Sounds extreme? On the one hand, yes. Because North Vietnamese General Giap praised the entire American press as his "most valuable guerrilla" not just CBS.
"If we've lost Walter Cronkite, we've lost the country," LBJ is reputed to have said after Tet, when the CBS anchor declared the war unwinnable. . . .
I remember. I see the same press today.
It is NOT a boring waste of time and the ramblings of demented old people stuck in the past. It's red flags waving and signalling as sure as Cronkite's eyebrows flashed and reinforced his verbal message: America, get out!
LBJ was spooked and began the process of ordering U.S. forces to stand down that streched slowly over a period of years and included Nixon. What was won in Vietnam in 1968 was immediately lost in Washington. IMO the North could have been forced to the peace table. Their post-war writings prove it, I believe. Millions of lives could have been saved.
Thanks, Walter.
This war today is for all the marbles. Many mainstream employees are traitors, they call it "being neutral."
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 . . .