Cronkite

by Douglas Brinkley

  On February 6, 1968, Cronkite flew from New York to San Francisco, then on to Honolulu and Tokyo. His mission was concise: to “see for himself what’s happened in South Vietnam.” On February 11, after major delays at the Tokyo airport, Cronkite, accompanied by producers Ernie Leiser and Jeff Gralnick and a combat-experienced camera crew, arrived in Saigon. From the beginning, the CBSers felt like sitting ducks on the tarmac. Bombs were bursting, whooshing, and screaming around the outskirts of the city and downtown alike. Long-range artillery fire could be heard in the distance. The faces of the Vietnamese street children they saw, terrified by self-propelled rockets and recoilless rifles and mortars, were wrought with fear. After World War II, Cronkite had encountered the same hollowed look in the eyes of displaced persons in Belgium and the Netherlands, a fright that spoke of hunger, panic, and confusion. The formerly elegant city of Saigon was a combat zone. Things had deteriorated since his 1965 visit.

  Wearing a flak jacket and army helmet, Cronkite traveled all over the Vietnamese countryside south of the DMZ that February, keeping detailed notes, recording observations on Tet in the war-ravaged nation. A surreal picture made the wire services: the CBS anchorman wearing dark sunglasses with a gentleman’s pipe jutting out of his mouth, like Douglas MacArthur headed back to the Philippines. This was quite a sensational return to being a war correspondent. Doubtless an adrenaline rush was coursing through Cronkite as his Jeep rumbled past soldiers and peasants alike. He gave a thumbs-up to every fellow correspondent he encountered. Members of the press tend to ignore one another on the job (even in a war zone) because they’re always competing for the same story. Contrary to the norm, all the Vietnam hands in the press swarmed around Cronkite like bees, determined to tell the CBS anchorman about the real ground game in Hué and Khe Sanh. Cronkite’s Tet notebook—today housed in the archives of the University of Texas at Austin’s Briscoe Center for American History—is loaded with scribbled observations about the on-the-ground conditions he encountered that February in South Vietnam, as well as commentary from other journalists.

  To make the CBS News Special Report work, Cronkite and Leiser knew they needed to interview soldiers at U.S. Army outposts throughout the South Vietnamese countryside and avoid clustering around official press conferences. Cronkite had made that mistake during his first trip to Vietnam, in 1965. The CBS team instead headed for the U.S. Marine Corps base in the hilly countryside of Khe Sanh. This was a very dangerous spot for any reporter to visit. The fighting around the city of ten thousand was so fierce that the CBS team couldn’t get into the American garrison. Shifting plans, Cronkite and his team now headed to Hué. Quickly Cronkite saw that in all three places—Saigon, Khe Sanh, and Hué—anarchy appeared to be off the charts.

  Only a few hours on the ground, Cronkite hustled up an interview with General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in the war. It didn’t go well. Westmoreland was brusque and dismissive, with a predatory bearing. To Cronkite’s amazement, the general claimed that Tet was an American victory, that the North Vietnamese had failed in their military objectives. That was true, but the strength of the enemy force, and its resolve, was far greater than the general and his staff were willing to concede to Cronkite. This was the twelfth day since the Tet Offensive began, and while the United States was indeed winning back territory, almost two thousand Americans had perished trying to thwart the Vietcong surprise attack. Westmoreland mildly reprimanded Cronkite to do his homework properly. The Vietcong laid siege to Saigon during the Tet Offensive, Westmoreland admitted, but didn’t capture the city. Therefore, it was clear as day that, to Westmoreland, the Department of Defense was winning the Vietnam War. With one caveat: two hundred thousand more troops were needed.

  The upbeat Westmoreland had told Cronkite, in no uncertain terms, that the ARVN and three U.S. Marine Corps battalions had defeated more than ten thousand entrenched People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) and Vietcong at Hué. As Cronkite and company headed up Highway 1 (the main north–south road of Vietnam, running the length of the country from the Chinese border to the Mekong Delta) to Hué, they realized Westmoreland had lied. The Marines were still trying to retake the city. Explosions were going off everywhere. “The battle was still on in Hué when I got up there,” Cronkite recalled. “It lasted twenty-seven days.”

  Reporters working for AP, The New York Times, UP, and Reuters were surprised to see the renowned Cronkite walking through the bombed-out streets of Hué, gunfire erupting in the vicinity, with the poise of a combat veteran. Like the younger correspondents, he slept on the bare floor of a Vietnamese doctor’s house that had been turned into a pressroom. He ate C rations and used the overflowing latrine. No one thought he acted like a bigwig or was bigfooting. Cronkite operating in Hué was a sight to behold. Like a prosecuting attorney gathering facts, he interviewed everyone, from orphans to traumatized U.S. soldiers. He went on a marine patrol to survey the perimeter roads around Hué. According to him, he was only operating on a Journalism 101 principle learned in high school: the more information, the better the story. Besides interviewing Vietnamese, Cronkite managed face time with South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu, loyal opposition leader Xuan Oanh, and U.S. lieutenant general Robert Cushman.

