Republic,
My reaction was similar to yours.
In early 1968, General Westmoreland said that we had come to so control the enemy that he couldn’t mount a successful attack in a single major province.
Within about a month the Vietcong mounted major attacks in every single one of some 58 provinces across the country.
Walter Cronkite went on a “fact finding” tour and basically helped the nation conclude that we could not trust our military commanders to tell us the truth. The presentation was that they were either lying, or hopelessly deluded.
What was forgotten was the fact that NONE of the attacks were successful; rather, we annihilated the Viet Cong. They ceased to exist as a fighting force. And from Tet on, it was North Vietnamese Army troops fighting us, using much more conventional tactics, and no longer having the support of the people.
Tet was a complete military disaster for North Vietnam. It couldn’t have gone much worse for them.
But at just the moment we could have truly won the Vietnam War, people like Walter Cronkite persuaded us to give up.
Had we stayed in, we almost certainly would have been able to get the North to come crawling to the negotiating table. But as it was, they watched “Uncle Walter,” and knew that somehow, amazingly, the American left had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
Another thing few people realize is that Vietnam was a major battle in the Cold War. We fought communism all across the world, and checked the most evil ideology on earth in hot spot after hot spot.
Our soldiers and Marines knew how to win. Unfortunately, our our leaders forgot, and liberals sabotaged us at every turn.
Yet another thing, as we think of what the media has become, was just how profoundly liberal and atheist Walter Cronkite turned out to be. It is hard to see how such a profoundly biased man offered us “objective” news.
I mean, if a political leaning if full of people who want their OWN NATION to lose a WAR, then what is their END GAME FANTASY? What do they want America to look like in that fantasy? I just do not understand.
We then began withdrawing, particularly after Nixon resigned. The libs had to get rid of Nixon...and they did. What he did pales in comparison to Clinton and the Obamanation...but he had to go.
After he left, the North built up and in 1974 violated the terms of the treaty they had signed with us and conducted a massive invasion of the south. Rather than build back up and fight this blatant violation and agression...we continued to leave because of the libs, dems, left, and MSM.
Hundreds of thousands of our friends were butchered, hundreds thousands more took to the sea in delapitated boats and rafts.
It led to the killing fields in Cambodia, and to a distrust of us throughout the world and by many of our allies that lasted until Reagen built us back up and then we used it to good effect in the 1st Gulf War. (With Granada and Panam in between).
Cronkite was a big part of all of that negative consequence.