PS: You also note in the book that, in 1968, Cronkite privately urged Robert F. Kennedy, a dove on Vietnam, to get into the presidential race to take on LBJ, who in the end decided not to run for another term as president.
DB: I call foul on that. He should have come clean and let the public know that. Vietnam tore everyone’s compass apart. Cronkite was no exception.
PS: Notwithstanding Cronkite’s roots in wire-service reporting, he also, as you write in the book, “opened the floodgate for the line between commentary and news to be blurred.” The groundbreaking example is that special report, on Feb. 27, 1968, dissenting from LBJ on Vietnam. (Cronkite concluded, on air, that “We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and in Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds.”)
DB: I would see February, 27, 1968 as the beginning of what you now see as the news anchor on cable, editorializing nonstop, and when breaking news happens, they come on to be the fact-finder. The brand of the TV personality is now what carries weight. People are tuning in for the personality, not the news itself. That is part of Cronkite’s legacy, for better or for worse.
PS: His most famous moment as an anchor was the announcement of JFK’s shocking death. The power of the scene derives from its seeming spontaneity—the halting speech, the eyeglasses taken off and then put back on—and yet one of his own producers told you that “he was like an actor in the middle of his performance of a lifetime.” What’s your take?
DB: Cronkite was a ham, a jocular ham. He loved in college to act in plays. He loved the stage. He learned the tricks of the trade as a broadcaster. There were actors’ tricks, which included how you take glasses on and off. He looked at the clock to mark the moment for history, took off his glasses, got teary eyed a bit. It was the right performance. He was a pro. A tradesman. And being a good actor is part of the trade.
PS: It seems impossible these days not to see Cronkite and his era except through a veil of nostalgia.
DB: Absolutely. No question about it. It seemed like a more simple, sane time for the media. It’s [now] the post-Cronkite, mass-media culture. There will be no new pastor-in-chief.
The impact of Cronkite, and specifically Cronkite's break with the Johnson administration over the Vietnam War, is vastly overrated. I think the fallacy is called 'post hoc, ergo propter hoc' in Latin. US participation in the war went on for another five years. The 1968 and 1972 elections produced overwhelmingly right-leaning victories at the presidential level. LBJ did not lose 'the country' over the war; as anyone actually alive and sentient in 1968 knows, he lost the country over his disastrous domestic policies, notably the race riots which followed the burst of liberal legislation on civil rights, and rising (justified) fear of violent crime, which was dismissed as racist by liberal savants. (Johnson's Attorney-General was Ramsay Clark!) The only thing Cronkite's dissent from the war indicated was that Johnson had lost the Martha's Vineyard class of affluent Democrats. Public opinion on the ground about the defining social issues in the US during this period was very different from that of Cronkite's views - there was an obvious and growing disconnect between elite opinion and mass opinion during the Cronkite years. The chattering classes spend a little too much time talking to themselves.
I don't understand this nostalgia for the Cronkite period 1963-1981. One yardstick, small but telling: during this period, JFK was assassinated, his brother was assassinated, Martin Luther King was assassinated, George Wallace was shot, Sen. Stennis was shot, President Ford was shot at twice, and Ronald Reagan was shot. By instructive contrast, in these supposedly partisan and mean-spirited times, there had been no such violence directed at a political figure after 1981 until the shooting of Rep. Giffords in 2011.
#1 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Wed 13 Jun 2012 at 12:44 PM
As Bill Clinton famously said, "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is."
Mark Richard's use of the Latin "hoc" (this) intimates that the "this" referred to is the end of the Vietnam War. As one who was indeed "live and sentient" (and an Evening News staffer) in 1968, my recollection of the informed commentary at the time is that the "this" that Walter was credited with (or reviled for) was that his break with the LBJ administration seemed to presage the end of the Johnson presidency, not war’s-end, which, as Mark correctly points out, was still years away.
But that's all just wordplay. Mark's philippic, typical of right-wing political commentary, uses an assortment of actual facts, near facts and factoids to reach a peroration that appears on the surface to pass the ipso facto smell test, but which is, finally, neither ipso nor facto.
#2 Posted by Art Kane, CJR on Wed 13 Jun 2012 at 05:37 PM
Pardon. This comment is not to incite - really - but just to allay my curiosity.
Wouldn't a conflict of interest disclaimer be in order for this journalistic piece, since the interviewee's book is being advertised on the CJR website please?
~ Isa
#3 Posted by Isa Cann, CJR on Wed 13 Jun 2012 at 06:13 PM
To Art: post-Sixties historiography/hagiography has generally, and inaccurately, cited Cronkite's announced opposition to the Vietnam War as a public-opinion turning point against the War itself, not just against Lyndon Johnson. The 'doves' never did have a majority of public opinion on their side if being anti-war meant a precipitous withdrawal of troops from Southeast Asia, though this is often strongly implied in contemporary discourse recalling Cronkite. LBJ was already in political trouble before Cronkite's announcement, for the reasons I noted. Wallace's candidacy in 1968 was fueled almost entirely by alarm over violent crime and urban rioting, and Nixon campaigned strongly on those issues. The latter did not campaign on 'winning the war'. The mainstream Democrats were charging that 'law and order is a code-word for racism', not a winning strategy in retrospect.
You are, of course, invited to specify what were 'near facts' and 'factoids' in my post. My original observation was that the importance of Cronkite's conversion on Vietnam has been given too much retrospective importance, and I think I'll stick with that opinion as a teen growing up in a fairly representative area (central Ohio) in 1968 - though I understand why a NY-based 'Evening News staffer' might think otherwise. 'Right-wing phillipic'? Groan. These attepts at ideological abuse not only have liver spots on them, but they uninentionally confirm the argument that elite opinion in places such as NY and DC was becoming untethered from mass opinion during the never-never 1960s and the dreary 1970s.
#4 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Fri 15 Jun 2012 at 12:50 PM
Of course, if we're going to get all nostalgic about past presidents interrupted, anyone remember people getting huffy over that Carol Coleman interview a while back?
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_06/004222.php
Unless you're a fricken protestor with code pink or teabaggers for truth, you don't interrupt the speech, you interrupt during the question period during the response to your question just like Helen Thomas did when Bush finally asked a question of her 7.9 years into his presidency.
If someone had pulled this on Bush, jobs would have been lost, networks would have been demonized, press passes revoked, and bombs would have been dropped.
This is yet another episode of republicans being ahistorcal a-holes.
#5 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Fri 15 Jun 2012 at 06:50 PM
Whoops, another episode of pages on a small device getting mixed up.
My bad.
#6 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Fri 15 Jun 2012 at 07:00 PM