Salant wrote a highly confidential memo in the late summer of 1967 instructing correspondents to explain what their stories from Vietnam meant in the larger context of the war. Tell us what it all means, Salant implored. This, it seemed to Laurence, was an order to draw conclusions from what he witnessed in the war, to provide personal impressions at the end of his reports, to do commentary for the first time. The extent to which this memo from Salant to manager of news Ralph Paskman was circulated, however, remains unclear. Perhaps few others besides Cronkite, Midgley, and Manning saw it. But by then everyone at CBS News knew that Marvin Kalb, the CBS News diplomatic correspondent who covered the 1964 Senate debate of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, had found out that “contingent drafts” of the Tonkin Resolution were drafted long before the incident supposedly occurred.
But just before Laurence left for Saigon in August 1967 (his second tour), Paskman called his foreign correspondent into the office and closed the door. He told Laurence the meeting was confidential, not to be repeated to anyone. “I agreed,” Laurence recalled. “Then he took the memo out of the drawer in his desk and showed it to me. He allowed me to read it briefly, as if it were secret, and then took it away and put it back in the drawer and closed it.” Paskman reiterated not to mention the memo to anybody. Once again Laurence reassured him that mum was the word. “His expression was one of worry,” Laurence recalled, “as if he were opening the door to an unknown, possibly dangerous new policy.”
When Fouhy had visited with Salant just before leaving New York, he had one question: What is our Vietnam budget? “Spend,” Salant snapped, “whatever it takes.” The bureau grew to more than thirty-five employees (some of them South Vietnamese). The bureau chief, cameramen, and correspondents were American, French, Japanese, German, and Australian (the exception was Safer’s photographer at Cam Ne, Ha Thuc Can). Duong Van Ri, a Vietnamese soundman, got promoted to camera work in 1968. “We all knew,” Plante recalled, “that Salant and Cronkite, by 1967, didn’t think the war was going to end well.” WCBS-AM in New York, the second CBS radio station to adopt an all-news format, regularly ran cutting-edge reports from South Vietnam that differed wildly from what the Johnson administration claimed had taken place. Cronkite was its most devoted listener.
All this Vietnam angst had some CBS News folks going buggy. Midgley wanted to balance the grim news from the Saigon bureau with some relief for Evening News viewers. In 1967, Charles Kuralt, a CBS correspondent originally from Wilmington, North Carolina, who had been considered for the anchor position in 1962, suggested a new Americana feature for the show. He was tired of covering wars and revolutions in South America and Vietnam. Midgley was not at first receptive. The thirty-minute program needed, if anything, more news spots. He was reluctant to hand two or three minutes over to anyone—and to Kuralt in particular.
Slightly overweight, prematurely balding, with eyes that seemed to case every room he entered, Kuralt didn’t look like a Nielsen ratings winner. He looked like an innocuous man—a dead ringer for the hot dog–vending Ignatius J. Reilly from John Kennedy Toole’s novel A Confederacy of Dunces—who was easy to lose in a crowd. Furthermore, everyone at CBS knew that Cronkite bristled at the very word feature. And Kuralt’s travelogue idea was at the opposite end of the spectrum from hard-hitting news, for which Cronkite and CBS were known. It involved no investigation, no battlefield bravura, no blunt reporting on the injustices of American society. Kuralt wanted to take a camera and find stories about everyday Americans. Cronkite was adamantly opposed. He couldn’t bear the thought of filling the Evening News—his Evening News—with anything soft, fluffy, or deserving of the worst insult of the 1960s: irrelevant. But this was a rare instance in which he failed to have the last say on the Evening News’ content; he lost the battle. Midgley agreed to a compromise by which Kuralt’s “On the Road” feature would run on a trial basis for three months, starting in October 1967.
