Podhoretz. Via Hot Air.
Isn’t there a quagmire somewhere we can get involved in, now that the coast is clear?
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.
Cronkite’s retirement in 1982 put Dan Rather in the anchor chair, but Rather was never able to command the lofty heights of his predecessor. That was in part due to Rather’s own peculiar personality, but also to developments—technical developments involving the rise of cable television and, eventually, the personal computer—that would bring to a blessed end the shared monopoly over American news enjoyed by CBS, NBC, ABC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, and Newsweek.
When Rather attempted, in 2004, to bring down a president in the midst of a close reelection bid with a report based on obviously forged papers—a greater journalistic sin than Cronkite’s, by far—he was undone in 12 hours by a lawyer in Atlanta commenting on a blog and a jazz musician in Los Angeles with a blog who demonstrated the papers in question had been produced at least a decade after the report claimed they had. Had there been an Internet in 1968, and military bloggers aplenty, Cronkite’s false conclusion about Tet would have been challenged immediately; we would not have had to wait for Braestrup to publish his enormous book nine years later.
I should call my mom; she loved Cronkite. More even, perhaps, than she loves Jim Lehrer these days. Her ex-husband (my dad) had to remember when the CBS Evening News was on, so he wouldn’t call during the broadcast to talk about money, visitation rights, or whatever.
But of course that aura of infallibility extended to the entire CBS News crew, and I could never persuade her that we had good reasons for taking Dan Rather down—no matter how many times I tried to explain that as an office temp I’d worked on all kinds of typewriters back in the early 1980s, and there was no way that Rather’s documents could possibly have been produced on a typewriter. Or that I’d been typesetting on computers since 1989, and I knew what typeset documents looked like. (She thought I was simply being “partisan,” and she’s deeply uncomfortable with this blog. Fortunately, she doesn’t read it very often. But I am given to understand that it is not a wholesome hobby.)
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Don’t tell your mama that I’m hoping Cronkite (and McNamara) are in the hot place, screaming for eternity. I saw a lot of Vietnamese bodies in Hue City in ’68 with their hands wired behind them. Many were simply buried alive.
To have Cronkite declaring the series of battles that we eliminated the VC as a viable fighting force, plus sent several major NVA units to gook heaven as a defeat for us, well my mama always said that you go to Hell for lying just the same as if you were stealing chickens.
Tough when you and your mother don’t share fundamental view of human nature. What to do? Talk about other things, I guess. Lucky me, my 89-year-old father, Goomp, is my biggest blog fan.