1968

by Mark Kurlansky

  When Cronkite arrived in Vietnam, he could not help looking happy, back in war correspondent’s clothes, helmet on head, giving a thumbs-up sign that seemed completely meaningless in the situation. But from the start Cronkite and his team had difficulties. It was hard to find a friendly airport at which to land. When they finally got to Saigon on February 11, they found themselves in a combat zone. Westmoreland briefed Cronkite on how fortunate it was that the famous newsman had arrived at this moment of great victory, that Tet had been everything they had been hoping for. But in fact that same day marked the twelfth day since the Tet Offensive had begun, and though the United States was gaining back its territory, 973 Americans had already died fighting off the Viet Cong attack. Each week was breaking a new record for American casualties. In one day, February 9, 56 marines were killed in the area of Khe Sanh.

  In Khe Sanh, where U.S. Marines were dug in near the north-south border, the battle was worsening, and Hanoi as well as the French press were starting to compare it to Dien Bien Phu, where the Vietnamese overran a trapped French army base in 1954. The French press took almost as much glee as the North Vietnamese in the comparison.

  In Washington, speculation was so widespread on the idea that the United States might turn to nuclear weapons rather than lose Khe Sanh and five thousand marines that a reporter asked General Earle G. Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, if nuclear weapons were being considered for Vietnam. The general reassured no one by saying, “I do not think that nuclear weapons will be required to defend Khe Sanh.” The journalist had not mentioned Khe Sanh in his broad question.

  There was a waiting list for correspondents to get a day in Khe Sanh, but Walter Cronkite was not to make the list. It was considered too dangerous. The U.S. military was not going to lose Cronkite. Instead he was taken to Hue, where artillery was smashing the ornate architecture of the onetime colonial capital into rubble. The Americans had once again secured Hue, Cronkite was told, but when he got there marines were still fighting for it. On February 16, U.S. Marines of the 5th Regiment’s 1st Battalion took two hundred yards in the city at a cost of eleven dead marines and another forty-five wounded. It was in Hue that Americans first became familiar with the stubby, lightweight, Soviet-designed weapon, the AK-47, equally effective for a single-shot sniper or spraying ten rounds a second. The weapon was to become an image of warfare in the Middle East, Central America, and Africa.

  What most disturbed veteran war correspondent Cronkite was that soldiers in the field and junior officers told him completely different versions of events from those given him by the commanders in Saigon. This was the experience of many who covered Vietnam. “There were so many patent untruths about the war,” said Gene Roberts. “It was more than what is today called spin. We were told things that just weren’t true. Saigon officers and soldiers in the field were saying the opposite. It produced a complete rift between reporters and the U.S. government.”

  Report from Vietnam by Walter Cronkite aired on February 27 at 10:00 P.M. eastern time. Cronkite fans, who seemed to include almost everyone, were thrilled to see Walter in Vietnam, out on the story, where in his heart Cronkite always believed he belonged. Then, after the last station break, he was back where CBS thought he belonged, behind a desk, dressed in a suit. He stared into the camera with a look so personal, so straightforward and devoid of artifice, that his nine million viewers could almost believe he was talking directly to each of them. The impression of sincerity was helped by his insistence on writing his own script:

  To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, though unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next months we must test the enemy’s intentions in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.

  This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.

  It was hardly a radical position. Few of its premises would have been acceptable to most leaders of the antiwar movement. But at a time of polarization, where every opinion was either for the war or against it, Walter Cronkite’s statement was against the war. He was not of the sixties generation, he was of the World War II generation, his career had been built on war. Cronkite thought supporting democracy against communism was such a given that it never occurred to him his open backing of the cold war was a violation of his own neutrality. Now he was saying that we ought to get out. Of course, by this time he was not alone. Even the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page said, “The whole Vietnam effort may be doomed.”

  Yet despite all his troubles, Johnson reacted to the Cronkite special as though now, for the first time, he had a real problem. There are two versions of Johnson’s response. In one version he said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.” In the other the president was quoted saying, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the war.”

  The show was said to have had a great effect on the president. Cronkite insisted that his role was greatly exaggerated. “I never asked Johnson about it, though we were pretty friendly. But there is no question that it was one more straw on the camel’s back, perhaps no more important than that, but the camel, the back of the camel, was getting ready to collapse.”

