I’m not a Vietnam historian, but if the war was won as you claim, what were the motivations of Cronkite and the media in general in lying to the American public?[/quote]
Afx: I wouldn’t say “lying”, rather, a skewed or biased reporting of the war.
I think the press had a legitimate mistrust of the military, especially the Army under Westmoreland, and were relying on the writings of journalists like Halberstam, who were openly critical of the war and how it was being managed.
Bear in mind, this was the first “war in your living room” where Americans were treated to pictures and film of the war, presented during the evening news. You were seeing footage of wounded and dead GIs and Marines during dinner. In WWII and Korea, the US Government censored and/or suppressed such footage. There were pictures of American war dead that weren’t allowed into circulation until after WWII had ended.
I think by 1968 there were serious questions as to where the war was going in terms of an exit strategy and Cronkite himself admitted to being “shaken” by footage of Viet Cong sappers inside US Embassy grounds in Saigon during the Tet Offensive. It doesn’t help that the Tet caught both the US and South Vietnamese forces by surprise and there was a sense that the North Vietnamese Army and VC were a step away from destabilizing the South. It looked like America was unprepared and didn’t have a sense of control over the war or a workable strategy.
In point of fact, after the initial surprise wore off, the US forces inflicted grievous casualties on the North Vietnamese Army and especially the Viet Cong forces, which came out into the open and fought a conventional set piece campaign for the first time in the war and US firepower absolutely decimated them. The Marines at Hue City and Khe Sanh, during the same time period, erased entire regiments of North Vietnamese Army forces.
The two key North Vietnamese leaders, Ho Chi Minh and General Giap, admitted later that Tet was a complete US military victory, but also a complete North Vietnamese propaganda victory based on American news and media reporting following.
