Cronkite (50 page)

On the Republican side, Richard Nixon was back in politics, having lost the presidential race in 1960. He, too, distrusted CBS News. In 1968, he would be part of a field that included three GOP governors who were either declared or presumed candidates: Nelson Rockefeller (New York), George Romney (Michigan), and Ronald Reagan (California). George Wallace, the Democratic governor of Alabama, was rumored to be gearing up for a third-party run as a segregationist. Cronkite worried that the deteriorating situation in Southeast Asia had become more than President Johnson could handle. “LBJ, just bypassing Stanton, would telephone Cronkite directly to grouse about
CBS Evening News
war coverage,” Charles Osgood recalled. “Vietnam was more than he could take, really.”

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The Tet Offensive

WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?—THERE IS NO LIGHT!—STILL THE RED MENACE—HEADING TO SAIGON—WESTMORELAND LIES—OLD-STYLE REPORTER—HIS FRIEND GENERAL ABRAMS—COCKTAILS ON THE CARAVELLE ROOF—JOHN LAURENCE’S ADVICE—BARELY ESCAPING—THE CRONKITE MOMENT—THE GREAT STALEMATE—MARCH TO FOLLY—PRODUCER BENSLEY GETS SHOT IN NAM—LBJ WON’T RUN—MYTHS OVER THE SPECIAL REPORT—THE FAIRNESS DOCTRINE—AN EVENING WITH TIM O’BRIEN

W
alter Cronkite was sitting in his cluttered CBS News office at the broadcast center on West Fifty-seventh Street on January 31, 1968, when he heard a clattering over the wire service machines in the
Evening News
newsroom. He meandered down the corridor to read the Associated Press dispatch from South Vietnam about a string of surprise North Vietnamese and Vietcong attacks on Saigon, Hué, and numerous other sites (soon to be known collectively as the Tet Offensive). Assault teams had even attacked the U.S. embassy, the South Vietnamese General Staff headquarters, Bien Hoa Air Base, and the U.S. Army base at Long Binh. The wire made Cronkite uneasy. Wasn’t Saigon supposed to be a U.S. stronghold? His frustration made him determined to report the U.S. setback as thoroughly as he would a U.S. victory. Heading over to producer Sandy Socolow’s adjacent office, where Ernest Leiser and producer Stanhope Gould were discussing that night’s program, Cronkite waved the dispatch in their faces. “What the hell is going on?” he asked, full of consternation. “I thought we were winning the war!”

The CBS News bureau in Saigon had reported to New York that the U.S. and South Vietnamese army forces had been surprised and were suffering heavy casualties. Many reporters throughout 1967 had believed that the Johnson administration was lying about imminent U.S. victory in South Vietnam. The AP dispatch of the Tet Offensive was proof that the end of the war was nowhere in sight. When Cronkite read it, his first thought was that R. W. Apple of
The
New York Times
was right: the war was indeed a stalemate. Cronkite, remaining pro–U.S. troops, had become frustrated by Johnson’s “light at the end of the tunnel” drivel. “We spoke just after Tet,” Andy Rooney recalled. “And he felt miserable that he hadn’t taken Apple and, for that matter, David Halberstam, more seriously. He now knew they were spot-on.”

At the
CBS Evening News
the grisly specter of the Tet Offensive dominated coverage for days. When Cronkite tried to wedge in long-form stories about a California physician performing the first heart transplant in the United States, and Japan becoming the world’s second-strongest superpower, they got bumped for a Tet exclusive. When Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941, there were at most ten thousand operating TV sets in the United States. In January 1968, sixteen out of every seventeen U.S. homes had a TV set. According to the Nielsen ratings,
CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite
and NBC’s
Huntley-Brinkley Report
were seen in more than a hundred million homes during the first week of the Tet Offensive. “Vietnam was America’s first television war,”
Washington Post
journalist Don Oberdorfer wrote, “and the Tet Offensive was America’s first television superbattle.”

When Cronkite was a United Press reporter, he learned an important lesson: be your own eyewitness. Worried about the proliferation of unsubstantiated rumors and deliberate misinformation streaming out of Saigon, he believed it was essential to now take in the Vietnamese situation for himself with “mind wide open.” The UP and AP offered chunks of the story, but, as was to be expected, analysis was scant. The first statistics coming out of Tet were dire: two thousand U.S. dead and twice that number of South Vietnamese soldiers; around ten thousand civilians killed. Yet the initial CBS reports were overdrawn: the North Vietnamese Army and especially the Vietcong suffered a tactical disaster during Tet. Confusion reigned over whether Tet was a win or a loss for the United States. “I said,” he recalled, “well, I need to go because I thought we needed this documentary about Tet. We were getting daily reports, but we didn’t know where it was going at that time; we may lose the war; if we’re going to lose the war, I should be there, that was one thing. If the Tet Offensive was successful in the end, it meant that we were going to be fleeing, as we did eventually anyway, but I wanted to be there for the clash.”