  For Cronkite that February, the “real” meaning of Tet was coming into focus: the South Vietnamese government had lost its credibility and was thus condemned to negotiating a quick peace accord. Touring Vietnam, Cronkite grew increasingly bitter toward the Pentagon. The credibility gap between the reality of Hué and Westmoreland’s spin was blatant. What sickened Cronkite was that his own network from 1965 to now had largely bought into Westmoreland’s military propaganda. He pleaded guilty. Along with NBC and ABC, CBS had not wrongly reported Hué as an utter U.S. defeat. Cronkite was determined to rectify the situation on his CBS Reports special. (Hué was, in the end, described as a U.S. victory, but only after a long, bloody battle.)

  Cronkite, Leiser, and Gralnick left Hué on a transport chopper; their flight companions were a dozen dead Marines in rubber body bags: killed in action. “It was quiet,” Gralnick later told The Wall Street Journal. “Nobody said anything. It was an instant understanding for everybody in that helicopter of the cost of the war.” Hadn’t Westmoreland told Cronkite that Hué had been pacified? The general’s lie wasn’t abstract now to the CBSer. It hung inside the craft as a desecration of the lives of the Marine corpses in rubber sacks. On the flight, Cronkite grieved for the thousands of American vets who had gotten their arms and legs and balls blown off. And then there were the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians killed in an impossible and unnecessary war.

  Determined to get to the bottom of the Pentagon’s lies about Hué, Cronkite traveled to Phu Bai, twelve miles south, to learn more about Tet. He had arranged to interview General Creighton Abrams, deputy commander of the U.S. troops in Vietnam. Cronkite’s best source in Vietnam was Abrams, whom he had befriended during the Bulge in 1944, when Abrams was one of Patton’s squadron commanders. Sitting around a fireplace with Abrams and his staff in Phu Bai, Cronkite expected to get the lowdown. He found Abrams to be only slightly more candid than his boss, Westmoreland. While Cronkite respected Abrams, he thought his rationale for LBJ sending 200,000 more soldiers to Vietnam was ludicrous. “It was sickening to me,” Cronkite recalled. “They were talking strategy and tactics with no consideration of the bigger job of pacifying and restoring the country. This had come to be total war, not a counterinsurgency or an effort to get the North Vietnamese out so we could support the indigenous effort.”

  Cronkite respectfully listened to Abrams and respectfully disagreed with the general’s questionable assessment that with more reinforcements, the United States could “finish the job.” He had seen too much evidence to the contrary to believe Abrams. But Abrams also let Cronkite know that the current U.S. military strategy wasn’t working—the South Vietnamese needed to shoulder more of the burden.

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p; “My decision was not difficult to reach,” Cronkite recalled in A Reporter’s Life. “It had been taking shape, I realized, since Cam Ranh Bay. There was no way that this war would be justified any longer—a war whose purpose had never been adequately explained to the American people.”

  Cronkite stood on the roof of the ten-story Caravelle Hotel in Saigon, watching as U.S. Air Force C-47s shot flares in and around the perimeter of Saigon followed by rounds of heavy artillery fire. He was tired and disheartened. He understood the impossibility of it all. Off in the distance he could hear the sounds of war: AK fire, helicopter rotors turning, and Claymore antipersonnel mines exploding. It was dusk, and the streets below were filled with Vietnamese riding bicycles and carrying baskets, seemingly oblivious that war was thundering at their doorsteps. Somebody handed Cronkite a drink and he just stared out at Saigon in utter disbelief. Reconciled to the fact that he was going to call the war a “stalemate” (at best) in his “Report from Vietnam,” he went inside to keep a dinner engagement. He was ashamed that LBJ had strung him along, conned him really, for four bloody years about American victory being in sight. Besides serving fine French cuisine, the legendary hotel was home to the Australian and New Zealand embassies, along with CBS’s Saigon bureau. Cronkite’s dinner companions were three of the network’s respected Vietnam War correspondents, John Laurence, Peter Kalischer, and Robert Schakne. “Walter said he wanted to know what was really going on,” Laurence recalled of the debriefing. “He let us tell him whatever we knew in an open and honest way.”

  The central point of what Laurence told Cronkite (explained in great detail in his CBS memoir, The Cat from Hué, a book Cronkite later called “a masterpiece of war reporting”) was that Washington and Saigon held to “the logic of past wars,” that the U.S. Army would win the war because “its soldiers were killing more of the enemy than they were losing themselves.” Some analysts even believed that the kill ratio was approximately ten to one. However, Laurence argued, the North Vietnamese weren’t going to give up, no matter what their losses were. They had been fighting for the independence of their country since the 1930s and their leaders were prepared to accept enormous casualties, even ten to one. The U.S. was destroying the countryside and massacring its people with military might, often indiscriminately, killing innocent civilians by the thousands with air strikes and artillery. At the same time, Laurence argued, thousands of outstanding American soldiers were being killed in an asinine war that was unwinnable. Laurence was so animated in his antiwar argument that Schakne kicked him in the shin under the table in an attempt to get him to cool his jets.

