Cronkite, Bonn, and Dombrow—eager to outhustle NBC News—chatted with taxi drivers, street vendors, and waiters as if they were conducting mini Gallup polls on whether U.S. military intervention was a good thing. They also went to Bien Hoa, about an hour south of Saigon, to visit the U.S. Army 173rd Airborne Brigade. Using his trusty Mitchell camera, Dombrow—a loud, funny, roly-poly, and extremely talented documentary cameraman—had set up an interview in a moving Jeep between Cronkite and a brigadier general. In the era before handheld movie cameras, Cronkite’s interview, filmed brilliantly by Dombrow as they traveled down a bumpy dirt road, was cutting-edge TV work—take that, NBC News’ “Vietnam Week in Review.” When Cronkite raised the subject of the Vietcong as a fierce fighting force, the general growled, “They’re cowards!” How so? asked Cronkite “They’re cowards!” he continued. “They won’t come out and fight. Cowards!”
Cowards . . . cowards . . . cowards . . . the word rang in Cronkite’s ears for the rest of the day. That night Cronkite, Bonn, and Dombrow discussed the hotheaded general over beer. If the Vietcong and/or the North Vietnamese army were to “come out and fight,” as the general suggested, all those U.S. warplanes in Bien Hoa and Da Nang would annihilate them. In a pitched battle, the well-armed 173rd Airborne Brigade would probably whip the Vietcong. But Ho Chi Minh’s guerrilla fighters could definitely score points by hovering just inside the tree line and killing U.S. troops with sniper fire, one man at a time. And that’s what Cronkite—and Ky—saw the enemy doing all over South Vietnam. “Walter, with his World War II experience, understood that,” Bonn recalled. “So that night we all agreed: [that] was the dumbest general any of us had ever encountered. Yes, Walter was still gung-ho in ’65. But the dumbest general really shook him.”
Morley Safer of CBS News, a Canadian reporter who had been working the Vietnam beat for a few months, was among those who closely interacted with Cronkite on that 1965 trip. He had joined CBS News as a London-based correspondent in 1964, but after Pleiku he was told to open the CBS News bureau in Saigon. Cronkite also consulted former Unipresser Peter Kalischer, who, after winning an Overseas Press Club Award for his 1963 CBS coverage of the overthrow of South Vietnam’s president Ngo Dinh Diem, killed in a coup, was working out of CBS News’ bare-bones Saigon operation. “Walter was too skeptical, too savvy and had too sensitive a shit-detector to be taken in, but Walter could be diverted by machinery, by things with wheels and wings, and especially by things that float, and the military saw to it that he had a chance to see and use everything, go on air strikes, be made to feel an insider,” Safer perceptively explained . “His itinerary was designed to keep him away, as much as possible, from correspondents and others permanently based in Vietnam who were considered to be naysayers.”
Indeed, the Department of Defense and the State Department rolled out the red carpet for Cronkite in South Vietnam that July. The junket was hardly a baptism by fire. The U.S. Army let him shoot guns, fly planes, detonate mines, and throw grenades; they would do the same thing for novelist John Steinbeck in 1967 (the Nobel laureate ended up not only supporting Johnson’s war, but also writing a series of pro-serviceman columns for Newsday as a result of his trip). All of the soldiers Cronkite met at USARV (U.S. Army Vietnam) headquarters in Long Binh (near Saigon) were impressive. A couple of GIs he met from Fort Riley, Kansas, regularly wrote him at the CBS Evening News; they became pen pals.
Toward the end of Cronkite’s handshaking tour, Safer and an army officer—perhaps John Paul Vann, the infamous U.S. military source for New York Times reporters David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan—buttonholed the anchorman and gave him a “grunt’s-eye view of the world” that was “completely different” from what the general had told him. In his memoir, Flashbacks, Safer stated that he set up at least a few meetings for Cronkite to learn the unvarnished truth about America’s failures in Vietnam, to counter all the “lies and bogus optimism” that were being pitchforked his way. Nothing over the top, nothing intentionally antiwar. Just the Big Truths.