Cronkite went to see CBS News president Dick Salant about broadcasting on Tet from Saigon. Cronkite decided before he even pitched Salant that he wanted to “try and present an assessment of the situation as one who had not previously taken a public position on the war.” No longer would he be impartial. The time had come to weigh in. From a TV ratings perspective it was a calculated risk; he might end up driving the hawks away from the
Evening News
for good. According to Phil Scheffler, CBS News executive producer of special events at the time, Salant approved the idea of the South Vietnamese trip but wanted Cronkite to make his bold statement as a commentator at the end of a
CBS Evening News
broadcast. “Walter said he couldn’t possibly do an editorial on the
CBS Evening News
,” Scheffler recalled, “which he considered sacrosanct.”

Salant listened attentively to Cronkite. At first, he was dismayed at his anchorman’s insistence on flying to South Vietnam
immediately
to report on Tet. He couldn’t afford for his star anchorman to get killed in a plane crash or ambushed by the Vietcong on a back highway. Each time Cronkite mentioned the Pentagon’s exaggerations, Salant cringed as if his star reporter were throwing stones in the blades of a huge floor fan. He had never before seen Cronkite so animated. His response was that he was overreacting to Tet. “If you need to be there, if you are demanding to go, I’m not going to stop you,” Salant said, “but I think it’s foolish to risk your life in a situation like this, risk the life of our anchorman, and I’ve got to think about it.”

That was Salant’s typical way of saying no:
thinking about it
. To Cronkite’s pleasant surprise, Salant then threw out a lifeline. “But if you are going to go,” he said, “I think you ought to do a documentary about going, about why you went, and maybe you are going to have to say something about where the war ought to go at that point.”

The ironclad rule at CBS News was that editorializing by a journalist was verboten. If Salant detected a single verb or adjective that lurched toward editorializing on the
CBS Evening News
, the reporter would automatically be taken to the woodshed. The brand of CBS News was impartiality. Now Salant, to Cronkite’s utter astonishment, was willing to break the network’s golden rule. He didn’t have to press his argument further, because Salant was already on the same page. “You have established a reputation, and thanks to you and through us, we at CBS have established a reputation for honesty and factual reporting and being in the middle of the road,” Salant told Cronkite. “You yourself have talked about the fact that we get shot at from both sides, you yourself have said that we get about as many letters saying that we are damned conservatives as saying that we are damned liberals. We support the war. We’re against the war. You yourself say that if we weigh the letters, they weigh about the same. We figure we are about middle of the road. So if we’ve got that reputation, maybe it would be helpful, if people trust us that much, trust you that much, for you to say what you think. Tell them what it looks like, from you being on the ground, what is your opinion.”

“You’re getting pretty heavy,” Cronkite said to Salant.

Salant and Cronkite settled on doing a prime-time
CBS News Special Report
that would be called “Report from Vietnam: Who, What, When, Where, and Why?” (Long after the Vietnam War had ended, Cronkite would fume whenever someone misrepresented his Tet commentary as part of the
CBS Evening News
when it was, in truth, a prime-time
Special Report
.) Bags packed, immunized, Cronkite was headed west into the Vietnam war zone. The Battle of Hué was being fought as ARVN and U.S. Marine elements counterattacked to expel enemy forces from the city, and Cronkite wanted to see the action firsthand. “It was an Orwellian trip,” David Halberstam wrote. “Orwell had written of a Ministry of Truth in Charge of Lying and a Ministry of Peace in Charge of War—and here was Cronkite flying to Saigon, where the American military command was surrounded by defeat and calling it a victory.” The risks for Cronkite professionally were high. If he became known as a dove, his reputation for journalistic objectivity would be downgraded from that of “Sphinx to pundit.”

