Friday, July 17, 2009

"If I've lost Walter Cronkite, I've lost Middle America"

Forty years, almost to the day, after his coverage of the Apollo XI landing on the Sea of Tranquility, perhaps the last of his several iconic moments as a newscaster, we lost Walter Cronkite.

But he's best remembered, and rightly so, for this editorial (excerpt), responding to the Tet Offensive and the pointlessness of American escalation in its aftermath, on February 27, 1968.

It's impossible to imagine a pretty-haired TV news reporter today with the integrity, let alone the gravitas, to publicly call out an Administration for a failed war.

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