Sharing cocktails on the rooftop garden of the Caravelle Hotel in Saigon, which housed the CBS bureau on the third floor, Safer dumped in Cronkite’s lap the Big Truth about the Pentagon propaganda offense. He was genuinely pessimistic. No one was telling the American people the tonnage of U.S. missiles and bombs being dropped on South Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian villages by Operation Rolling Thunder. Safer told Cronkite that at least a certain percentage of the fresh-faced GIs they had met—like the Fort Riley soldiers—would get killed if Johnson didn’t rethink his policy. It was hard for Cronkite to digest the disturbing notion that McNamara regularly lied, that General William Westmoreland, who was commanding America’s armed forces in combat in Vietnam, was as foolishly jingoistic as the ranting general. To Cronkite, smart reporters such as Safer and Kalischer, both of whom he personally admired, needed to help the American military win the war, as he had done during World War II with United Press. It bothered Cronkite that many of the young hotshot reporters and cameramen he encountered in Vietnam were flippant, calling the U.S. military press briefings “the five o’clock follies”; that was deeply disrespectful. “The truths I told him didn’t come as a complete shock,” Safer recalled. “But it was just difficult for him not to be supportive of the American troops in the field.”
In early August 1965, Safer accompanied U.S. Marines on a search-and-destroy mission to the Vietnamese hamlet of Cam Ne. After they took sniper fire from the hamlet, the Marines systematically burned the thatch homes of Cam Ne to cinders. The Marines used everything from flame throwers to Zippo lighters. Safer was appalled: U.S. troops were supposed to be “winning hearts and minds.” Residents, who had been instructed to stand aside by the Marines, pleaded for mercy. Their agonizing cries were ignored. Safer had his South Vietnamese cameraman—Ha Thuc Can—film the destruction and shipped it off to Russ Bensley to edit in New York.
On August 5, 1965, the Safer report of the torching of Cam Ne aired on the CBS Evening News. It caused a fierce reaction in Washington—the State Department, the Pentagon, the Marine Corps, and the White House all demanded that CBS replace Safer. The footage slammed home the uncomfortable fact that the destruction of Cam Ne by Marines had been unnecessary. Cronkite joined CBS News president Fred Friendly in defending the thirty-four-year-old correspondent. But the blowback was like a bazooka shot to the gut. “Some of the reporting I did pained Walter,” Safer recalled. “But when the heat was on me about Cam Ne, when viewers wanted my head on a stick, and I was called to New York in the autumn of 1965 for reassignment, he threw a dinner party for me at his home. Anchormen don’t usually give a shit about the reporter in the field. But Walter did. I was the new kid at CBS at the time. The White House wanted me fired. That prick Bill Moyers [White House press secretary to Lyndon Johnson] pilloried me. Hate mail came pouring in. The heat was on for me to get fired. And what did Walter do? He threw me a dinner party in New York. That was the kind of man he was.”
Safer’s edgy reporting from South Vietnam, in which Marines committed atrocities of ghastly proportions, pained President Johnson far more than it did Cronkite. Dr. Frank Stanton got a vicious, threatening call from the hot-under-the-collar White House that rattled his bones.
“Frank,” Johnson said, waking the slumbering president of CBS.
“Who is this?” said the half-asleep Stanton.
“Frank, this is your president, and yesterday your boys shat on the American flag.”
Johnson insisted that Safer was a communist. He just had to be. Upon finding out vis-à-vis a security check that Safer was Canadian, the president gloated. “Well, I knew he wasn’t an American.” The Pentagon chief spokesman, Arthur Sylvester, complained to Fred Friendly that Safer was a “Canadian Communist homosexual”; CBS News issued a memo saying the network had the “highest confidence” in Safer. CBS had Safer cover the Battle of Ia Drang Valley in November of 1965. While trying to do a story one afternoon, his choppe
r was shot down. No one was seriously injured. Safer recuperated for a few days, got airlifted to Saigon, and then flew to New York with footage in hand to prepare the CBS News Special Report “The Battle of Ia Drang Valley,” which aired on a Friday evening in mid-November with an introduction by Cronkite. “It was after that broadcast that Friendly asked me to take a break from Vietnam and go back to London as bureau chief,” Safer recalled. “Rather, who had replaced me in London, was sent to replace me in Saigon.”
Cronkite felt horrible that Safer, who had done such gutsy work in Cam Ne, had been exiled. But besides throwing him a dinner party, he couldn’t save Safer from getting pulled. President Johnson now believed that “Cronkite was out to get me!” Starting in early 1966, Cronkite frequently visited Safer in Great Britain to discuss Vietnam. Both Cronkite and Safer believed General Westmoreland was clueless about what made the Vietcong tick. “We knew in 1966 and 1967,” Safer recalled, “that the only guys who knew Vietnam was a lost cause were CIA.”
