Walter Cronkite

Walter Cronkite Without Tears
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY Posted Monday, July 20, 2009 4:20 PM PT
Journalism: After the eulogies, the fact remains that "the most trusted man in America" betrayed that trust. He helped snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in Vietnam and tried hard to do the same in Iraq.

President Obama on Friday praised Walter Cronkite as a journalistic icon, calling the CBS anchor the "voice of certainty in an uncertain world." More to the point, he was the father of advocacy journalism, the patron saint of media bias. He went from reporting news to recreating it in his own image.
Far from the image of the patriotic war correspondent, Cronkite was a World Federalist who couldn't wait for what was called "the American Century" to end.

In this Aug. 25, 1998, photo, Walter Cronkite is joined by President Bill Clinton, wife Hillary and daughter Chelsea on a sailboat near Edgartown, Mass. Best known as anchorman for the 'CBS Evening News' for 19 years, Cronkite died Friday night at 92.
In a profile by Newsday TV writer Verne Gay in the Jan. 21, 1996, issue of Los Angeles Times Magazine, Cronkite spoke of his dream for America. "We may have to find some marvelous middle ground between capitalism and communism," Gay quotes Cronkite as saying.
Let's call it socialism, and Cronkite at least lived long enough to see it unfolding before his eyes and ours.
Cronkite said that for the United States "the first priority of the new order must be a revision of the educational system to . . . guarantee that each of our citizens will have equal resources to share in the decisions of the democracy, and a fair share of the economic pie."
For him, equal opportunity was not enough; equal success must be guaranteed. And he was ahead of his time in suggesting we should spread the wealth around.
In October 1999, Cronkite accepted the Norman Cousins Global Governance Award from the World Federalist Association. In accepting the award, he said "we must strengthen the United Nations as a first step toward a world government" and that "Americans will have to yield up some of our sovereignty."
Cronkite was also bothered by American wars against oppression and tyranny. The "most trusted man in America" said Vietnam was unwinnable and helped to make it so. Then-President Johnson reportedly told an aide, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America."
Except that Cronkite's analysis was almost pure fiction and dead wrong.
His report after the Tet offensive of 1968 was a total misreading of the situation on the ground, which was that Tet was an American and South Vietnamese victory and a Viet Cong defeat. His report did succeed in fueling the anti-war movement Hanoi counted on for victory.
The Viet Cong didn't reach a single one of their objectives and lost most of their 45,000 troops in their attacks on 21 South Vietnamese cities. So massive was their defeat that it convinced Hanoi to send North Vietnamese Army regulars south to carry on the fight. But that's not what Cronkite reported.
What Cronkite never mentioned is that defeat came not on the battlefield but in the halls of Congress, when the "Watergate babies" of 1974 cut off aid to the valiant South Vietnamese who'd been successfully defending their country. The Democrats de-funded that war, and they wanted to defund the latest one too with his blessing.
In 2007, Cronkite said the Iraq War "is being carried out by a stubborn president." Stubborn like Churchill and Reagan. In an op-ed in the Japan Times, Cronkite said that we "have lost the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, and victory no longer seems to be a remote possibility."
The reporters and talking heads who revered him and sought to emulate him also manipulated the true facts, focusing on body counts and ignoring the millions of purple fingers, casting their first votes, their hearts and minds clearly with us.
To the Cronkites of the world it will always be 1968, and only global governance can save us from our quagmires. And that's the way it is . . .