Remembering Tet and CBS
President Bush did not compare Iraq to Vietnam the other day, though that was what ABC reported. He did, however, say that the recent violence in Iraq resembled the Tet Offensive. Historian John Keegan disagreed:
The recent upsurge of violence in Iraq in no way resembles the Tet offensive. At Tet, the Vietnamese new year, the North Vietnamese People’s Army simultaneously attacked 40 cities and towns in South Vietnam, using 84,000 troops. Of those, the communists lost 45,000 killed. No such losses have been recorded in Iraq at any place or any time. The Tet offensive proved to be a military disaster for the Vietnamese communists. It left them scarcely able to keep up their long-running, low-level war against the South Vietnamese government and the American army. Indeed, insofar as Tet was a defeat for the United States and for the South Vietnamese government, it was because the American media decided to represent it as such.
Keegan is correct about the media misrepresenting victory as defeat. On February 27, 1968 Walter Cronkite gave his famous verdict on Vietnam because of the Tet Offensive, which as we now know, was a North Vietnamese Battle of the Bulge and an American victory:
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.
President Johnson said in response: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.” Ronald Reagan said that Cronkite or CBS should have been indicted for what he said.
UPDATE
It is interesting to consider that the anti-war reporting and commentary of Cronkite has continued through the years at CBS. There was the Selling of the Pentagon in 1971, as dissected by John Podhoretz. The broadcast used dishonest editing and other techniques to make the Pentagon “sound inept, stupid, wrong, vicious.” It also included this chestnut:
A Democratic congressman from Louisiana named F. Edward Hebert, then chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, supplied some footage to Davis and his team of an interview he had filmed with a former Vietnam POW. Davis told Hebert’s press secretary “the videotape would be used for a POW special on CBS.” Outraged to have been used by CBS to aid its case that the Pentagon was improperly marketing itself, Hebert went on the attack. CBS re-aired the show a few days later with 20 minutes of responses after the airing by Hebert and others–followed by a rebuttal by CBS News president Richard S. Salant, who said pointedly on the air that “no one has refuted the essential accuracy” of the show.
There was the The Defense of the United States series in 1981, about which Lt. Colonel Evan Parrott wrote four years ago:
The anchorman for the series was Dan Rather, who stated that he hoped the “Defense” series would “start the debate rolling in every town and city in America”1 about defense spending in general and the Reagan buildup in particular. Special antipathy was directed toward the nuclear aspects of defense. That this program caused the current debate over nuclear weapons is questionable. There is no question, however, that, very much like “The Selling of the Pentagon,” it was awash in hyperbole and distortion, inadequately supported by a parade of so-called experts.
There was the 1982 The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception, in which:
In the spring of 1982, a CBS News employee disclosed to TV Guide that producer George Crile had violated network standards in making the program. The 24 May story by Sally Bedell and Don Kowet, “Anatomy of a Smear: How CBS News Broke the Rules and ‘Got’ Gen. Westmoreland,” stipulated how the production strayed from accepted practices. Significantly, TV Guide never disputed the premise of the program. The writers attacked the journalistic process, pointing out, for instance, that Crile screened interviews of other participants for one witness and then shot a second interview, that he avoided interviewing witnesses who would counter his thesis, and that answers to various questions were edited into a single response.
General Westmoreland settled his libel suit against CBS. Also, we have had Rathergate, notable, not for its uniqueness, but for continuing a long line of such reporting. It is not surprising then, that ABC misreported the remarks of President Bush in the interview with George Stephanopolis. ABC News (the network of the anti-Reagan The Day After in 1983) was in a sense merely following in the path of its older sister network in misreporting on matters of war and the military.
October 20th, 2006 at 3:17 pm
In the days of turmoil after 9/11, Dan Rather brought Cronkite on-screen as an elder sage who had lived through Pearl Harbor etc etc. I swear that Cronkite declared it was as patriotic to protest the war as it was to support it. That was what he chose to say while the situation was still fluid, the enemy had not been identified and, as it were, the smoke was still rising from Ground Zero. I was appalled that Cronkite had successfully disguised himself–plummy voice, pipe, mustache–as an embodiment of Middle America. It brings Jimmy Carter to mind.
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Jack, the Reagan/Cronkite Townhall link doesn’t work for me; this one does. “After watching Walter Cronkite’s coverage of the Vietnam War in December 1972, Reagan told President Richard Nixon, “under World War II circumstances, the network [CBS] would have been charged with treason.”" (Maybe so, but Vietnam was not fought under WWII circumstances.)