Building on a following he had developed as the first anchor of CBS News Sunday Magazine, Kuralt reported good news about big accomplishments in the small worlds of innovative Americans around the country. Starting with a segment on New England autumnal leaf color-changing, Kuralt soon profiled an old black man in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, who made bricks; a train engineer who maintained working steam locomotives in Wisconsin; a Vermonter who marketed a nineteenth-century treatment for chapped cow udders; and a Southerner who fixed bicycles so that no child in the neighborhood would be without one. Kuralt’s homespun two-minute stories were not the stuff normally regarded as national news. Time magazine succinctly described Kuralt’s “On the Road” features as “two-minute cease-fires” from the tumultuous era. The gentle-hearted segments, for which Kuralt won two Peabody Awards and an Emmy, proved essential to the Evening News, allowing it to cover troubled times in stark terms by also celebrating the basic values upon which even a splintered country could agree: American generosity, humor, nonconformity, and dignity. As Midgley noted, Kuralt liked to talk with “oldsters,” as if they were the only rational voices left in an America obsessed with Vietnam.
Cronkite soon came around to embrace the value of “On the Road” on the Evening News, ultimately befriending its host. Just as Murrow had developed a tag team of smart guys in the 1940s and 1950s, Cronkite was doing the same in the late 1960s. Kuralt became one of his favorite sidekicks. Together they toyed with the idea of buying a string of radio stations, with Kuralt eventually acquiring WELY in Ely, Minnesota.
At the end of 1967, the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite finally passed The Huntley-Brinkley Report in the ratings. Kuralt was a winning factor. It had been a tough slog since 1962. The excellence of the Vietnam correspondent corps was a major part of the broadcast’s success. The likable Kuralt and the lofty Sevareid contributed to the appeal of the mannered Cronkite broadcast. The network’s unceasing promotion of Cronkite as the best anchor helped, too.
It was becoming clear by Christmas 1967 that the Vietnam War was going to be the big issue in the 1968 presidential election. The entire CBS Evening News program was now in technicolor: the blood of Vietnam was now deep red in people’s living rooms. President Johnson no longer trusted Cronkite and his CBS ilk. At a March 1967 dinner party, he told reporters that CBS and NBC were “controlled by the Vietcong.”
Cronkite tried to differentiate Johnson’s policy from the grunts who were fighting in Vietnam, young draftees whose main objective was to survive. None of the officers Cronkite interviewed in Vietnam below the rank of lieutenant colonel said they were fighting for the flag; they were fighting to protect their band of brothers. By 1967, Johnson’s entire Vietnam enterprise was falling apart. Heroin use by troops was steadily increasing, as was NSU (non-specific urethritis, what the military called gonorrhea). There was a rash of “fragging”—tossing grenades into the tents and barracks of unpopular officers and NCOs. “No one had a clear idea of why they were fighting this war,” recalled Safer.
With the promise of a close election in 1968, Cronkite knew in late 1967 that CBS News was in for a tumultuous year. President Johnson, with his overworked Texas mannerisms, was by now so roundly distrusted regarding Vietnam that Democrats were breaking ranks. As early as 1966, Salant expected Senator Robert Kennedy of New York to challenge Johnson for the Democratic nomination, and CBS News began covering him closely. Cronkite used to joke that his two newest hobbies were “bird and Bobby watching.” At just forty years of age, Robert, the brother of John F. Kennedy, had written a book in 1967—To Make a Newer World—calling for the U.S. to withdraw from Vietnam. Eugene McCarthy, Minnesota’s poet-intellectual senator, a dove on Vietnam, declared his candidacy in November 1967 as the antiwar choice; former CBS News vice president Blair Clark served as his campaign manager. Realizing that the Vietnam War was growing more and more unpopular, that November General Westmoreland delivered a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, claiming U.S. troops had reached a point “where the end begins to come i
nto view.”
