Cronkite (52 page)

The aftershock of Cronkite’s reports was seismic. His opinion was quoted in the press, and it opened the door for NBC News’ Frank McGee to take a similar stand in a documentary on Vietnam that aired two weeks later. The gossip in the press rooms of America was that Cronkite had offed the president. Even the conservative
Wall Street Journal
editorial page said, “The whole Vietnam effort may be doomed.” A wave of relief hit Cronkite for giving voice to his dissent. As a CBS News executive later joked, “When Walter said the Vietnam War was over, it was over.” A lot of Johnson administration officials, including Walter Rostow and Dean Rusk, weren’t amused. “I was very disgusted with the media, particularly CBS and Walter Cronkite,” General Westmoreland complained in an oral history interview. “I think they deceived the American people.”

As the CBS special aired that February 27, President Johnson was traveling to speak at the Gregory Gymnasium at the University of Texas at Austin. He took Air Force One to his home state to take part in a birthday party for Governor John B. Connally, a close friend. According to former White House press secretary George Christian, when Johnson heard about Cronkite’s flagrant antiwar commentary, he blurted out, disheartened, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.”

Just what President Johnson really said about the “Cronkite Moment,” as it is known in the history books, has been mired in scholarly controversy. There are a few alternative versions of what LBJ supposedly said, the most prevalent being: (a) “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America”; and (b) “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the war.” It doesn’t make any real difference. The important point is that Cronkite had grabbed America’s attention about Vietnam in a way that would have been impossible for LBJ to have missed. Former White House press secretary George Christian later gave a fuller rendering to Bill Small of CBS News about how the administration received the February 27 Cronkite special. “Believe me, the shock waves rolled through government,” Christian said. “When Walter returned from Vietnam, I think the reports disturbed a lot of people about the conduct of the war; pessimism breeds pessimism. I do think he gave an honest reporter’s view. But he is a household name far more than other newsmen; he is the man millions rely on for their summary of the news every day; he is not indentified as an editorialist, but as a reporter of great objectivity.”

With his honest commentary about the Vietnam War being honorably lost (or a “stalemate”), Cronkite became more significant than a mere Nielsen ratings winner on the nightly news merry-go-round. He entered the main-game annals of American history. With white streaks in his closely cropped hair and mustache, Cronkite had come to epitomize old-fashioned values in an era of rote lies. America asked for truth about Vietnam, and Cronkite dutifully delivered.

When Barbara W. Tuchman wrote her 1984 opus
The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
, the eminent historian depicted Cronkite as a folk hero because of his “Report from Vietnam.” Not only did Tuchman quote Cronkite on what he had encountered in the “burned, blasted and weary land” of South Vietnam, but she also gave credence to the possibly apocryphal LBJ saying, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.” Tuchman argued that it was Cronkite’s report that caused Senator William Fulbright to have the U.S. Senate reinvestigate the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which he now feared was “null and void.” Tuchman believed that Cronkite had crashed the house of cards concerning U.S. military inervention in Southeast Asia.

There has been a cottage industry of books about Vietnam since 1968, and in most of them, Cronkite’s TV dissent can be found in the indexes. That single
CBS News Special Report
guaranteed his status as a legend. Dozens of other reporters denounced the Vietnam conflict long before Cronkite, but his turning against the war was above-the-fold stuff. By conventional TV standards, where the anchorman played objective journalism and war down the middle, Cronkite was a revolutionary. While Cronkite’s words themselves weren’t unique or incendiary, his stance was eye-opening. “Cronkite’s step out of character,” historian Todd Gitlin noted in
The New Republic
, “was a formidable symbol of broken legitimacy in an age that liked its symbolism straightforward.”

New York Times
reporter Neil Sheehan, who would write the Pulitzer Prize–winning book
A Bright Shining Lie
about the Vietnam War, was also a media historian and monitored Cronkite’s shift from hawk to dove with great interest. “If you watched the
CBS Evening News
, Walter Cronkite sounds like a Pentagon spokesman in 1965 and 1966,” Sheehan told Brian Lamb in a C-SPAN
Booknotes
interview. “I hope I’m not making Mr. Cronkite angry by saying this. But he’s essentially repeating—in an enthusiastic way—what he’s being told. It is only after 1968, after Tet ’68—the communist Tet Offensive of ’68, which disillusioned the public—that you find an antiwar bias coming into the news media in general. You find figures like Cronkite really questioning the war.”

