I personally would have hated Cronkite even more had I existed around that time. LBJ’s doing a meatgrinder bit was definitely bad, but at least he had the excuse of trying to avoid a repeat of what happened in the Korean War when the Chinese proceeded to drive MacArthur’s people out at the very least if not a nuclear war. Not to mention LBJ was clearly scared of the media due to constantly watching the three major channels’ coverage of the war, so I can forgive him somewhat, especially considering how close we got to World War III a few years before Vietnam escalated.
Cronkite, however, deliberately lied about the progress in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive (and like the other networks might have tried to paint Vietnam in a bad light as well), and there’s plenty of evidence pointing to him deciding to lie anyways on the air despite being told by Westmoreland what was going on, even cynically rationalizing that the mass graves should have been a reason to quit. Heck, there’s even evidence to suggest that he’s pretty much the reason why LBJ chickened out of a second term (we got EXTREMELY lucky that we got Nixon instead, who actually DID come far closer to an actual victory in the war, and in fact, he actually DID win us the war, despite the narrative. Congress after Watergate just stabbed South Vietnam in the back.). What’s worse, his statement during the 1990s made it clear he was a Communist sympathizer by that time. Forget Nixon, LBJ was the first victim of the Deep State (I’m not counting JFK, since Ion Mihai Pacepa and some others have already made pretty convincing arguments that the Soviets/Cubans were responsible that time for the assassination, NOT the Deep State).
That sumbitch LBJ tried to kill my dad...twice.
Didn’t Tet show that all the talk about progress in the war was nonsense? Tet was a US victory on the battlefield, but it showed we weren’t close to finishing off communism in South Vietnam.
How did Nixon “win the war”? He campaigned promising to withdraw us, and he did; we left with communist units intact in South Vietnam (and it enraged the S. Vietnamese government).