Walter Cronkite and Robert McNamara were major factors in our humiliating defeat in Vietnam, the only war America lost*. As JFK’s and Lyndon Johnson’s very powerful but blundering Secretary of Defense McNamara was the key architect for losing the Vietnam War to our Communist enemies. And as the country’s leading network anchorman, the most trusted man in American liberal politics, Walter Cronkite’s opposition to the war and pessimistic reports from Vietnam were key to fanning the flames of the anti-war movement and turning millions of Americans against LBJ's poor wartime leadership. Indeed, to this day Cronkite is honored in Vietnam with pictures hanging in the Vietnam War Museum; honored as the man who renewed the hope and spirit of the Communist enemy at a desperate hour when the NVA** and Vietcong were down on their knees and faced with defeat due to the failed and disastrous Tet Offensive***.
*We never lost a battle in Vietnam and Nixon bombed the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table where they signed an agreement with us for ending the war-this was contrary to Ho Chi Minh's prediction that we would give up the fight and leave Vietnam in disgrace. What we lost was the peace when in 1975 the Democratic Congress pulled the plug on our allies in South Vietnam.
**North Vietnam Army
***The North failed to achieve any of its military objectives in the offensive but scored a huge propaganda and psychological victory due largely to Cronkite and the demoralizing reporting and the “make love not war” anti-American peace movement.
Indeed, the so-called “Cronkite Moment” on the Tet Offensive when defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory-when Cronkite, overcome by the carnage of the brutal offensive, declared that Tet was proof “that the war was unwinnable”-is regarded as the turning point of the war-the moment when Johnson lost Middle America, when American resolve to win was shattered, and a broken LBJ decided to withdraw from the 1968 presidential race.
Cronkite and McNamara both born in 1916* and dying 11 days apart at age 93 (with Cronkite celebrating his 93rd birthday on November 4th, the day of Obama’s election victory**) is, I believe, a terrible sign warning that a new Vietnam is on the horizon for America; it is a sign that the Middle East is likely to explode with violence, suffering the fate of South East Asia*** when American forces pulled out of Vietnam and left chaos and death behind. It’s likely to be ominous of things to come for our war in Afghanistan, and once US troops withdraw from Iraq leaving a power void in the region for our enemies to fill-setting the stage for a holocaust likely to exceed in its carnage the Iran-Iraq War and Cambodian killing fields****. Who knows, Obama might even involve us in a new ground war in the Middle East. With a sixties-born leftist radical in the White House at war with American values, greatness, power and prestige (and projecting an image of weakness and drift) all catastrophes and upheavals are possible in the region.
*McNamara was born June 16, 1916; Cronkite was born November 4, 1916.
**Keep in mind that Obama was elected on the 29th anniversary of the Iranian Hostage Crisis when pro-Khomeini student radicals seized the US embassy in Tehran and held our diplomats for 444 humiliating days. His election on that day is a sign of coming failure and humiliation for America in the Middle East-keep in mind that Iran arms and funds the Taliban in Afghanistan and Hamas, Hezbollah and the Sadrists in Iraq.
***As McNamara served LBJ the Texan President who started the ground war in Vietnam, he ironically died on July 6th the 62nd birthday of George Bush the Texan President who ordered the ground invasion of Iraq (and Afghanistan). This gives us one of many Iraq/Vietnam pairings-the Kerry campiagn being the first-signaling that Iraq is likely to be another Vietnam.
****In August of 2007 Ahmadenijad warned that “when US forces leave Iraq and the Middle East Iran and its regional friends (Hezbollah, Syria, etc.,) will fill the vacuum.