Posted on 01/18/2018 2:36:48 PM PST by Kaslin
But buried in the dusty archives of CBS News was another Cronkite report from Saigon broadcast days earlier – nearly two weeks earlier to be exact. The “lost” Feb. 13 clip, shows Cronkite had a much different and unambiguous view of the recent Tet battlefront immediately after it was over.
“First and simplest, the Viet Cong suffered a military defeat,” he reported. “Its missions proved suicidal. If they had intended to stay in the cities as a negotiating point, they failed at that. The Vietnamese army reacted better than even its most ardent supporters had anticipated. There were no defections from its rank, as the Viet Cong apparently had expected. And the people did not rise to support the Viet Cong, as they were also believed to have expected.”
WASHINGTON – A newly discovered CBS News clip broadcast by Walter Cronkite while still in Saigon following the Tet Offensive reveals the influential newsman had a much different perspective on the battle than he expressed in the history-making commentary he delivered after returning to New York days later.
Anyone who had reached the age of awareness when Cronkite delivered his famous live editorial Feb. 27, 1968, knew the significance of what “the most trusted man in America” was saying: The U.S. had lost the Vietnam war. President Lyndon Johnson’s famous reaction told the story: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America,” he is reported to have said.
“Tonight, back in more familiar surroundings in New York, we’d like to sum up our findings in Vietnam, an analysis that must be speculative, personal, subjective,” he said in opening his brief closing report. “Who won and who lost in the great Tet Offensive against the cities? I’m not sure. The Viet Cong did not win by a knockout but neither did we.”
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
Walter Cronkite was always willing to sell the United States out to Communists.
He spent two years in Moscow after WWII.
Yep. Some may have been dupes but many knew exactly that they were helping the Vanguard of the Revolution advance the Communist empire.
Michael Medved was one such activist. He went on to work for Red Ron Dellums.
Thanks for the ping!
A lot of secret stuff is being revealed today!
Hopefully, it is a turning point.
This stands out and should be repeated over and over:
“...No matter what Cronkite said immediately after the Tet Offensive or days later in his New York broadcast, the history 50 years later is conclusive that the massive coordinated attacks by the Viet Cong guerrillas and the North Vietnamese army, though surprising in their magnitude, were not only soundly and convincingly repulsed by U.S. forces and the South Vietnamese army, but actually annihilated in one of the most spectacular military defeats in history. Nevertheless, in part because of Cronkite’s famous broadcast, according to historians and Vietnam veterans, the staggering military defeat proved to be a major propaganda victory for the Communist forces...”
Good thing he didn’t report during the Battle of the Bulge.
Today’s democrat party “leaders” - and all of the fellow travelers in Hillary-Obola’s national press corpse - are Vietnam anti-War professional protesters and appeaseers and “living-the-68-colors - from John Kerry, to Bill Clinton, Hillary, Pelosi, etc, etc, etc.
Obola was simply their very convenient “get the youth” token black communist - who turned to be a very valuable Muslim appeaser-supporter.
Just more proof what a Communist Walter Cronkite was!
The media has always been an enemy of the people.
Yep,he’d gladly sit at the right hand of Satan to usher in World Government with the US subservient to a foreign power.
I have a friend who was over in Vietnam during Tet, and he told me, those over knew it was a disaster for the VC.
Thanks for your service and for sharing this with us and your realities of what happen post TET.
ASA Vet has been telling for over a decade that you guys did not lose TET battle.
Walter Cronkite was not a newsman. He was focused on the general temperment of the people that he viewed as the popular sentiment at the time, and he reported the news that way. That is why he turned his reporting on the Vietnam war against the United States. Cronkite was a weasel. He was a leader in what is wrong with the news in this country today. I remember sitting with a friend and watching his very first newscast for a half an hour and saying to my friend that we were in real trouble. Listening to Cronkite trying to fill a half an hour with less than a half an hour of news was going to cause huge problems. It has and it is today.
A couple of years earlier in 1965 the high school I had attended held a retirement party for one of its long-time English teachers - before coming to our school she had taught at another where one of her students had been James Michener, author of "Tales of the South Pacific", basis for the Broadway show - on the same night as the retirement party Michener had been scheduled to attend a soiree at the White House honoring him and other artists of the time - proclaiming the great debt he owed his old high school teacher for how she had contributed to his success, he stood up LBJ and instead attended the retirement party amid glowing press reports about the inspired way he had sacrificed to honor his teacher in spite of the status of the president he had ignored - I wonder still if he would have been quite so noble had JFK still been in the White House that evening.....
The problem was the VC wasn’t the main threat in Vietnam; the North Vietnamese Army was. They were the ones who smashed the gate with their tanks in 1975, not the Viet Cong.
The war was a just cause, but Eisenhower was right in determining there was no clear path to victory there. Too many people simply didn’t want us there, or the South Vietnamese governments we were supporting (and this was demonstrated by the failure of “Vietnamization”). When captured guerillas or NVA soldiers made clear how long they had personally been fighting, then asked the Americans interrogating them how long they’d be willing to stay in Vietnam, the point was clear - the American public would never stand for it.
Kennedy’s involvement was miniscule in terms of troop numbers; we weren’t doing the brunt of the fighting as we would later. Also, the fact that it was composed primarily of advisers would indicate these were career soldiers, not draftees, serving there.
Comparisons to today’s quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan don’t stand for one simple reason alone: None of us or our sons are being drafted to go to these places. With all we now know about the war in Vietnam, I would be livid if I lost a loved one there. The reason Tet was so earth-shattering was because even as a VC disaster (which it certainly was), it exposed the lie that the enemy was on the ropes - according to our military, they would NEVER have the capability to launch those attacks after years of Americans fighting & dying there. That was Cronkite’s point, rather than concealing the VC disaster; if it was possible for the communists to still launch attacks on this scale in 1968, then we were no closer to winning the war that we were in 1965 (and had lost a lot of American lives already).
Four years later the Easter Offensive showed that without massive US air support the ARVN couldn’t beat the NVA; I’ll cut the ARVN some slack for the collapse in 1975 because their supplies had been cut off and they were literally running our of ammunition, but 1972 was an eye-opener. Beating the VC soundly in 1968 wasn’t equivalent to beating the NVA; in the conventional war the South basically couldn’t defend itself against the North. The concessions the US granted in return for our withdrawal and release of prisoners doomed the South; we allowed the NVA to remain in the South as part of that agreement. What other outcome was possible?
You are correct as it was US INF Division units, Special Forces Mike Force types plus South Koreans who kicked the VC out of cities. My unit just off the Ban Me Thout East airfield went into BMT and kicked as-. The ARVN 23rd Division was between us and downtown. They were a sorry ass unit. All the men I served with who had been there in TET had a bad taste for the ARVN plus the LLDB on SF A Teams and above. LLDB meant Lousy Little Dirty Bast-—s to SF.
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