On the Republican side, Richard Nixon was back in politics, having lost the presidential race in 1960. He, too, distrusted CBS News. In 1968, he would be part of a field that included three GOP governors who were either declared or presumed candidates: Nelson Rockefeller (New York), George Romney (Michigan), and Ronald Reagan (California). George Wallace, the Democratic governor of Alabama, was rumored to be gearing up for a third-party run as a segregationist. Cronkite worried that the deteriorating situation in Southeast Asia had become more than President Johnson could handle. “LBJ, just bypassing Stanton, would telephone Cronkite directly to grouse about CBS Evening News war coverage,” Charles Osgood recalled. “Vietnam was more than he could take, really.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Tet Offensive
WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?—THERE IS NO LIGHT!—STILL THE RED MENACE—HEADING TO SAIGON—WESTMORELAND LIES—OLD-STYLE REPORTER—HIS FRIEND GENERAL ABRAMS—COCKTAILS ON THE CARAVELLE ROOF—JOHN LAURENCE’S ADVICE—BARELY ESCAPING—THE CRONKITE MOMENT—THE GREAT STALEMATE—MARCH TO FOLLY—PRODUCER BENSLEY GETS SHOT IN NAM—LBJ WON’T RUN—MYTHS OVER THE SPECIAL REPORT—THE FAIRNESS DOCTRINE—AN EVENING WITH TIM O’BRIEN
Walter Cronkite was sitting in his cluttered CBS News office at the broadcast center on West Fifty-seventh Street on January 31, 1968, when he heard a clattering over the wire service machines in the Evening News newsroom. He meandered down the corridor to read the Associated Press dispatch from South Vietnam about a string of surprise North Vietnamese and Vietcong attacks on Saigon, Hué, and numerous other sites (soon to be known collectively as the Tet Offensive). Assault teams had even attacked the U.S. embassy, the South Vietnamese General Staff headquarters, Bien Hoa Air Base, and the U.S. Army base at Long Binh. The wire made Cronkite uneasy. Wasn’t Saigon supposed to be a U.S. stronghold? His frustration made him determined to report the U.S. setback as thoroughly as he would a U.S. victory. Heading over to producer Sandy Socolow’s adjacent office, where Ernest Leiser and producer Stanhope Gould were discussing that night’s program, Cronkite waved the dispatch in their faces. “What the hell is going on?” he asked, full of consternation. “I thought we were winning the war!”
The CBS News bureau in Saigon had reported to New York that the U.S. and South Vietnamese army forces had been surprised and were suffering heavy casualties. Many reporters throughout 1967 had believed that the Johnson administration was lying about imminent U.S. victory in South Vietnam. The AP dispatch of the Tet Offensive was proof that the end of the war was nowhere in sight. When Cronkite read it, his first thought was that R. W. Apple of The New York Times was right: the war was indeed a stalemate. Cronkite, remaining pro–U.S. troops, had become frustrated by Johnson’s “light at the end of the tunnel” drivel. “We spoke just after Tet,” Andy Rooney recalled. “And he felt miserable that he hadn’t taken Apple and, for that matter, David Halberstam, more seriously. He now knew they were spot-on.”
At the CBS Evening News the grisly specter of the Tet Offensive dominated coverage for days. When Cronkite tried to wedge in long-form stories about a California physician performing the first heart transplant in the United States, and Japan becoming the world’s second-strongest superpower, they got bumped for a Tet exclusive. When Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941, there were at most ten thousand operating TV sets in the United States. In January 1968, sixteen out of every seventeen U.S. homes had a TV set. According to the Nielsen ratings, CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite and NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report were seen in more than a hundred million homes during the first week of the Tet Offensive. “Vietnam was America’s first television war,” Washington Post journalist Don Oberdorfer wrote, “and the Tet Offensive was America’s first television superbattle.”
When Cronkite was a United Press reporter, he learned an important lesson: be your own eyewitness. Worried about the proliferation of unsubstantiated rumors and deliberate misinformation streaming out of Saigon, he believed it was essential to now take in the Vietnamese situation for himself with “mind wide open.” The UP and AP offered chunks of the story, but, as was to be expected, analysis was scant. The first statistics coming out of Tet were dire: two thousand U.S. dead and twice that number of South Vietnamese soldiers; around ten thousand civilians killed. Yet the initial CBS reports were overdrawn: the North Vietnamese Army and especially the Vietcong suffered a tactical disaster during Tet. Confusion reigned over whether Tet was a win or a loss for the United States. “I said,” he recalled, “well, I need to go because I thought we needed this documentary about Tet. We were getting daily reports, but we didn’t know where it was going at that time; we may lose the war; if we’re going to lose the war, I should be there, that was one thing. If the Tet Offensive was successful in the end, it meant that we were going to be fleeing, as we did eventually anyway, but I wanted to be there for the clash.”
