A Reporter's Life.

• Author: Dunsmore, Barrie

On January 30, 1968, the beginning of the Chinese lunar new year festival known as Tet, 70,000 communist troops launched a surprise offensive throughout South Vietnam. The attackers surged into more than a hundred cities and towns, and, for the first time, Saigon and the vast U.S. Embassy complex in the heart of the city came under rocket fire.

A few weeks later, the U.S. military claimed that because of the heavy losses the Viet Cong had suffered, "Tet" was a defeat for the communists. That was literally true, but Tet was nevertheless both a political and propaganda victory for the communists, and a key turning point in the war in Vietnam. This was because the intensity and scope of the Tet Offensive shocked most Americans, who had been led to believe that given American superiority in firepower and technology, victory in Vietnam was inevitable if not imminent.

This sense of shock acquired a significant amplification in the key electronic media - television. At a time when television news anchormen rarely left their studios, CBS News' Walter Cronkite hurried to Vietnam to prepare a special report on the Tet Offensive and its implications for American involvement in the war. As a veteran war correspondent, with the clout and contacts that only an anchorman can have, Cronkite was certainly qualified to do such a report. And, of course, according to numerous polls, he was at that time "the most trusted man in America."

At the conclusion of that special broadcast on Tet in late February, Cronkite did something he had almost never done before, and certainly not on the subject of Vietnam. After much agonizing he decided that he had to put his credibility on the line and offer a personal opinion. This is what he said:

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 that 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. . . . It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out, then, will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.

At the White House, President Lyndon Johnson watched the special report with some of his staff, including News Secretary George Christian and his assistant, Bill Moyers. According to Moyers, when the program was over, "The President flipped off the set and said 'If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America.'" Five weeks later, on March 31, Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection, this in the context of a unilateral bombing pause of North Vietnam.

No one would suggest that Cronkite changed the course of the Vietnam War, or that he was singly responsible for the President's decision to throw in the towel. But Johnson was prescient when he noted Cronkite's link with "Middle America", for by the end of 1968 most of Middle America came to share Cronkite's views on the war.

In the formative years of television, from about the mid-Fifties to the mid-Seventies, before the proliferation of channels that came with cable and satellites, CBS, NBC, and ABC were indeed the windows on the world for the great majority of the American people. Each night, more than fifty million Americans would gather in front of their TV sets at the dinner hour to watch the evening news. (Fewer than twenty million do so today. And while ABC was number three in that race, it actually had about twice as many viewers in the late Sixties and Seventies as it had in the early nineties when it was number one.)

The newscasts evolved into a combination national town meeting, teach-in, and therapy session, where people could learn about and ponder the momentous events of their world, their nation, and their neighborhoods. And these were momentous times. The Cold War was at its height and nuclear war was widely believed to be a very real possibility. By 1965, the war in Vietnam was raging. Much of the Middle East and Africa was in turmoil and either region had the potential to ignite a superpower confrontation. At home, a president, his brother, and the country's most prominent black leader were assassinated - the latter two in a single year, 1968. Below the seething surface, too, the country was in the throes of at least four ongoing and interlocking social revolutions over race, feminism, sexual freedom, and an array of new technologies. At such a moment, the newly found power of television could have become an instrument for division and extremism, as a free but irresponsible press has been in other times and in other places. It did not.

Perhaps more by accident than design, the television news broadcasts of that era were voices of moderation amid chaos. They reflected middle class values and essentially centrist politics, mainly because the men who produced and presented them were middle class and moderate - sometimes a little to the left, sometimes a bit to the right, but never far from the center.

While there were many people involved in these news programs, three men became their personifications: Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, and Howard Kingsbury Smith. All three men have now written memoirs. In addition to serving as fascinating first-hand accounts of much of the history of this century, these books also tell us much about how and why television news did what it did back then. In the interests of full disclosure ! must say...