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Vietnam Redux Reading Guide
by Walter Cronkite (notes from JP)
The following excerpt is from Walter Cronkite’s 1996 autobiography, “A Reporter’s Life”. Some questions to ask while reading it:
Has TV changed for the worse or better in cataloguing war?
Are people desensitized to war footage when they see it on TV or are they more affected by it than those watching the Vietnam struggle?
Has the mainstream media utterly failed the public who supposedly own the airwaves used to broadcast?
Pages 264-265 from “A Reporter’s Life”:
“The Vietnam War left us another legacy from which we still seek escape. A generation of officers later, there still lurks in the Pentagon the belief that the media lost the war. We could have won, they insist, if the press had not shown those pictures of naked, napalmed Vietnamese girls fleeing our bombing, of prisoners being shot in the head, of burning hooches, of wounded GIs. Television brought the war into our living rooms at home and destroyed our will to fight, their theory goes.
It was put succinctly by a Marine major writing in Military Review, the official journal of the U.S. Army. The underlining and italics are his:
‘The power and impact of television was the deciding factor in turning American public opinion from one of supporting the U.S. defense of South Vietnam to one of opposing it. More than any other factor, it was the television camera that brought home the reality of war that shocked the nation and broke its will.
What we need, contrary to the wide-open and unrestricted policies of Vietnam, is not freedom of press, but freedom from the press, more specifically, freedom from the television camera and its interference.
In the next war, the television cameras must stay home! ’
Wait a minute, a little voice says, isn’t there something called the First Amendment that might be affected by this? No problem for the major: ‘Much is made of the ‘public’s right to know.’ This is not a legal right, but is a concept invented by the news media to ensure their access, not the public’s, to newsworthy events.’
A quote from the brave new world order as viewed through tinted military goggles.
Our TV cameras did record some—not all, but some—of the misery that the war brought to Vietnam. As I recall, we also reported some other disillusioning things about that war, things the major didn’t see fit to recall in his article:
A corrupt, incompetent unpopular government that we were committed to support.
An allied army that often preferred not to fight.
A resourceful, dedicated enemy, resolved to struggle on regardless of casualties.
And the thoroughly reported lies and mistakes of our own leaders, whose political survival depended on making a war look good even as it turned bad.”
—Walter Cronkite
I have not forgotten Vietnam.
I have not forgotten Afghanistan.
I have not forgotten Iraq.
Is it too late to undo the systemic apathy in the children of the Boomers, and their children, too? Is it too late to dream of #peace…
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"
—Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás
#peace
@hashtagpeace on twitter
hashtagpeace.tumblr.com
