Is this part of VietNam and Walter Cronkite true about the tet offense?

Question

If so, he should be on trial for the American deaths his misrepresentation has caused.
About the 8th paragraph that starts "By 1968, NVA morale was at it's lowest point ever"

http://www.capveterans.com/jack_cunningham/id22.html

Maybe if enough people read this, they may start to think and realize what their actions do FOR the enemy.

Answer 1

That's no different than the New York Times publishing the date we were going to attack Iraq. Gave Saddam time to move his WMD to Syria. The media is far more antiAmerican than our enemy.

Answer 2

What is your alternative to this dilemma?

I guess we can suspend freedom of speech. If we did that then our country would become something that isnt even worth fighting for in my opinion.

The news is a business, they report what they think people want to see and hear. Their only objective is to get more people to watch their programs. If this means playing up fears, or skewing their reporting then they will do that.

Had normal everyday Americans supported the war then the methods employed by Cronkite and the media would have failed. They would have changed their reporting to public demand. If something bad happened then they would have reported it with a positive spin.

The bottom line is that the Johnson administration failed to convience the American public of the importance of the conflict. In that case the military can win every battle, however the public run government will not allow them to capitolize on their successes since they do not have public support.

I think that there can be no real victory without public support. I think that the media does play a part in influencing public support. I do not think that the media would be able to put a negative spin on its reporting if the negativity wasnt already there in relation to the publics view.

I think that the media is currently doing this exact thing with the Iraq situation. I never hear of any successes, however having been there myself I know that they are there. Currently you only hear about Iraq when something bad happens.

Look at Al-Anbar provence. This was an area that the media coined the "Sunni-Triangle" or the "triangle of death." This area has been completely pacified by the US Marines, there is almost zero enemy activity there now. This fact is simply not reported by the main stream media because it is not negative.

To me if the Bush administration failed on anything it was gaining the proper support from the general public for an operation like this. Vietnam is a clear cut example of how you can have very real successes militarily, yet be unable to capitolize on them because the government has failed to gain the public support necessary for victory. To me this was a serious failure on behalf of the Bush Administration because they failed to learn from the mistakes of the Johnson administration. This failure does hamper current operations in the field, and the media does play up on this.

They should have done a better job of gaining public support, then there would be no issue. The media would have to put a positive spin on the mission or no one would watch their programming.

Answer 3

Jack Cunningham is another Neandercon Chicken Hawk who doesn't understand squat because he wasn't there.
Kerry had every right to protest because he DID serve. While I disagreed with his opinions and his motives, I ever questioned his service or his loyalty.

The Communist won the war in the Tet Offensive because it totally discredited everything General Westmoreland and President Johnson were telling us. They suffered more casualties during Tet than Westmoreland said they had troops. They took the US embassy in Saigon and fought to the death holding it. They took Hue and stood thier ground. These were all things they should not have been able to do.

Just like Iraq, it reached the point where no one with half a brain could believe anything the US government was telling them. That was when Cronkite and the Press turned on the Government.

Answer 4

Like most articles like this there is some truth and some garbage..

The garbage in this article is right at the beginning and in fact is the PREMISE of the entire arguement and that is that the Vietcong leadership was beginning to call for the end of the war.

This is ludicrous.The Vietnamese had been fighting both a colonial war and simultaneously a civil war for years which initially led to the ouster of the French in 1954 .The US then stepped right into this re-newed civil war (Vietnam was divided after 1954 into the Communist North and "Democratic " south ) and escalated their presence for the next 10 years.

The Vietcong's history is one that is simply an anathama to "giving in " or ending their highly ideological mission.

Ergo,any person who attempts to present an argument that the Vietnam war was "winnable" based upon the falaceous premise that the Vietcong were thinking of ending their campaign is simply going to end up with erroneous/falaceous/wrong CONCLUSIONS.

Simply put ,garbage in = garbage out.

Remember that the driving ideologue behind the US's war in Vietnam was Robert McNamara who in recent years has admitted that he was totally wrong about the war and the US should never have become involved because it was first and foremost a CIVIL WAR not a war between communism and democracy.

The US of course according to many eexperts have made and continue to make the same mistake in Iraq because what is going on there now is exactly what was going on in Vietnam after the French left and the Americans came in and that is a CIVIL WAR .