  After dinner, Cronkite excused himself to look out over the city again. “At night from the roof of the Caravelle Hotel correspondents’ headquarters,” he later wrote to editor Robert Manning of The Atlantic Monthly, “I watched the helicopter gunships circling the city, unloading their hail of death on suspected enemy hot spots scarcely blocks away. And at the bar below I heard angry, frustrated American civilians and officers who had been in charge of pacification of the villages and had a few days before claimed we were winning the hearts and minds of the people, report with bitter cynicism that their villages apparently had welcomed the returning Viet Cong.”

  Gralnick, Cronkite’s field producer on the Vietnam trip and close associate for many years, couldn’t predict how his boss was going to play the CBS News Special Report once they got back to New York to edit. They had spent an unforgettable time together in Hué, Khe Sanh, and Saigon, seen a lot of collateral damage, and met scores of soldiers and reporters. But Cronkite continued to be contemplative. “He held his cards close”: this is how Gralnick described his boss’s attitude. All humor had left him. While Cronkite avoided saying that America was “losing” the war, Gralnick did notice that on four or five occasions “stalemate” came out of his lips quite easily.

  Cronkite, Gralnick, Leiser, and the CBS camera crew barely got out of Vietnam alive. To avoid mortar fire, Cronkite’s Jeep driver took a circuitous route to the Saigon airport. There the CBS trio hooked up with two other CBS employees, who were working for Face the Nation: director Bob Vitarelli and sound engineer Dick Sedia. Boarding a DC-9 operated by Vietnam Airways for Pan Am, Cronkite sounded calm but removed about his work in-country. The conditions around the airport were dangerous. Takeoff was going to be a spin of the roulette wheel. The CBSers were happy to get out quickly, heading for Hong Kong. “You know, Walter was Mr. Unflappable,” Vitarelli recalled. “But I was quite worried that we would get shot down.”

  Upon takeoff, the pilot flew the plane almost straight up like a rocket, determined to avoid enemy ground fire. Vitarelli, who had worked at CBS since 1953, had flown all over the world with Cronkite, from India to France to China. In the old days, before the satellite revolution of the sixties, Cronkite and Vitarelli would make crazed efforts to send film shot in Europe or Asia ASAP to CBS headquarters in New York for airing. Through all their peripatetic travels, they had never experienced such a gnarly departure as the one in post-Tet Vietnam. “I said, ‘He’s gonna stall this thing,’ ” Vitarelli recalled about the pilot’s rocket-like stunt. “Walter kept saying it would be all right. Nothing anxious about his body language at all. His calmness was eerie.”

  Back in New York, working closely with Salant, Socolow, and Leiser, Cronkite mined his satchel of diaries, photos, notes, press releases, clippings, propaganda, and hunches into a “Report from Vietnam” script. Leiser helped Cronkite compose his powerful commentary, to be delivered at the end of the show. What Cronkite planned to say was a closely guarded secret at CBS. “It was Walter’s writing,” Gralnick explained. “We just helped frame the argument, keep the language harnessed. It was Walter who insisted on using ‘stalemate’ to describe Vietnam.” Leiser, however, told veteran CBS News correspondent Murray Fromson (based in Bangkok in 1968) that he wrote “every word” of Cronkite’s “Report from Vietnam.” That was also Dan Rather’s understanding. What nobody disputes is that Cronkite, as managing editor, approved the blunt language.

  Content with the meticulous Leiser-Gralnick draft, angry about the lies of the Johnson administration, and embarrassed that he had believed them from the Gulf of Tonkin to Tet, Cronkite was a man on a mission. He took to the airwaves on February 27, 1968, at 10:00 p.m. EST, to confront the Pentagon’s spin machine. In his half-hour “Report from Vietnam,” he calmly and objectively presented the hard facts, showing everything from U.S. air raids to Vietnamese villages in ruin. Millions of Americans tuned in. In the course of the prime-time show, Cronkite made a powerful case that President Johnson was misleading the American public about the dire situation in South Vietnam. Victory wasn’t even a blip on the horizon.

  Most of “Report from Vietnam” was a kind of illustrated briefing. To Cronkite, one major point needed to be conveyed to his viewing audience: from a U.S. military perspective, the Southeast Asian war was unwinnable. “Report from Vietnam” ably conveyed that main point in a very sharp, authoritative fashion.

  After the last commercial break, Cronkite turned to speak personally to the viewers, looking straight into the camera from behind his New York desk. According to Diane Sawyer—a longtime CBS correspondent who in 2009 became an anchor for ABC News—Cronkite faced a personal crossroads in Vietnam, just as Murrow did when he went after Joe McCarthy in the mid-1950s on See It Now, and he didn’t flinch. His closing words became known by millions of Americans and signaled a major shift in the public’s view of the war. Those words have been included in the Library of America’s handsome Best Journalism of the Vietnam War:

  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 t
he De-militarized 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 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 in 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 dictations 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 the invasion of the North, the use of nuclear weapons, or the mere commitment of one hundred, 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 the 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.