Just how incredibly dangerous Cronkite’s fact-finding mission to Vietnam had been became abundantly clear just a week after “Report from Vietnam” aired. CBS News co-producer Russ Bensley (who edited Cronkite’s news segments) and cameraman John Smith were seriously wounded at Khe Sanh. Bensley, who started his broadcasting career at WBBM in Chicago, was wounded by mortar fragments and taken to a hospital in Da Nang. That wasn’t the end of his horrific ordeal. A Vietcong rocket attack blasted his hospital and he was wounded again. Surgeons were forced to remove his spleen and cut open his colon. This wasn’t an isolated case. Since Cronkite’s visit, fourteen U.S. correspondents and cameramen had been wounded in Vietnam. Two ABC News reporters—Bill Brannigan and Jim Deckard—had also been seriously wounded in Khe Sanh. CBS News Tokyo bureau chief Igor Oganesoff, who frequently shuttled to Saigon for fill-in duty, wired Leiser that he now refused to take combat assignments. It pained Cronkite to air a segment on the
CBS Evening News
showing Bensley getting wounded in Khe Sanh, but he did. “Nowhere in Vietnam was safe,” Bensley recalled. “After Tet, all our guys were getting wounded. I turned antiwar.”

Like General Westmoreland, pro–Vietnam War hawks thought “Report from Vietnam” bordered on treason, antiwar exhibitionism marketing itself as CBS triumphalism to get high Nielsen ratings. And a ratings success it proved to be. Because Cronkite was honest about what he saw in South Vietnam, the
CBS Evening News
took on a new edge in its war reporting. Ratings went up. Ironically, this marked the end of TV network news anchormen’s never taking policy positions. Opinion sold. Worries about editorializing became a quaint public policy notion no longer religiously adhered to. Cronkite, by speaking the truth, had allowed the dam of objectivity to break. If he regretted any aspect of his Tet special, it was that he had opened the floodgate for the line between commentary and news to be blurred. Beginning in 1968, everybody—movie stars, disc jockeys, musicians, novelists, corporate CEOs—felt compelled to offer his opinion on civil rights, urban poverty, abortion, and, above all, Vietnam. Jack Gould, still the arch media critic of
The New York Times
, complained, “It is only a matter of time before Chet Huntley and David Brinkley will be donning fetching leotards for their nightly
pas de deux
and Clive Barnes [
Times
theater critic] will be reviewing the New Hampshire primary.”

In coming years, some historians would claim that Cronkite’s analysis of Tet was premature: the 1972 Easter Offensive, for example, proved that the South Vietnamese could thwart a North Vietnamese invasion. There was a feeling that he hadn’t given the U.S. troops who had defended Saigon a fair shake. Hadn’t the North Vietnamese
lost
the Tet Offensive from a purely military perspective? Wasn’t Vietnam a battlefield that had to be fought in order to win the larger cold war against Sino-Soviet hegemony? What no one disputed was that “Report from Vietnam” pitted Cronkite against Johnson’s war policies in Southeast Asia.

LBJ never mentioned the nasty riptide of the Cronkite Moment in his presidential memoir,
The Vantage Point
. Nobody in the Johnson family believed that the Cronkite commentary was startling to Johnson (he had been grappling with the post-Tet condition himself for weeks). But as a master politician, Johnson must have known that the Cronkite broadcast, while stating the obvious, was doing him glaring political damage. As Diane Sawyer noted, not since Murrow lifted Senator Joe McCarthy by the skunk tail for public scrutiny in 1954 had one TV broadcast reflected such a fateful climate change in public opinion. Cronkite’s editorial was truly an irritant to LBJ. The president’s real concern was that Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy had both signaled their determination to challenge him for the Democratic nomination; passions over the Vietnam War threatened to disrupt national life. Still, there remains a lingering controversy over whether President Johnson ever blurted out the popular “If I’ve lost Cronkite . . .” line. The root of the confusion stems from an interview scholar David Culbert conducted with Christian, who seemed to hedge on the validity of his famous quotation:

