[FlyVet]

In your opinion, was Cronkite just another ignorant dupe, reporting whatever was whispered in his ear (not that that excuses him), or was he more sinister than that?

I really don't know.

[DMZFrank]

I think that he was a fellow traveler. He probably became enamored of the Walter Duranty type journalists who were covering up the atrocities of the Stalin regime in the 1930’s, and was influenced by the strain of sympathies then fashionable among lefists who were exposed to the one world utopiaisms of the IWW types and the internationalist crowd. He was probably more of a dupe than a hard core idealogue.