Pulled Out Rug

Walter Cronkite is receiving "fare the wells" across the old line media but what must be remembered is that his "stalemate at best" statement paved the way for US defeat in Vietnam. Cronkite made the sacrifice of sixty thousand Americans in Southeast Asia meaningless, advanced the Communist cause, and precipitated the fall of dominoes that included South Vietnam, Laos, and facilitated the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia. All this with one "the war can not be won" statement in the wake of the Tet Offensive in which the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and Viet Cong attacked during a ceasefire that was traditional during the lunar New Year celebrations and which according to their own commanding general Vo Nguyen Giap had been a resounding defeat for his forces with the regular army throttled and turned back and the guerrilla bands crushed. So what was a moment of triumph by our forces was transformed into a defeat and propaganda coup for the other side. The Johnson administration should have had Westmoreland (the David Petraeus of his day), McNamara, or even the President himself publicly question how many campaigns Cronkite had waged, what battles he had won, or which war college he had attended. The damage wrought by Cronkite's uninformed speculation cost millions of lives. The slog to victory would have been hard, but just like the Malay Insurrection, the war could have been won and thousands of Americans would not have had their lives taken for nothing, millions of Asians would not have been murdered, and Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam would not have become Red enslavement and murder regimes. Cronkite, amidst the glowing eulogies, must be remembered as one of the breed of journalists who undercut his own country.