Walter Cronkite Without The Sugar Coating

It started with the tributes following his death, I guess. The endless encomia on what a great man Walter Cronkite was: his towering presence; his integrity; and my favorite, the slogan "the most trusted man in America".

It all got to be a bit much.

The most laughable myth is that his reportage was unbiased. Cronkite's coverage reeked of bias. OffHisMeds well remembers his effort to disarm America during the Viet Nam war by misportraying the Tet Offensive - in which North Viet Nam and the Viet Cong were decisively defeated in an attack upon the South - as a disastrous military defeat for the United States. To revisit his treatment of the Tet Offensive is to read words that never would have come out of the mouth of an uber-partisan Dan Rather, and this in the golden age of so-called unbiased reporting.

In reviewing Cronkite's words and deeds during the Viet Nam War, one also appreciates that he wrote the manual on Media activism, and gave birth to the notion that the "Fifth Estate" - through their advocacy - was a legitimate arm of government, regardless of the fact that nobody voted for them to be so. If Media activism was the disease, Walter Cronkite was Patient Zero, blithely infecting the many others that were to come, and always in the service of radical Lefty beliefs.

But back to cases, and specifically the Viet Nam War. Cronkite's misrepresentations during the conflict were numerous:

- With the Tet Offensive, Cronkite declared defeat in 1968, a mere two and a half years after America's commitment of combat troops to Viet Nam. He openly advocated for "terms" and explicitly stated that the terms negotiated should not be those of a victorious United States. It's amazing to think that, Cronkite's prognostications notwithstanding, South Viet Nam managed to hang in there another five years. It's equally amazing that anybody - journalist or politician - could so blatantly advocate for surrender.

- He misportrayed the South Vietnamese as hopelessly corrupt and ineffective, and worse than North Viet Nam. With the hindsight of fifty years, but that America had a client state now with anywhere near the backbone that South Vietnam showed back in the 60s and 70s.

- He worked to discredit the "domino theory" of communism over-running Southeast Asia, absent a presence by the United States, a theory that would become reality with the fall of South Viet Nam, Cambodia, Laos and other countries, culminating in the slaughter of millions and the banishment of millions more.

- Cronkite made little mention of the fact that North Viet Nam was a Soviet client state, and that their aggressions against the South would have been impossible without the massive militarization of that country by the Communists. Cronkite was also silent on the culpability of the Soviets in prolonging the conflict. It is strange that he should have so many words of criticism for the United States in the conflict, but none for the Evil Empire.

- Cronkite gave credence to the myth that America routinely exaggerated North Vietnamese and Viet Cong casualties. This was one of the means by which the Left devastated the credibility of our military and forced our withdrawal from the war.

- Most damning of all, Cronkite rationalized not only the disastrous "limited war" strategy imposed by Democrats, wherein the U.S. and South Vietnam were damned to a perpetual holding action, but the "escalation" theory then so popular with Liberals, wherein any conflict with a Soviet puppet that did not have an outcome pleasing to the Soviets might ultimately escalate into nuclear war. Hear him in his own words:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdOb_183d1o

The fact that the whole Liberal appeasement movement - which Cronkite supported - was philosophically attuned to accept Communism's bona fides at face value while simultaneously glossing over Communism's many atrocities, gave legitimacy for far too long a period of time to a movement that - while finally being relegated to the dustbin of history by Ronald Reagan in 1991 - hung in there at least thirty years longer than it needed to, thanks in part to people like Walter Cronkite.

Cronkite had no problem perpetuating the notion of a moral equivalency of Communism and American-style Democracy. His comments pre and post his journalistic career reflect a modest but creepy sympathy not just with Communism, but Soviet Communism, and his actions while he was a reporter and news reader reflected that. He fanned the flames of the anti-war movement and ultimately, his war agenda was indistinguishable from Jane Fonda's, minus her unfortunate photo op mounting a North Vietnamese Triple A, and his ability to make even the most unreasonable words sound reasonable.

In the end, Walter Cronkite was a Lefty, reflexively critical of American Exceptionalism, and a believer in a One World Order that compromised American hegemony. He was also an anti-anti communist, and a perhaps not-so-unwitting enabler of communism. In that, he had a long and distinguished list of predecessors, including I.F. Stone and Walter Duranty, albeit that they were both on the Soviet payroll, and he was not.

Walter Cronkite was many things, including a distinguished reporter and an anchor whose rhetorical skills and delivery were unmatched in the history of television news. What he most decidedly was not, however, was a man capable of separating his political beliefs from his journalism. He not only did it, he reveled in it.