“. . . we’d like to sum up our findings in Vietnam, an analysis that must be speculative, personal, subjective. Who won and who lost in the great Tet offensive against the cities? I’m not sure. . .”

Not having been aware of those three words – speculative, personal, subjective – I now change my outlook on this piece of history. I read it not as news, but more accurately an opinion piece. Clearly something that should always be approached with skepticism.

Totally blind faith in anyone is not good.

Thanks for posting this.

But, yes, Cronkite was one of the first of our “talking head” journalists to come out of the closet as against his own country.

Some even think he was a socialist early in his career. This is not at all unremarkable for those who were young people during the 1930′s and even before. The Communists had made great inroads into our society long before WWII. Their ideas and values were extremely attractive for many in the FDR generation.

Two people who were hooked into Marxism/socialism even before WWII: Obonga’s grandparents.

Twenty years ago I began to do family genealogy in earnest. I got to talk with many people my parents’ age and older, and got a real flavor of the time. In reality, you would be amazed at how many people of Cronkite’s generation, older and younger than he, were attracted to socialism. In fact, maybe the big secret someday will be exposed in all its enormity: that my generation, the Boomers, have perhaps been unfairly tainted as being overwhelmingly socialist, when in reality maybe Marxism never really had more than 30% of us at one time. But our parents’ and grandparents’ generations were far more substantially hooked into Marx than we were.

My wife has a deceased uncle who attended my alma mater (the University of New Hampshire) during the 1950′s and he always said almost all of his humanities professors were Communists. My mother-in-law, his sister, attended UNH during the forties and she said there were a lot of them too. Professors AND students.

I don’t buy the explanation that Cronkite gives of his “disillusionment” with the way the military “lied” about the war. I know vets of the war and some very smart people whom I learned a lot from. We didn’t always have very good intelligence about the Communist enemy during that war, and assessments are partly based upon intel. By the metrics of battle, we destroyed the enemy in almost every encounter. In fact, our LURPS (Long Range Recon Patrols) got better than the enemy at ambush and evade. Enemy morale was not good. Cronkite most certainly would have been privy to some of that information, but he chose a different narrative that fit his worldview.

He carried the water for the Communists. Just as his heirs do to this day.

Walter C and his screed marked the beginning of the end for the MSM as it existed. He won a Pyrrhic Victory: a tactical victory but a strategic defeat for the Media.

This was the start of a long downhill decent for Big Media. The crack in the wall that left the water erode away support.

And so it goes…

“And with each escalation, the world comes closer to the brink of cosmic disaster.”

Isnt this every bit, if not more, hyperbolic than any “Mission Accomplished” sign ever was? Is it really credible that the Soviet Union or Communist China would actually launch a nuclear war in response to an American escalation in Vietnam?? It seems Brezhnev’s low-key response to Nixon’s 1972 bombing escalation would disprove Cronkite’s excessive claim. In any case, there certainly didnt seem to be any such qualms on the Soviet side when they invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, in the very same year as the Tet offensive. (Nor when they invaded Hungary in 1956, or Afghanistan in 1979.)

It seems that this fear of meeting strength with strength, the so-called “Vietnam syndrome,” was one of the detriments the opponents of the Vietnam war added to the American psyche. This “fear itself” permeated every post-Vietnam American cold war decision, such as whether to send aid to El Salvador or put missiles in Western Europe.

The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses.
Vladimir Lenin

Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of our party.
Joseph Stalin

The writer is the engineer of the human soul.
Joseph Stalin

all these other explanations seek to paint the situaion as a natural movement in history, but that is only possible if your ignorant or refuse to include the manipulators in the history.

in fact, if you manipulate history, you HAVE to ahve a group of peopel whose political job is to describe whats happening in terms that excise those actions…

all one has to do is go to the source..
but no one here in the west has read the source..
here are some quotes from long ago..
and they tell you where our philosophy of actions come from..

The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.
Vladimir Lenin

There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience. A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel.
Vladimir Lenin

Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism.
Vladimir Lenin

[edited for length by neo-neocon]

Whose leading who and what ever happened to ELECTED LEADERSHIP?