6 years in, and a 40-year flashback

As has been widely noted, this past week marked the fifth anniversary of the Bush administration's unethical, immoral, and unwinnable war in Iraq. As the war enters its sixth bloody year, no end appears in sight. The fragile, fractious political situation in Iraq is no better now than it ever was. The public infrastructure is still shattered, with such basic necessities as electricity and potable water still widely unavailable in many regions of the country for more than a few hours a day. The so-called surge is stalled and its tenuous successes are failing to take hold. Everyday violence is still omnipresent, and the 3,000-year-old civilization of Iraq is still in shattered ruins. By any measure, George Bush's ill-advised Iraq adventure is an unqualified disaster.

Numerous comparisons have been made between the untenable situation in Iraq today and the equally untenable situation in Vietnam back in the 1960's. Not all of those comparisons are apt or accurate, but many of them are. America in the spring of 1968 was a very different place than it is in the spring of 2008, even though it's fundamentally unchanged in many ways today. Racial and political tensions were far higher then than they are today, with riots in the streets still in the news and bombings of banks and other public institutions still far too common for comfort. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were raw wounds in the shared psyche of America in 1968. And overseas, an endless war against amorphous insurgents continued to drain the hearts and minds and blood and treasure of our nation's best and brightest for the sake of a cause that no one could satisfactorily explain at home.

One thing that was strikingly different in the America of 1968 than the America of today was the power of the broadcast news media. Print newspapers and magazines were still the dominant source of information, but the combined influence of the three broadcast television networks was huge. In our current climate of multiple non-stop cable 'news' channels populated by pontificating pundits who eagerly substitute jingoistic bloviating for honest journalism at every turn, it can be difficult to remember that once upon a time, instead of today's 24/7 overload of endlessly-recycled talking-head talking points ad nauseum, there were only a couple of hours of evening news coming from only a few sources that presented solid stories from real reporters in real time.

One of the most widely admired and deeply respected broadcast reporters of the day was CBS News' Walter Cronkite. Cronkite was a veteran reporter with a well-earned reputation for objectivity and for thoroughly examining all sides of every story he covered. In many ways he was the antithesis of today's evening news anchors, with their plain partisanship and passionate polemicizing on the key issues of the day. Cronkite was rational, reasonable, and impartial at all times -- which made it all the more shocking when, on February 27, 1968, he finished reporting on his most recent extended trip to cover the front lines in Vietnam by delivering an on-camera editorial that still resonates as one of the most important moments in television news history:

Tonight, back in more familiar surroundings in New York, 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. The Vietcong did not win by a knockout, but neither did we. The referees of history may make it a draw.

Another standoff may be coming in the big battles expected south of the Demilitarized Zone. Khe Sanh could well fall, with a terrible loss in American lives, prestige and morale, and this is a tragedy of our stubbornness there; but the bastion no longer is a key to the rest of the northern regions, and it is doubtful that the American forces can be defeated across the breadth of the DMZ with any substantial loss of ground. Another standoff.

On the political front, past performance gives no confidence that the Vietnamese government can cope with its problems, now compounded by the attack on the cities. It may not fall, it may hold on, but it probably won't show the dynamic qualities demanded of this young nation. Another standoff.

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.

In 2008, it's difficult for us to fully appreciate the remarkable stature that Walter Cronkite held in 1968. He was the pre-eminent figure in broadcast journalism at a time when broadcast journalism was the dominant factor in shaping public opinion. Over a span of decades, viewers consistently rated him as "the most trusted man in America." Cronkite was far from being a radical or a firebrand; he typified the best qualities of objective reporting and exuded an avuncular, trustworthy style that reached out to everyday Americans in a way that no commentator can hope to equal today. So it's no wonder that when then-President Lyndon Johnson heard of Cronkite's televised comments about the war in Vietnam being unwinnable at best, he turned to his closest advisers and said, “That’s it. If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.”

Cronkite himself was well aware of the requirements of his role as one of the most trusted news reporters in a time when news reporters were generally trusted much more than they are today. As he said in a 2006 Frontline interview, "A journalist covering politics, most of us are aware of the necessity to try to be sure we're unbiased in our reporting. That's one of the fundamentals of good journalism. We all have our likes and our dislikes. But ... when we're doing news -- when we're doing the front-page news, not the back page, not the op-ed pages, but when we're doing the daily news, covering politics -- it is our duty to be sure that we do not permit our prejudices to show. That is simply basic journalism."

As for his decision to break with his own established traditions and deliver an uncharacteristic on-camera editorial that so powerfully influenced the historical events that followed, consider this exchange between Cronkite and the BBC's Tim Sebastian from a interview in 2000:

BBC: You did a report in 1968 on the Tet offensive which was credited with swaying American public opinion towards removing US troops from Vietnam. Did you cross the line? Did you go too far?

Cronkite: I didn't go too far. I crossed the line! The difference was that we enunciated very clearly that this was an editorial. It came at the end of a documentary on my experiences going out to cover Tet -- one person's view of Tet.

I got there within a week of the Tet offensive. I saw this action and we reported it. We said, "After this commercial break, I'm going to come back and give you my personal opinion of what I saw out there. This will be my personal editorial which we do not do normally do here, but I think it's important."

In the turbocharged, spin-drenched, blogoswirled political climate of today, we need a reasonable, rational, reliable source of real news and informed opinion like Walter Cronkite more than ever. Alas, the closest thing to his kind of consummate professionalism we've had in recent years is CNN's (nee ABC's) Aaron Brown, whose detailed and cerebral reporting was edged off the air by his network owners in favor of Anderson Cooper's edgier style in a blatant quest for ratings at the end of 2005. (Brown went on to take the John J. Rhodes Chair in Public Policy and American Institutions at Arizona State University, and it's no coincidence that he is now a professor in that school's highly-acclaimed Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.)

Given the fractured and factionalized state of modern broadcast and cable reporting, with newspapers turning into online portals and bloggers dominating the discourse among today's political influentials, it's highly unlikely that any one journalist will ever be able to have such a powerful influence on the America of 2008 and beyond as Walter Cronkite had on the America of 1968 and afterwards.

But 40 years ago, Cronkite's conscience drove him to step outside his carefully cultivated objectivity and directly address the nation with the understanding he'd absorbed from a month's time on the ground in Vietnam -- and that helped to change the course of history, providing a lesson for all of us about the perils of waging an unwinnable war that the Bush administration seems so regrettably determined to forget over and over again.

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