Even after the Cam Ne incident, Cronkite remained a cautious hawk. He thought the Americans would, in the end, win over the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people. While Safer’s sobering analysis and the brigadier general’s “cowards” rant stuck with him, they didn’t radically alter his thinking. On September 29, 1965, Cronkite offered remarks about the Johnson administration’s foreign policy at the Associated Press Managing Editors Convention in Buffalo, New York. The speech was an odd and amazing window into how Cronkite processed his recent trip to Southeast Asia. On the dove side, he called the U.S. intervention in Vietnam a “bottomless pit” and a seemingly “insolvable quandary.” By seeing firsthand how huge the U.S. construction projects around Da Nang were, Cronkite knew that President Johnson was downplaying the U.S. government’s commitment to South Vietnam’s nation-building effort.
Yet Cronkite didn’t think America should retreat from the cold war chess game, just bury its head in the sand like Uncle Sam Ostrich. South Vietnam . . . Egypt . . . Cyprus . . . Indonesia . . . Cambodia . . . Africa. Name the place and Cronkite thought increased U.S. aid and American military hardware were needed there. “Our foreign policy goal of preserving this environment for free societies brings us into the morass of Vietnam,” Cronkite said to the AP editors. “If we were to be faithful to that goal, our aid to South Vietnam was not only justified, but required, and we cannot now grow faint of heart because of the almost unbearable frustration, but must endure and redouble our effort to find the means of victory.”
That same fall of 1965, Cronkite lunched with R. W. Apple and David Halberstam, both New York Times reporters focusing on Vietnam, to better understand the Battle of Ia Drang Valley. Considered the first conventional battle of the Vietnam War, it was fought between one brigade of the U.S. Army’s First Cavalry Division (Airmobile) and three regiments of the North Vietnamese Army. Cronkite was far more optimistic than the Times reporters. On October 13, Cronkite interviewed Secretary of State Dean Rusk for a “Man of the Month” feature on The Twentieth Century series. A few sparks flew over what the media’s role was in covering foreign policy crises like the Dominican intervention and the Vietnam War. “You’re interested in the drama of the news,” Rusk upbraided Cronkite. “What we are working for is the repose of solutions and peace.”
Around Thanksgiving, Cronkite had a map of Vietnam hung up in the CBS Broadcast Center, with pushpins that were used to help producers and writers locate exotic places such as Dien Bien Phu, Pleiku, Kon Tum, and Qui Nhon. It was an updated Rand McNally version of his map of the Korean Peninsula that he’d drawn on a chalkboard in 1950 for WTOP-TV. CBS News was now treating Asia, for the first time, as a major theater. “I returned from that first trip to Vietnam,” Cronkite recalled, “with the feeling that the evidence in the field seemed to support the contention of the high command and the administration in Washington that we were making progress.” Sounding like Westmoreland, Cronkite praised Johnson’s “courageous decision that communism’s advance must be stopped in Asia and that guerrilla war as a means to a political end must be finally discouraged.”
But Cronkite also felt that CBS News needed to cover the North Vietnamese side of the war as well. On December 6, Cronkite, in an extremely controversial decision spurred on by Friendly, aired a taped interview that British journalist Felix Greene had conducted with President Ho Chi Minh of North Vietnam. “American imperialism is the aggressor,” Minh said. “It must stop air attacks on North Vietnam. It must put an end to its aggression in the South, withdraw its troops from South Vietnam, and let the Vietnamese settle for themselves their own affairs as provided for in the Geneva agreements.”
When Pocket Books published Vietnam Perspective, a collection of CBS broadcast transcripts, in time for Christmas 1965, Cronkite wrote in the introduction, “This is the meaning of our commitment in Southeast Asia—a commitment not for this year or next year but, more likely, for a generation. This is the way it must be if we are to fulfill our pledge to ourselves and to others to stop communist aggression wherever it raises its head.” That was hawkish. But allowing Ho Chi Minh on his CBS Evening News broadcast, raising the ire of President Johnson, was definitely dovish. This strange dichotomy, this being pro-war while your correspondents on the ground in Vietnam were more skeptical, wore on Cronkite. He tried to stay UP-neutral, adhering to rule number one in journalism, objectivity: “If the World Goes to Hell in a Handbasket It’s the Reporter’s Job to Be There and Tell What Color the Handbasket Is.”