Also like Vietnam,many in the US cling to any and all positive events (no matter how minimal) in Iraq today that will justify continuing the slaughter there .Bush et al have so much invested in that filthy war that they simply cannot retreat for to do so would confirm that his Presidency will go down in history as probably the worst in US history.

Like this "asker" and the author of the article posted ,they both miss the whole point of the anti-war movement in that they conclude that the anti-war people are de facto responsible for loosing the Vietnam war as they de facto aided and abetted the communists.

This is pure crap !!!

Many today oppose the Iraqi war as they and others did the Vietnam War based SOLEY ON THEIR MORAL/ETHICAL CODES which has NOTHING to do with the "enemy" whatsoever .

ALL mainstream Christian Churches (including Bush's own Methodist Church) un-equivicably condemn Bush's atrocity in Iraq as a moral abomination repugnant to Christianity's moral / ethical code and de facto ANTI-CHRISTIAN .

Ifv you are a Christian and some 87 % of Americans claim to be so,then how on earth can any Christian support or be apart of this atrocity in Iraq.

Not to get "religious" but to those that are Christians when YOU stand in your judgement ,Bush et al are not going to be there defending you and PATRIOTISM is no defence for the slaughter of 400,000 innocent Iraqi civilians.

Answer 5

I think you totally miss the lesson of the Vietnam era.

You can make all the arguments you want, and re-write history till doomsday, claiming the protesters and media caused us to lose the war, but in the end, it makes you appear silly.

I read much of the web site you reference. I have great respect for anyone who served in the Vietnam war. Some parts of the web site criticize those who protested against the war. That’s fine. But if you go to any extreme, where you insist no one should be allowed to speak against the war, calling them traitors or responsible for x-number of American soldier deaths, then you are denying the protester’s first amendment rights. Who is the traitor now?

I get the feeling you would prefer to live under a dictatorship where no one is allowed to disagree with the official government actions and statements. If your dictator decides to go to war, any voice of dissent would be squashed. Is that the kind of government you wish to live under? What would you do if you disagreed with the government’s reason for the war? What would you do if you did not want to serve in the war? What would you do if you believed the war was morally wrong?

Your criticism of Walter Cronkite is misguided.

Answer 6

Well, you have to realize that what people way after winning (like Giap) to disparage the enemy is part of warfare. And you have to realize that people who think the best way to win is to never protest will pull in anything they can to shut people up.
The fact is, we live in a democracy where people are allowed to protest (and National Guard troops are not allowed to shoot protestors as they did at Kent State.) Further, we do not demand that our reporters mouth the national line and certainly do not put them on trial (if we did, the standard would be so high that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld would in prison now for lies and bad management.) The Vietcong became very good at media management.
In fact, since I was alive at the time, Cronkite's change from being a supporter of the war to questioning our being in the war was a major influence on people who trusted him. And Nixon lied by saying he had a plan, his "plan" cost us thousands more lives.

Answer 7

It's true. We won the TET offensive. Cronkite saw we might just end this thing in victory and that bothered him so much that he began the disinformation campaign that started the college campus revolts. A microphone (or press) is far more powerful than a bullet. Why wasn't he tried for treason? His actions fit the Democrats' play book: Never fight or try to defeat Communism...their favorite form of government. LBJ quickly decided he had made a mistake to take on the Russians through their surrogate, N. Vietnam.

Answer 8

Wars are not supposed to be won or lost. If so, the international banking families (Rockefeller, Morgans, Rotshchilds) who started the Central Bank aka the Federal Reserve wouldn't make enough money for their liking as the constant supply and flow of tanks, guns, trucks, ships would cease. The Bush family is also part of this as Prescott Bush loaned the Nazi party money before and during WW2. Continuity of instability of every war is their goal.

If you want the truth in its' entirety, take a closer look..hard to stomach but everyone should see the following:

http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/

Answer 9

Yes it is true. Cronkite was an idiot then, and is still undermining our troops along with another idiot, Jimmy Carter. People like this should let the soldiers fight the war. They cause so many unnecessary deaths.

Answer 10

cronk was media, and media people are really screwed up. you have to expect this.