re: #176 whitebeach

I believe that the real turning point was Walter Cronkite’s commentary on CBS News the night of Feb. 27, 1968. He had just returned from a trip to Vietnam in the wake of the Tet offensive of Jan. of that year, and his editorial, which seems fairly tepid today, basically said that the people running the war had been too optimistic, and that the whole thing was headed for a stalemate. But this opinion was huge at the time. I don’t think that one newsperson before or since has had anything even close to the credibility and authority of Cronkite, and his words brought antiwar sentiment into the center of the mainstream.

I remember as a kid watching the 10 o’cock news on WNEW-5 out of NYC. At the end of the news reports, they would scroll a list of all the locals killed in action in Vietnam. No commentary, no background music. Just a list of dead soldiers. It made an impression on me and my parents, and probably many other viewers.

I doubt it happened for the subsequent wars. After Vietnam, the military decided that too much press coverage of wars was detrimental to the mission, so no more broadcasts of flag-draped caskets coming home, no free-range reporters capturing embarrassing actions by our soldiers, no nightly tallies of the dead and MIA.