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>"If we've lost Walter Cronkite, we've lost the country," LBJ is reputed to have said after Tet . . .

If Cronkite was so
pivotal, then why didn't
some US black ops

mission just shoot him
with a Vietcong rifle?
No more bad news shows,

and the bad guy Reds
would get the blame for killing
a TV icon . . .

Cronkite was not alone. You would have had to take out the entire mainstream media except for a couple here and there. I wasn't kidding about North Vietnamese Communist General Giap. He really did say that the American press was his "most valuable guerilla."

Time and U.S. News and World Report and the few conservative newspapers scattered around the country did a pretty good job.

LBJ was doomed even without Cronkite. The era's version of moveon.org was the underground newspapers like Berkeley Barb and East Village Other. The McCarthy wing of the Party was emerging strong. The "anti-war" radicals were going nuts on campuses. Civil rights radicals merged with "anti-war" radicals. Riots, curfews, and National Guard (and some regulars) patrolled cities. Ultra-liberal Democrat Party powerhouses like Fulbright were screaming about it being a "civil war."

Had it been Cronkite alone he would have been assassinated. It was LBJ's style. IMO.