Cronkite went to see CBS News president Dick Salant about broadcasting on Tet from Saigon. Cronkite decided before he even pitched Salant that he wanted to “try and present an assessment of the situation as one who had not previously taken a public position on the war.” No longer would he be impartial. The time had come to weigh in. From a TV ratings perspective it was a calculated risk; he might end up driving the hawks away from the Evening News for good. According to Phil Scheffler, CBS News executive producer of special events at the time, Salant approved the idea of the South Vietnamese trip but wanted Cronkite to make his bold statement as a commentator at the end of a CBS Evening News broadcast. “Walter said he couldn’t possibly do an editorial on the CBS Evening News,” Scheffler recalled, “which he considered sacrosanct.”
Salant listened attentively to Cronkite. At first, he was dismayed at his anchorman’s insistence on flying to South Vietnam immediately to report on Tet. He couldn’t afford for his star anchorman to get killed in a plane crash or ambushed by the Vietcong on a back highway. Each time Cronkite mentioned the Pentagon’s exaggerations, Salant cringed as if his star reporter were throwing stones in the blades of a huge floor fan. He had never before seen Cronkite so animated. His response was that he was overreacting to Tet. “If you need to be there, if you are demanding to go, I’m not going to stop you,” Salant said, “but I think it’s foolish to risk your life in a situation like this, risk the life of our anchorman, and I’ve got to think about it.”
That was Salant’s typical way of saying no: thinking about it. To Cronkite’s pleasant surprise, Salant then threw out a lifeline. “But if you are going to go,” he said, “I think you ought to do a documentary about going, about why you went, and maybe you are going to have to say something about where the war ought to go at that point.”
The ironclad rule at CBS News was that editorializing by a journalist was verboten. If Salant detected a single verb or adjective that lurched toward editorializing on the CBS Evening News, the reporter would automatically be taken to the woodshed. The brand of CBS News was impartiality. Now Salant, to Cronkite’s utter astonishment, was willing to break the network’s golden rule. He didn’t have to press his argument further, because Salant was already on the same page. “You have established a reputation, and thanks to you and through us, we at CBS have established a reputation for honesty and factual reporting and being in the middle of the road,” Salant told Cronkite. “You yourself have talked about the fact that we get shot at from both sides, you yourself have said that we get about as many letters saying that we are damned conservatives as saying that we are damned liberals. We support the war. We’re against the war. You yourself say that if we weigh the letters, they weigh about the same. We figure we are about middle of the road. So if we’ve got that reputation, maybe it would be helpful, if people trust us that much, trust you that much, for you to say what you think. Tell them what it looks like, from you being on the ground, what is your opinion.”
“You’re getting pretty heavy,” Cronkite said to Salant.
Salant a
nd Cronkite settled on doing a prime-time CBS News Special Report that would be called “Report from Vietnam: Who, What, When, Where, and Why?” (Long after the Vietnam War had ended, Cronkite would fume whenever someone misrepresented his Tet commentary as part of the CBS Evening News when it was, in truth, a prime-time Special Report.) Bags packed, immunized, Cronkite was headed west into the Vietnam war zone. The Battle of Hué was being fought as ARVN and U.S. Marine elements counterattacked to expel enemy forces from the city, and Cronkite wanted to see the action firsthand. “It was an Orwellian trip,” David Halberstam wrote. “Orwell had written of a Ministry of Truth in Charge of Lying and a Ministry of Peace in Charge of War—and here was Cronkite flying to Saigon, where the American military command was surrounded by defeat and calling it a victory.” The risks for Cronkite professionally were high. If he became known as a dove, his reputation for journalistic objectivity would be downgraded from that of “Sphinx to pundit.”
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