ABSTRACT
Even as understanding of the political and social context of warfare grows, the history of war largely remains a story of battles. Many histories of the Vietnam War, for example, hinge on the early morning hours of January 31, 1968, the first day of the lunar New Year, when North Vietnamese soldiers and National Liberation Front guerillas launched a series of attacks against government and allied forces in South Vietnam. The Tet Offensive is understood as a psychological turning point for the United States-the point at which America’s heart was no longer in the war, even as the country’s sacrifice of blood and treasure continued. On February 27, 1968, the previously staid CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite-after returning from a trip to Vietnam-declared the conflict a “bloody stalemate.” Following the broadcast, President Lyndon B. Johnson is said to have told aides, “It’s over” (Hallin 1986: 108). The “trouble with this inspiring little story,” as Louis Menand (2012) observes, “is that most of it is either invented or disputed.” There is little evidence that Johnson either saw the broadcast or commented on it, and less evidence that Cronkite’s opinion changed the already established direction of war coverage or influenced the president’s decision not to run for re-election. There was no definitive reversal in domestic support for the war in 1968, and elite consensus had broken down visibly before the offensive. In August 1967, Pentagon in-fighting between the Joint Chiefs-who favored escalated bombing of the North-and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s Office of Systems Analysis-which favored pacification of the population and strengthening South Vietnam’s defense forces-erupted in a clash of official testimony before the Senate followed by McNamara’s resignation (Hallin 1986: 160). Polling data in November 1967 and January 1968 suggested that the public was weary but growing slightly more hawkish, fueled by the desire for America to fight its way out of an unwise war that had become a source of mounting casualties and rising taxes. Subsequent polls would show no immediate, precipitous drop in the public’s support for getting tough in Vietnam before getting out (Hammond 1996: 9). The story of Tet and America’s Cronkite moment in Vietnam is simple because it is the function of stories to simplify reality and invest events such as Tet and the CBS broadcast with meaning. Cronkite’s position on the war is not an object lesson in the news media’s power over elite opinion. It is, instead, an
example of the stark contrasts around which news media build war stories. As young correspondents in World War II, Cronkite and most of his contemporaries described the war as a heroic struggle against totalitarianism. Once the Vietnam War stopped making sense in those terms, it became in the discourse of Cronkite and others not a more complex situation but simply a different one: a tragic and divisive quagmire rather than a unifying test of national grit. Cronkite’s famous 1968 broadcast represented a somewhat belated break with one dominant media narrative about the war in favor of another. American journalists did not approach the Tet Offensive wanting their country to fail. As Phillip Knightley argues with respect to war coverage in the years before the offensive:
Most correspondents, despite what Washington thought about them, were just as interested in seeing the United States win the war as was the Pentagon. What the correspondents questioned was not American policy, but the tactics used to implement that policy.
