Cronkite was a key figure in many ways, but foremost among them, perhaps, was the fact that he cleared the way for the mainstream media and the Establishment to join what Lionel Trilling called “the adversary culture.” Cronkite, the gravelly voice of accepted American wisdom, whose comportment suggested he kept his money in bonds and would never even have considered exceeding the speed limit, devastated President Lyndon Johnson in the wake of the 1968 Tet Offensive by declaring that the United States “was mired in stalemate” in Vietnam—when Johnson knew that Tet had been a military triumph.To listen to Cronkite you would have assumed the Tet Offensive was a dramatic triumph by North Vietnam and a devastating defeat for the U.S. Not hardly. I did a little research into the real number of casualties each side suffered in those battles:
This on-air editorial, spoken during the most-watched newscast in the country when that meant 30 million people were watching (as opposed to 7 million today, with the nation having added more than 100 million in population), was a transformational moment in American history.
“If I’ve lost Cronkite,” Johnson was reputed to have said, “I’ve lost middle America,” and shortly thereafter he announced he would not run for reelection. This was a mark of Johnson’s own poor political instincts—a president who thought a rich and powerful anchorman living the high life in New York city was the voice of the silent majority was a man out of touch with reality—but it was a leading indicator of how the media were changing. Cronkite didn’t know what he was talking about when it came to Tet, as the late Peter Braestrup demonstrated in his colossal expose of the scandalous media coverage of the battle, Big Story. But he knew that among the people who mattered to him, and who were the leading edge of ideological fashion, Tet was a failure because the war in Vietnam was bad, and he took to the airwaves to say so.
Losses during Tet OffensiveIn fact, what Cronkite did was give the peace movement and our enemies in Vietnam a real lift, knocked Lyndon Johnson out of the race for re-election, and paved the way for Richard Nixon. He certainly didn't end the war. It was the one time that I'm aware of in his days as CBS anchor that he editorialized rather than just reporting the news and he got it wrong.
Country/Force Killed / Wounded / Missing
US, Korea, Australia 1,536 / 7,764 / 11
South Viet Nam 2,788 / 8,299 / 587
North Viet Nam and Viet Cong 45,000 / not known / not known
Civilian 14,000 / 24,000 / 630,000 homeless
There's a good lesson in there somewhere for today's journalists.
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The things I remember from that time: When Johnson announced, we were ecstatic--if we had known we'd get Nixon, I think we would have reconsidered, though Nixon may have been as inevitable as Obama. We stopped believing casualty reports--the term was "credibility gap." As much as I disliked Johnson personally, and loved JFK, Johnson inherited Kennedy's war and again one never knows what would have happened if either had fully committed. All we've done since 1945 is reinforce MacArthur's belief that we should never engage in war on the Asian mainland. Those are my feelings, and I honestly don't know how much of them have been influenced by a less-than-truthful government and media.
Number of American soldiers killed in Vietnam:
a little below 59,00
Number of Vietnamese killed: 3.4 million (Robert Mcnamara's estimate)
Jimmy Carter March 1977: We owe the Vietnamese nothing as the "destruction was mutual."
Lew - do you think we should have let more of our guys get killed to even things up?
The other thing about Big Story was that Braestrup criticised the press for being too pessimistic. Yet, the press was less pessimistic than the internal discussions and documents of the government.
Walter Cronkite's words:
We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. They may be right, that Hanoi’s winter-spring offensive has been forced by the Communist realization that they could not win the longer war of attrition, and that the Communists hope that any success in the offensive will improve their position for eventual negotiations. It would improve their position, and it would also require our realization, that we should have had all along, that any negotiations must be that — negotiations, not the dictation of peace terms. For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. This summer’s almost certain standoff will either end in real give-and-take negotiations or terrible escalation; and for every means we have to escalate, the enemy can match us, and that applies to invasion of the North, the use of nuclear weapons, or the mere commitment of one hundred, or two hundred, or three hundred thousand more American troops to the battle. And with each escalation, the world comes closer to the brink of cosmic disaster.
To say that we are closer to victory 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.
Cronkite's editorial was prescient based on a discussion with then commanding general Abrams. It was an editorial and, as such, he made it known that he was giving an opinion. That the Tet Offensive was technically a defeat for the North did not change its implications. The communists stunned the Americans with their capacity to orchestrate a large scale attack, they overran defenses in Saigon itself. It proved, beyond a doubt, that there was no way to win the war.
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