Johnson did talk about Cronkite going to Vietnam and in effect turning against the war and it did worry him immensely that Cronkite had in effect become dovish, because he saw the impact was going to be tremendous on the country. Now whether or not Johnson saw that program at X time and that sort of thing, I don’t know. He saw newscasts of other things, I’m sure that Johnson is bound to have seen the program. I remember being with Johnson when he saw a commentary from Cronkite. Now whether it was on the morning news. . . . I think it was probably on the CBS Morning News, where it might have been an excerpt out of the program or something. I saw the programs. . . . I either saw them at home or I saw the videotapes. I don’t remember. . . . I don’t know whether he saw them. I’m pretty sure he saw all the [recorded] programs in some manner although I don’t remember precisely. I know we talked about the Cronkite program and he was very concerned about Cronkite coming home from Vietnam and portraying the “cause is lost” in effect, the impact it was going to have. Now when it was and where it was, I don’t really have a clear recollection.

Almost everyone who worked for CBS News was awed by Cronkite’s “Report from Vietnam” in the spring of 1968. It was refreshingly risky, unexpected, and spot-on. All the network’s best Vietnam veterans—Morley Safer, John Laurence, Peter Kalischer, Bert Quint, and Robert Schakne among them—were flat-out stunned.
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“We were held to such a rigid set of values,” recalled Ed Fouhy, then the bureau chief in Los Angeles. “You just couldn’t inject opinion into a story. We all knew the war was a stalemate. The surprise was that Cronkite called the game over on prime time.” Cronkite himself wondered whether he had done the right thing. Had he betrayed the old United Press honor code of reporting, not editorializing? “I did it because I thought it was the journalistically responsible thing to do at that moment,” he reflected in 2002. “It was an egotistical thing for us to do . . . it was egotistical for me to do it and for CBS to permit me to do it.”

Jack Shafer of
Slate
offered the best rationale as to why TV news anchors like Cronkite, Chancellor, and Reasoner were so trusted by viewers in the late 1960s and early ’70s: they were governed by the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine. “The doctrine required broadcast station licensees to address controversial issues of public importance but also to allow contrasting points of view to be included in the discussion,” Shafer explained. “One way around the Fairness Doctrine was to tamp down controversy, which all three networks often did.” Shafer sees Cronkite’s Tet special as a sparkling exception to the Fairness Doctrine protocol.

Because liberal historians consider the Vietnam War to have been a ghastly mistake, Cronkite’s dissent has become an epic in the groves of academe. The novelist Tim O’Brien, winner of the 1979 National Book Award for
Going After Cacciato
and a Vietnam War specialist, credited Cronkite with inspiring him to write fiction. Growing up in small-town Minnesota, O’Brien would regularly catch
You Are There
on CBS. “I remember watching one episode on the OK Corral,” O’Brien recalled. “Those shows were fact-filled, vetted, mini–short stories. If it wasn’t for
You Are There
I might not have become a novelist.” Having served as an infantryman in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970, in the division that contained the unit guilty of the My Lai massacre, O’Brien was also grateful that Cronkite spoke out after Tet. By the mid-1990s, Cronkite had become an admirer of O’Brien’s novels on Vietnam. One evening, after
In the Lake of the Woods
was published, O’Brien was lecturing at the Horace Mann School in New York and was surprised to see Cronkite sitting in the front row. After the talk, Cronkite went up to O’Brien and said, “I’m stone deaf, didn’t hear a word you said. Can I take you out for dinner?”

O’Brien was flattered. Over their meal at an Upper West Side diner, Cronkite asked him a direct question: “Did I do the right thing in February ’68?” O’Brien was astounded. Cronkite wasn’t looking for validation per se, but he wanted to talk about whether his ’68 post-Tet broadcast demoralized U.S. troops in Vietnam. A Tet revisionism claimed that CBS News manipulated the American public into erroneously believing the Vietcong’s Tet Offensive had worked. Cronkite wanted O’Brien, a fighting soldier, to tell him the truth. “He asked me whether I had felt betrayed by him,” O’Brien recalled. “He wanted to talk about his decision with a combat veteran like myself. I told him he had been right to recognize the impossibility of our position in Vietnam. We could have invested the entire GNP into Vietnam or built a Metrodome around Saigon and it wouldn’t have made a difference. Cronkite had the reportorial wisdom to recognize that central reality. Ninety percent of the soldiers blamed the media for losing the war, but I didn’t.”