July 17, 2009
Walter Cronkite | 1916-2009
To say that we are closer to victory [in Vietnam] today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy’s intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.
This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.
(Read the full text of Walter Cronkite’s CBS Evening News editorial commentary of February 27, 1968.)
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I will always remember WC giving the numbers of American dead and Enemy dead at during the most intense parts of the Vietnam War, which were listed on a board behind the reporting desk. One evening, when the numbers were something like 14 American dead and 2,568 Enemy dead, he took off his dark-framed glasses and turned around to look at the board, then put them back on as he turned back. That was about as close as he came to showing himself, in the days when news coverage aimed to be “objective” and chit-chatty lame-ass jokes weren’t the central practice of news reporting. Another time he broke character: his report that JFK had died at Parkland Hospital. He didn’t boo-hoo, but he also didn’t wipe the tears away. And that voice! The sound of soundness in thought and spirit–whatever the unknown specifics of his views. He made a big mark on my whole view of history.
Cronkite’s “mired in stalemate” commentary sounds so reasonable, so measured that I am hard-pressed to convey to those who did not live through those years how electrifying it was to hear that message conveyed in that voice through the medium of television and into the homes of Middle America.
I mean, if Walter Cronkite was suggesting that we might consider negotiating with the man in the black pajamas . . .
Yes! And I remember hearing a “moral majority” type saying “Goddamn it, Cronkite’s gone over to the hippy side.”
I read on another site that WC liked music, including The Grateful Dead. The man had depth. And that’s the way it is.
Rest in peace.