe and Al Pacino, you could sense that was about the time that CBS News started losing its power. They caved in initially on airing Dr. Jeffrey Wigand's whistle blower piece on big tobacco. Eventually, it aired. But the loss of faith in their people had begun.
Cronkite was rock solid. I wasn't born the year JFK was killed, but I've watched his entire live broadcast on YouTube and felt as if I were there. I was 5 when we landed on the moon and unbelievably I have extremely vivid memories of that day. I also remember Walter Cronkite. I remember my father's applause when Armstrong took that step.
I remember ONLY watching CBS News in my life as a major network. No NBC or ABC for me. No Tom Brokaw and no Peter Jennings. I am nothing if not loyal. The majority of my loyalty stemmed from Walter Cronkite.
Great observation Steve. It shows precisely the amount of trust we had in him. May God rest his soul.
About the way I feel about it Al. We're all cattle.
Cronkite had humble honesty. Today we get: "Those that talk the loudest win journalism." Those that defend this say: They never claimed to be journalist.
Many times they quote these corporate shills in defense of their own topic.
News had balls then. Cronkite could veto this and re-write that... because he appeared to have integrity, I believed him. He also didn't raise his voice. He was the voice of reason.
He would've been blown off the screen by Bill O'Reilly. Or blown off screen.
They showed the Vietnam War. We don't show war today.
The King is dead, long live the king! I just hope somebody pops up and takes the long dead reains...
I am only speculating, but maybe this is the same mechanism that required a Southerner to pass the main human rights laws or a feisty anti-communist to open a new chapter on China.
It seems to me that the part of the populace who operates on "common sense" is less concerned about WHAT that common sense tells it, than WHO was selling those ideas.
Therefore the men you mention may be more successful in selling liberal ideas than, say , a New Englander would be.
It is just a hunch, I can't prove it :-)
WHAT??!!
This is clearly the most vile, uninformed and nasty slur I have EVER read anywhere about a decent, honest, highly intelligent and feeling human being who was Walter Cronkite.
The even hint at the scum at fake noise being able to hold his toilet paper is not only hateful, it is fucking dumb.
YOU owe this great man's memory an apology.
The only place where reporters have similar authority to give commentary is Fox. The primary pupose of reporters at that network is to offer editorial comment on the news, comment which is skewed to the right, of course. At Fox, the bosses require commentary, often veiled as straight reporting, but commentary nonetheless. Of course, I doubt any reporter for Fox has the editorial FREEDOM that Cronkite had. When they editorialize, I'm sure it must be in a certain ideological direction.
I certainly do not think Cronkite would ever have found a home at a network like Fox.
Congress has often been blamed for the collapse of South Vietnam, but recent documents in the National Security Archive (nsarchive.org) reveal that Nixon surrendered in 1972. Kissinger told China that the US would accept a Communist Vietnam and Nixon went to China to sign agreements to normalize relations between the two countries. Then Breznev came to the US and the US and the Soviet Union agreed to a stand-down. The Cold War was over.
America has just lost a great man, a man who will be remembered not just as a great journalist but also as a great American.
We need more Walter Cronkites today.
That their host was a journalist makes the story remarkable. Talk about trust.
Even Giap said that; he just knew that it wouldn't happen.
That does not answer the question of whether or not that was a good thing or a bad thing.
We might still have a NV problem like Korea if we had done that.
Actually, in some ways we were better off losing, given one key point which people seem to have forgotten, which is that the United States did not conduct offensive land operations against the North because of Korea and Chinese intervention.
Maybe that was a good thing, maybe we will regret not having Haiphong and Cam Rahn Bay under our control someday.
Not the Vietminh were not going to surrender, but they were decimated and unimportant after Tet.
The NVA was pushed to the brink in 1969, but they knew we were leaving, and the ARVN always labored under a very big morale problem caused by the lack of ground offensives into the North.
A pure defensive aim is always a recipe for poor morale.
That might have been the better strategy, if one thought it was worth being there, which was to have made punishing raids across the DMZ by the ARVN on a corps scale backed by B-52 strikes.
But that assumes it was worth being there in the first place.
Exactly. As I mentioned in an earlier comment, my city has lost manufacturing jobs to new plants in Vietnam. Kind of makes one wonder what the purpose of our involvement was 40 years ago. Of course, there was a Cold War, a zero sum game in which you were either free or Communist, pro-America or anti-America. The United States and the world might be a lot better off we could stop viewing the world in such black and white terms, and let other nations work out their internal conflicts without our intervention.
It is great to be nostalgic, but Cronkite would not survive in the world of 24/7 news cable shows all trying to compete with hundreds of stations, Internet, DVDs, Ipods and a generation raised to view news as entertainment.
If the Cold War was necessary then I believe the Berlin airlift, soldiers standing by their tanks in Germany, and the hot wars of Korea and Vietnam were necessary to win it. Neither Truman nor Eisenhower believed the Korean War could be won because China would not accept US troops on its border. Eisenhower agreed to a ceasefire with North Korea and China but South Korea never agreed to a ceasefire.
In 1989, the War Atrocity Museum in Saigon portrayed Eisenhower as the great villain. Like many other Americans I asked why Eisenhower for whom I had voted? Because Eisenhower refused to sign the French/Viet Minh peace accords or to permit elections in 1956 that would decide whether or not the north and south would remain separate. Eisenhower arranged the SEATO agreement and committed the US to the defense of South Vietnam and to train its army. The "domino theory" was Eisenhower's belief that if South Vietnam fell, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Burma vulnerable. India was already in the Soviet orbit and Pakistan was believed to be on the brink.
On the eve of the Kennedy inauguration, Eisenhower told Kennedy that the war in Vietnam could not be won without the occupation of Laos because the Communists would not permit US troops on its border. And China could not be contained or defeated in a land war in Southeast Asia. Soviets were not likely to stand down while the US used nuclear weapons on China. By 1965, China had its own atomic bombs. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon all knew that the war in Vietnam could not be won. They hoped that after heavy losses to personnel and property North Vietnam would give up on conquering the South.
Whether Vietnam was worth it or not depends on whether the Cold War was necessary. There's no question about who won that war.
Thwarted in Europe, Kruschev boasted that Soviet-sponsored wars of “national liberation” would continue.(2) 1962, the Cuban missile crisis. 1963, South Vietnam President Diem assassinated. A month later Kennedy assassinated. 1964, China threatened to attack Taiwan. 1965, China tested a nuclear device. Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous nation, allied itself with North Vietnam and China. British ships and Australian troops were sent to defend Malaysia from Indonesia. In 1966 Singapore warned that if SEATO failed in Vietnam Southeast Asia would fall to communism. North Vietnam occupied part of Laos and Cambodia was in its sway. Neither Thailand nor Burma seemed able to stand alone. That would leave Singapore, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Japan isolated. That was the domino theory. Johnson formed ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asia Nations). The president of ASEAN later thanked Johnson for providing eight years for those countries to prepare themselves so that none of them fell to Communism.