Cronkite was caught in a mid-1960s conundrum: whether to believe Robert McNamara (hawk) or Morley Safer (dove), who thought the Vietnam War was America’s Waterloo. There was one constant in Cronkite’s thinking: be objective. Everyone, hawks and doves alike, Cronkite thought, was acting squirrelly. Upstanding U.S. government officials had fibbed their way into a major war; unorthodox peaceniks answered to no one and yet pretended to be more knowledgeable about Far East Asian affairs than Secretary of State Dean Rusk. It was confusing to Cronkite. But the New Left’s claim that Johnson was dead wrong about the Vietnam enterprise left him stone cold. Trying to soothe everyone, Cronkite skirted around that central foreign policy question in 1966. Erring on the side of “promotion of democracy” was always a good thing, in his view.
Along with Harry Reasoner, Alexander Kendrick, Marvin Kalb, Peter Kalischer, and Richard C. Hottelet, Cronkite contributed to “Vietnam Perspective,” a four-part CBS News Special Report. While it was edifying for Cronkite to ask General Maxwell Taylor and UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg questions, Cronkite showed no real enthusiasm for this string of CBS News Special Reports about B-52s bombing North Vietnam to disrupt movement along the Mu Gia Pass or the Congress of Racial Equality claiming that the military draft was discriminatory against blacks. He had Project Gemini to focus on. His great achievement was getting President Johnson to read a January 21, 1966, speech announcing the resuming of the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign against North Vietnam—whose army was the fifth largest in the world—on CBS News for color film cameras. What Cronkite didn’t tell his CBS viewers was that Rolling Thunder was a half-assed bombing campaign, constantly hamstrung by Johnson’s crippling fits and starts, bombing pauses, and stand-downs.
The U.S. military had divided South Vietnam into four military corps areas—from I Corps up against the DMZ to IV Corps in the far south: Cronkite wanted to travel to all of them. “As field correspondents,” CBS News correspondent Bill Plante recalled, “we knew a lot of bang-bang combat action [footage] would get our stories on the Evening News.” Plante had developed strong ties with the Marines in Da Nang. When Harrison Salisbury, Cronkite’s old UP boss, now with The New York Times, visited Hanoi at the end of 1966, Cronkite worried that CBS was perhaps being too timid, covering only the situation in South Vietnam. An effort was made to get Cronkite a visa to North Vietnam. “CBS thought better of sending Cronkite, fearing it would appear that he was somehow antiwar, so they switched his application with Collingwood�
��s—with me as a back-up if that fell through,” Safer recalled. “In the end, Charles Collingwood was given the visa and he sent back a series of reports from North Vietnam.”
Bill Moyers claimed in hindsight that if Cronkite had been more courageous, like Murrow, and criticized the U.S. buildup in Vietnam in 1965, Johnson might have deescalated the conflict. This was ass-covering bullshit: every time the CBS Evening News ran a segment even slightly critical of Johnson policy, Moyers pounced with a White House threat. Cronkite thought that Moyers, a former reporter for Johnson’s radio-TV stations in Austin, was a phony, acting like he was one of the press boys when in reality he was an LBJ stalking horse. “Moyers had a very nasty streak,” Safer recalled. “Decades later at the Emmy Awards, he apologized to me for the way he pilloried CBS back then.” When historian Don Carleton raised Moyers’s point to Cronkite in the early 1990s, the anchorman bristled. “I just don’t believe it,” he snapped. “No. Johnson was riding high, wide, and handsome in 1965. I would have been a mosquito bite on Johnson’s rear end; he would have flicked me off like an insect. I’m surprised Moyers said that.”
While Cronkite was slow to seize the idea of a credibility gap between the Pentagon version of events in Southeast Asia and that of CBS News’ Saigon bureau reporters, he was unafraid to show gruesome war images on the Evening News as troop levels topped two hundred thousand. Burning villages . . . mortar rounds . . . bomb craters . . . poisonous defoliants . . . screaming children . . . desecrated wetlands . . . wounded soldiers . . . casualties. The sheer barbarity of it all was beamed into Main Street America, giving the Vietnam conflict the nickname “the living room war.” Color television only made the violence more memorable (and horrible). A three- to six-month rotation was implemented so that CBS News correspondents could serve a tour of duty in the Saigon bureau without being away from their homes for too long. Almost everyone went. There was an unspoken awareness that if you refused assignment to Saigon—as Roger Mudd did for family reasons—it would cost you career-wise with Dr. Stanton down the road. Others who refused to go were Terry Drinkwater (whose wife threatened to divorce him if he went), Robert Pierpoint (who had covered enough combat in Korea), and Eric Sevareid (who said he had seen enough of war during World War II in the 1940s and in 1965 in the Dominican Republic).
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