On February 6, 1968, Cronkite flew from New York to San Francisco, then on to Honolulu and Tokyo. His mission was concise: to “see for himself what’s happened in South Vietnam.” On February 11, after major delays at the Tokyo airport, Cronkite, accompanied by producers Ernie Leiser and Jeff Gralnick and a combat-experienced camera crew, arrived in Saigon. From the beginning, the CBSers felt like sitting ducks on the tarmac. Bombs were bursting, whooshing, and screaming around the outskirts of the city and downtown alike. Long-range artillery fire could be heard in the distance. The faces of the Vietnamese street children they saw, terrified by self-propelled rockets and recoilless rifles and mortars, were wrought with fear. After World War II, Cronkite had encountered the same hollowed look in the eyes of displaced persons in Belgium and the Netherlands, a fright that spoke of hunger, panic, and confusion. The formerly elegant city of Saigon was a combat zone. Things had deteriorated since his 1965 visit.

Wearing a flak jacket and army helmet, Cronkite traveled all over the Vietnamese countryside south of the DMZ that February, keeping detailed notes, recording observations on Tet in the war-ravaged nation. A surreal picture made the wire services: the CBS anchorman wearing dark sunglasses with a gentleman’s pipe jutting out of his mouth, like Douglas MacArthur headed back to the Philippines. This was quite a sensational return to being a war correspondent. Doubtless an adrenaline rush was coursing through Cronkite as his Jeep rumbled past soldiers and peasants alike. He gave a thumbs-up to every fellow correspondent he encountered. Members of the press tend to ignore one another on the job (even in a war zone) because they’re always competing for the same story. Contrary to the norm, all the Vietnam hands in the press swarmed around Cronkite like bees, determined to tell the CBS anchorman about the
real
ground game in Hué and Khe Sanh. Cronkite’s Tet notebook—today housed in the archives of the University of Texas at Austin’s Briscoe Center for American History—is loaded with scribbled observations about the on-the-ground conditions he encountered that February in South Vietnam, as well as commentary from other journalists.

To make the
CBS News Special Report
work, Cronkite and Leiser knew they needed to interview soldiers at U.S. Army outposts throughout the South Vietnamese countryside and avoid clustering around official press conferences. Cronkite had made that mistake during his first trip to Vietnam, in 1965. The CBS team instead headed for the U.S. Marine Corps base in the hilly countryside of Khe Sanh. This was a very dangerous spot for any reporter to visit. The fighting around the city of ten thousand was so fierce that the CBS team couldn’t get into the American garrison. Shifting plans, Cronkite and his team now headed to Hué. Quickly Cronkite saw that in all three places—Saigon, Khe Sanh, and Hué—anarchy appeared to be off the charts.

Only a few hours on the ground, Cronkite hustled up an interview with General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in the war. It didn’t go well. Westmoreland was brusque and dismissive, with a predatory bearing. To Cronkite’s amazement, the general claimed that Tet was an American victory, that the North Vietnamese had failed in their military objectives. That was true, but the strength of the enemy force, and its resolve, was far greater than the general and his staff were willing to concede to Cronkite. This was the twelfth day since the Tet Offensive began, and while the United States was indeed winning back territory, almost two thousand Americans had perished trying to thwart the Vietcong surprise attack. Westmoreland mildly reprimanded Cronkite to do his homework properly. The Vietcong laid siege to Saigon during the Tet Offensive, Westmoreland admitted, but didn’t capture the city. Therefore, it was clear as day that, to Westmoreland, the Department of Defense was winning the Vietnam War. With one caveat: two hundred thousand more troops were needed.

The upbeat Westmoreland had told Cronkite, in no uncertain terms, that the ARVN and three U.S. Marine Corps battalions had defeated more than ten thousand entrenched People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) and Vietcong at Hué. As Cronkite and company headed up Highway 1 (the main north–south road of Vietnam, running the length of the country from the Chinese border to the Mekong Delta) to Hué, they realized Westmoreland had lied. The Marines were still trying to retake the city. Explosions were going off everywhere. “The battle was still on in Hué when I got up there,” Cronkite recalled. “It lasted twenty-seven days.”

Reporters working for AP,
The New York Times
, UP, and Reuters were surprised to see the renowned Cronkite walking through the bombed-out streets of Hué, gunfire erupting in the vicinity, with the poise of a combat veteran. Like the younger correspondents, he slept on the bare floor of a Vietnamese doctor’s house that had been turned into a pressroom. He ate C rations and used the overflowing latrine. No one thought he acted like a bigwig or was bigfooting. Cronkite operating in Hué was a sight to behold. Like a prosecuting attorney gathering facts, he interviewed everyone, from orphans to traumatized U.S. soldiers. He went on a marine patrol to survey the perimeter roads around Hué. According to him, he was only operating on a Journalism 101 principle learned in high school: the more information, the better the story. Besides interviewing Vietnamese, Cronkite managed face time with South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu, loyal opposition leader Xuan Oanh, and U.S. lieutenant general Robert Cushman.