walter cronkite vietnam

Now that doesn’t look like a communist victory.

Walter Cronkite.Cronkite told Kennedy that he should run for president. There are just the names of the Americans who lost their lives in Southeast Asia.The east and west ends of the memorial feature the names from the very midpoint of the war, as measured by Americans killed. The referees of history may make it a draw.”At the close of the hour, Cronkite, back at his desk in New York, delivers his verdict. May 25, 2018 at 12:12 PM EDT Until 1968, Walter Cronkite believed what his government told him about the Vietnam War. . “The Viet Cong did not win by a knockout, but neither did we.

North Vietnam benefited politically from the Tet Offensive when Walter Cronkite, a respected television newscaster, swayed many Americans and President Johnson, by giving his personal opinion on a national prime time editorial: "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 … Who was truly winning this war? But then he went to Hue, the ancient imperial capital, where the most intense urban fighting of the war was grinding along day after day, house to house, room to room. A few days later, Kennedy jumped into the race. There are no dubious metrics of enemy deaths, no media reports, no speeches. Before his report, Cronkite was known as a warhawk, and supported American involvement in the overseas conflict. Cronkite left Hue in a helicopter carrying the remains of 12 Marines in body bags.“He was just doing the gumshoe reporting all over Vietnam, and the print reporters all swooned over Cronkite for doing it,” says historian and Cronkite biographer Douglas Brinkley.U.S. He acknowledges that what he is about to say is “subjective.” It’s his “[I]t seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate . Walter Cronkite, Vietnam, and the Decline of Media Credibility. Walter Cronkites Eltern waren der Zahnarzt Walter Leland Cronkite, Sr. und dessen Frau Helen Lena Fritsche. On March 31, LBJ went on national television and announced a partial halt to bombing in North Vietnam amid new peace negotiations. Cronkite doesn’t talk about military casualties. . “They say 10,000 died and we lost 249 and the South Vietnamese lost 500. He argued the opposite. There are no images of body bags. Barbie Zelizer, professor of communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, says news photos — such as the famous Eddie Adams photo of the national police chief executing a Viet Cong fighter — were just as central in shaping public opinion.That photo incited revulsion, depicting a callous disregard for human life.

Meanwhile, a similar battle was happening on the home front. It looks like a home movie. If wounded in the early years, they weren’t even eligible for a Purple Heart.Much of the U.S. effort was aimed at rooting out communist guerrilla fighters in South Vietnam — the “pacification” effort. Did the media coverage of Tet change the way Americans viewed the war?

— to run for a U.S. Senate seat in New York.McCarthy ran a shockingly strong second to Johnson in New Hampshire. Until 1968, Walter Cronkite believed what his government told him about the Vietnam War. Kennedy told Cronkite that the Democrats wanted him — Cronkite! That allowed him to fly to Vietnam like an intercontinental ballistic missile of objectivity. This didn’t look like a war the Americans were winning. There was no government censorship, but negative news reports infuriated President Lyndon Baines Johnson, and he didn’t hesitate to let the networks know it.That had been the case in August 1965. The role of the news anchor has been diminished. Cronkite’s assessment, which came after he visited what then was South Vietnam in the wake of the communist-led Tet offensive, was unremarkable for the times. In the episode on Tet, he addressed the criticism that reporters got the story wrong.When you root around in the history books, you realize there’s little consensus about anything.