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Walter Cronkite Has Blood on His Hands
July 19, 2009
Matt Patterson
I vividly remember watching Cronkite during the '60's...every night it was the same ol' same ol': What's going wrong in Vietnam. How many American soldiers were killed each day. What the commanders and military WASN'T releasing to the press. I specifically recall Cronkite's nay-sayer reports, night after night, ignoring the facts and spinning everything into an American defeat. After my brother was killed in September '68 during the LZ Margo incident, my family stopped watching Cronkite and the evening news.On February 27, 1968, Walter Cronkite delivered his verdict on the (ongoing) war in Vietnam. The most trusted man in America pronounced that it was "...more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam War is to end in a stalemate."
Stalemate....
The Tet Offensive, which battle prompted Cronkite's televised towel throwing, was a decisive American victory -- of the more than 80,000 Communist troops who poured south on the Vietnamese New Year, American and allied South Vietnamese soldiers would kill or capture more than 58,000, while suffering a combined, and comparatively light, 9,000 casualties.
Tet was in fact a disaster for the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. Not only was the invasion repulsed by American forces - who fought valiantly and fiercely in spite of being taken by surprise -- but the uprising in the south upon which the Communists had gambled never happened.
From this, Cronkite conjured his "stalemate." But he was not done with his shameful propaganda, continuing,
"...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."
Not as victors...thus Cronkite convinced America the war was already over and lost, while our men, our soldiers, our sons and fathers, were fighting and dying and triumphing on the field of battle.
Uncle Walter got his wish. America came home -- Saigon fell. The result?
The Viet Cong consolidated its power over the whole of Vietnam. Like all good Communists, they proceeded to enslave the population, herding hundreds of thousands into concentration camps to be tortured, starved, and killed. The people of South Vietnam, who had trusted America and fought alongside us as allies, put to the sea en masse in whatever rickety craft they could find. Hundreds of thousands drowned in this desperate attempt to escape; by 1980, these "Vietnamese Boat People" were recognized as one of the greatest humanitarian disasters of the modern age, as over 800,000 people fled their country in terror.
But that was a picnic compared to what happened next door in Cambodia, where the North Vietnamese-created Khmer Rouge seized power and implemented a policy of systematic extermination. Out of a population of perhaps 7 million, the Communists slaughtered between 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians. Millions more were forced into slave labor.
Walter Cronkite was called the most trusted man in America. He abused that trust, peddling his own opinion (hope?) - steeped in anti-American ideology - as fact. The Killing Fields were fertilized with this man's lies.
So speak to me not of this newsman's great legacy - it lays buried under a mountain of skulls in South East Asia.
I never watched Cronkite again. In my eyes, his vulgar anti-war bias was equivalent to the anti-American propoganda espoused by the hard-core leftists...beyond the media or folk anti-war activists...rivaling the overt anti-American activities of MOBE, Weathermen, socialist A.J. Muste, Maoist Howard Zinn, and on and on...
People who "thought" their actions were morally defensible, conceivably with the intent of pressuring U.S. leaders into ending the war...saving lives...though pompously, arrogantly devoid of the scruples to comprehend that their actions motivated and empowered the NVA/communists to escalate the killing, and subsequently resulted in the otherwise avoidable deaths of hundreds of thousands of combatants, and the incomprehensible deaths of millions of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian who died while fleeing after the war, or were rounded up by the Khmer Rouge, NVA and Pathet Lao and genocidally butchered by the thousands in open pits. What resulted from the anti-war movement had nothing to do with war or politics. The post-war holocaustic deaths of millions of Vietnamese and Hmong was shear evil: An evil facilitated by the errant demagoguery of anti-Americans with which Walter Cronkite held court.
These past few days, everytime I see or hear his name on the radio or television, I change stations. I'll wager right now Cronkite's soul is facing the blood soaked legacy of the millions of lives ended due to his nonchalant bias. His eternity in journalist's hell: A well deserved resting place.
