Walter Cronkite, legendary broadcast journalist and news anchor, died today at the age of 92. He was a trusted voice in turbulent times, and brought us the daily news and the historic events, the moon landings and political conventions, the assassinations and wars. His broadcast after the Tet Offensive is often credited with turning the American public against the Vietnam war. Long before television news deteriorated to around-the-clock infotainment, Cronkite earned our trust without super graphics or computer generated flash, without ranting or teasing or pandering to popular taste.
They don't make 'em like Walter anymore. Nowadays, news anchors are better looking and less informed, pretty faces without a trace of understanding in their eyes, mere teleprompter readers with studio tans and perfect smiles. These days, the job seems closer to modeling than reportage. We're going to miss Cronkite.
Cronkite reports the assassination of President John F Kennedy.
Cronkite's reports from Vietnam challenged the hawks and swayed public opinion.
Update: a good note from Salon's Glenn Greenwald, "Celebrating Cronkite While Ignoring What He Did." Click here for the story.
It's Veterans Day, so we're telling war stories. Everyone loves war stories. Life, death, courage, you know the drill. We grew up playing war games. Some went off to actual wars to kill or be killed. Here are some war stories interwoven with the words of Tim O'Brien, a Vietnam veteran and author of The Things They Carried, and Going After Cacciato, which won the National Book Award in 1979. I was fortunate to study with O'Brien at the Sewanee Writers Conference in Tennessee, where he meticulously line-edited 75 pages of my novel-in-progress. I can assure you, the man is obsessed with "getting it right," and his work reflects a precision of emotion and truth one rarely encounters in writing of any kind. O'Brien has written extensively about his experiences in Vietnam, the moral dimension as well as the combat, and he often speaks about the difference between "story-truth" and "truth-truth."
"A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done." -Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
"You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let's say, and afterward you ask, 'Is it true?' and if the answer matters, you've got your answer.
For example, we've all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies.
Is it true?
The answer matters."
"You'd feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding reality, it's just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue. Yet even if it did happen - and maybe it did, anything's possible even then you know it can't be true, because a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it's a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, 'The fuck you do that for?' and the jumper says, 'Story of my life, man,' and the other guy starts to smile but he's dead. That's a true story that never happened."
"Often in a true war story there is not even a point, or else the point doesn’t hit you until, say, twenty years later, in your sleep, and you wake up and shake your wife and start telling the story to her, except when you get to the end you’ve forgotten the point again. And then for a long time you lie there watching the story happen in your head. You listen to your wife’s breathing. The war’s over. You close your eyes. You smile and think, Christ, what’s the point?"
John McCain was a POW, but you probably knew that since it seems to be the centerpiece of his presidential campaign. Some would even say he exploits that experience. While he may be a war hero, the question remains whether his wartime experiences qualify him to run the country. This interview with a former POW caught my attention.
Dr. Phillip Butler is a 1961 graduate of the United States Naval Academy and a former light-attack carrier pilot. In 1965 he was shot down over North Vietnam where he spent eight years as a prisoner of war.
Butler says John McCain is "not cut out to be President."
It's Martin Luther King Day, and an election year, so there will be plenty of false recollections and phony platitudes by vote-seeking politicians, and they, too, will have a dream. Once again, they will de-claw King, and ignore the radical implications of what he believed. I'm sure even President Bush, who stands diametrically opposed to everything King stood for, will have a staged photo-op and make a speech. The real King -- the rabble-rouser, the troublemaker who provoked acts of civil disobedience and was jailed and beaten, and finally killed -- is safely dead and buried. The revisionist re-write is complete.
They must see us as strange liberators...What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones? -- MLK, at the Riverside Church, 1967
Another excerpt from the Riverside Church speech, 1967:
This is the other speech, the speech they won't be quoting all day long. It was April 4th, 1967, when King spoke at the Riverside Church in New York City and delivered a fiery sermon about America and Vietnam. It is a powerful call to conscience during a time of war. The full text can be found here.
Walter Cronkite, legendary broadcast journalist and news anchor, died today at the age of 92. He was a trusted voice in turbulent times, and brought us the daily news and the historic events, the moon landings and political conventions, the assassinations and wars. His broadcast after the Tet Offensive is often credited with turning the American public against the Vietnam war. Long before television news deteriorated to around-the-clock infotainment, Cronkite earned our trust without super graphics or computer generated flash, without ranting or teasing or pandering to popular taste.
