Posted on 07/19/2009 5:59:39 AM PDT by kellynla
WASHINGTON – Walter Cronkite is dead at 92 – but most Americans, many of whom considered him "the most trusted man" in the country during his reign as CBS News anchor – still don't know what motivated him and how he secured such an influential and lofty position.
He was like a grandfatherly institution in the early days of TV. People believed him. Uncle Walter wouldn't lie, America believed.
Thus, when he gave his opinions, they had impact. One example was his report on the Tet offensive in Vietnam, which is credited with swinging the tide of opinion against the war.
Even in his death, however, nobody has addressed how and why an otherwise obscure figure at the time was elevated to become the most prominent anchorman on television.
The story was told publicly in the July 10, 2000, edition of the Nation, a Marxist-oriented journal, in a report on death of Blair Clark, who served as editor of the Nation from 1976 through 1978: "Whether it was calling on Philip Roth to recommend a Nation literary editor or persuading CBS News president Richard Salant to make Walter Cronkite anchor of CBS Evening News, Blair had a gift for the recognition and recruitment of excellence."
Clark was not only the editor of the Nation, he was also heir to the Clark thread fortune, a Harvard classmate and friend of John F. Kennedy, a buddy of Washington Post Editor Ben Bradlee and the manager of Eugene McCarthy's 1968 campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.
He veered back and forth between politics and journalism seamlessly as an associate publisher of the New York Post, a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, vice president and general manager of CBS News and yet remained a fixture in Democratic Party politics throughout his career.
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
Great tag line.
The day that Cronkite stepped over the line and criticized the Viet Nam war was a watershed moment for which mainstream journalism has yet to recover.
His declaration that the Tet Offensive was a draw when it really was a decisive US victory is as egregious as Dan Rather’s trying to bring down a president with forged documents. The difference is, we didn’t have the conservative blogosphere back then.
I wouldn’t trust Cronkite as far as I could throw him, which is not very far.
Give each of them a few pieces of silver and a few trinkets, and they sell their own Mothers into Slavery!
Cronkite was trilled with the few pieces of silver, and the praise he got from his Bosses:-) Meanwhile, AMERICA got Sold down the River by the likes of him, John Francois Kerry, and the Hanoi Cheerleaders:-(
And they almost did it to AMERICA with IRAQ, except for Our Great President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney with a Great Military and the backing of The Real AMERICANS!
AMEN! ANDAll Real AMERICANS AREGRATFUL AND THANKFUL TO YOU AND ALL IN THE MILITARY WHO SERVED AND GAVE THEIR LIVES FOR DEMOCRAY AND AMERICA IN VIET NAM AND EVERYWHERE! :-)
Actually, there were. In Hue, during Tet, when the VC, riding the arm of the NVA and armed with lists of names, rushed through the city rounding up 3000 GVN schoolteachers, administrators, and military personnel and their families and led them out to the sand dunes and shot them with their hands tied behind their backs with barbed wire.
Vindictive, nasty little VC bastards didn't get the press, though. Rusty Calley and Capt. Medina did.
After the war, the NVA and their buddies in Laos hosed the Meo and Hmong indiscriminately with Russian-made mycotoxins and other chemical weapons. The press? <yawn> -- all in a day's work for the Left.
Semper Fi,
Kelly
Oddly enough, the body count hasn't been emphasized as much lately. I have no idea why. /sarc
shezzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...
Absolutely correct. Police Gen. Loan dispensed summary justice to that VC captain who'd been running around two hours before with his company, no uniforms, sniping the families of Gen. Loan's men in the neighborhood where most of them lived.
The little VC rat-bastard had it coming, and Gen. Loan, in the full discharge of his loyalty to his men whose families had just been terrorized, gave it to him with a hammerless Smith.
Never Forget!
“All paid some, some paid all.”
Semper Fi,
Kelly
I wanted to contrast a) the VC behavior in contrast to our troops' (the VC had lists -- premeditated malice), and b) the fuzzing and glossing-over of the VC atrocities one the one hand, and the endless fascination over Rusty Calley's court-martial on the other.
At least the 'Rats noticed that Calley did get a court-martial! What did the VC get? Medals?
My dad is 86 - not that long ago I heard him make some remarks about Walter Cronkite I never thought I’d hear him make. He is of the opinion, based on the facts, that “Uncle Wally” undermined his own country and as a WWII Vet, dad is not happy about it. I haven’t talked to him since UW died - I’m sure, as the gentleman he is, that dad will say RIP, but the man won’t be missed.
After Tet, the VC formations that had been so big and bad and "all that" for the previous five-six years, basically ceased to exist. We shredded them.
During the 1972 NVA offensive, we did the same thing for the NVA regulars -- B-52's caught columns of T-54's on the roads and tossed them around like Tootsie Toys. The enemy concentrated his forces, and we concentrated his casualties with Arclight raids.
Between 1965 and 1973 we and the ARVN's and the ROK's and the Australians killed a million of Uncle Ho's cadres, the tough guys who would have rolled all the way to Singapore and closed the Malacca Strait (with the help of their PKI bretheren in Indonesia, who were all set to overthrow "Bung" Sukarno and establish a people's paradise on the bones of a couple million Indonesians -- oops, change of signals, make that 800,000 PKI dead, instead).
Four or five countries and city-states are free today because of what the U.S. did in Vietnam. And Uncle Ho is still dead, and so are his cadres.
Walter Cronkite was every bit the Leftist ideologue that Keith Olberman is today, but in his era he was able to mask it and that made him all the more damaging. When Walter Cronkite told America that Tet of ‘68 was a defeat for the US military, America believed him.
And he was lying his ass off to promote an agenda.
May GOD Continue to BLESS You and ALL of Your Family!
I forgot the Red Cross Girls the “donut dollies” They went to the front lines and the USO were also great if you could go to see them.
And let’s not forget that the city was under Martial Law because of the terror attacks against civilians.
I met some Canadian merchant marines as well.
There were no “front lines” in Nam...and I NEVER saw any “Red Cross Girls or “donut dollies” as you refer to them; while I was there.
You may think you're remark is cute...
but, if not for the Red Cross, I would have died in An Hoa.
58K Americans paid the ultimate price.
Hundreds of thousands more were maimed for life.
Thousands more were never accounted for.
So I suggest you keep your “cute” remarks to yourself.
Those who served like me and our families don't appreciate them.
Semper Fi,
Kelly
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