  Hue, the former Vietnamese capital, after being bombed into rubble by the United States, February 1968

  (Photo by Marc Riboud/Magnum Photos)

  What is as important for broadcast history, Cronkite’s ratings went up rather than down after giving his opinion, and few broadcasters would ever again wrestle with his and Salant’s qualms about a little editorializing. In fact, starting in 1968 there was a noted increase in political opinion from entertainers, disc jockeys, and radio talk show hosts. Suddenly everyone on the air, regardless of his or her credentials, was being asked to state a position on issues from Vietnam to the plight of inner cities. The other new trend was for political figures to appear on television entertainment programs, most notably Johnny Carson’s Tonight show but also such shows as Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Some found this increased blending of news and entertainment disturbing. Jack Gould wrote in The New York Times, “It is only a matter of time before Chet Huntley and David Brinkley will be donning fetching leotards for their nightly pas de deux and Clive Barnes”—the Times theater critic at the time—“will be reviewing the New Hampshire primary.”

  Decades after the Tet Offensive special Cronkite said, “I did it because I thought it was the journalistically responsible thing to do at that moment. It was an egotistical thing for us to do . . . it was egotistical for me to do and for CBS to permit me to do.” When again would a broadcast star submit himself to Cronkite’s brand of self-criticism?

  CHAPTER 4

  TO BREATHE IN

  A POLISH EAR

  I want to rule as Thou dost—always, secretly.

  —ADAM MICKIEWICZ, Dziady, or Forefathers’ Eve, 1832

  The communication of opposites, which characterizes the commercial and political style, is one of the many ways in which discourse and communication make themselves immune against the expression of protest and refusal.

  —HERBERT MARCUSE, One-Dimensional Man, 1964

  NO ONE was more surprised to discover a student movement in “the happiest barracks in the Soviet camp” than the students themselves. Happy barracks is perverse Polish humor. It was not that the Poles were happy, but that they had managed to secure from the Soviets certain rights, such as freedom to travel, that had been denied in other Eastern European countries. They were certainly happier than the citizens of Novotny´’s Czechoslovakia. The Polish government would
even sell $5 in hard currency to a Pole who wished to go abroad.

  By 1968, the belief that the Soviet bloc was crumbling had been widespread in Western academic circles for a number of years. In the summer of 1964, a group of economics and business experts offered a series of seminars in Moscow, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia on the disintegrating bloc. Clark Kerr, president of the University of California at Berkeley, participated, sensing trouble in the communist world, but without the slightest notion that he would return to campus in the fall to face the first important student uprising in the West.

  Now many thought the hour had arrived for the Eastern bloc. When Dubek came to power in Czechoslovakia and Brezhnev rushed to Prague, experienced Soviet watchers were quick to recall October 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev rushed to Warsaw faced with the onetime disgraced Władysław Gomułka, now managing a political comeback and overwhelmingly popular. Despite Khrushchev’s intervention, Gomułka came to power, and this Polish defiance had been all the encouragement needed for the Hungarians to rise up against Moscow. Was Brezhnev’s unsuccessful rush to Prague a prelude to uprisings in the Soviet bloc?

  This was Moscow’s great fear. They had newly rebellious Romania to worry about, and Tito’s Yugoslavia. Even Fidel Castro’s Cuba had been causing them trouble. In the midst of Soviet difficulties with Romania, a February meeting of world Communist Parties in Budapest was boycotted by Cuba, which was in the midst of an anti-Soviet purge in its government. In January the Cuban Communist Party had “discovered” a pro-Soviet “microfaction” in its midst and prosecuted and convicted nine pro-Soviet Cuban officials for being “traitors to the Revolution.” One Cuban official was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, eight were given twelve-year sentences, and twenty-six others received two-to-ten-year sentences.

  But while Poles had a reputation in Eastern Europe for rebelliousness, Poland was not high on Moscow’s lengthening list of worries for 1968. Gomułka, though at sixty-three he had outlasted Khrushchev, had lost some of his popular appeal. He understood that he had to balance Polish nationalism with Moscow relations and avoid the kind of debacle Hungary suffered in 1956. But the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary and the accompanying world condemnation had been difficult for the Soviets as well. Gomułka understood that the Kremlin had weaknesses and there were chances for concessions. The Soviet economy had been performing badly, and the Soviets could not afford the kind of hostility in the West that was produced by the crushing of Hungary in 1956. So with Moscow hesitant to act, it seemed a good time to test the limits. What those limits were was unknown, but all the bloc leaders, including Dubek, understood that there were at least two things the Kremlin would not accept: withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact military alliance and challenging Moscow’s power monopoly.

  Władysław Gomułka was the kind of enigma that CIA agents and KGB agents could earn their salaries trying to analyze. He was an antinationalist with a streak of Polish nationalism, a man with a history of rebellion against Moscow and yet a leader eager for good Soviet relations, an alleged anti-Semite married to a Jew. Being married to that woman would make anyone an anti-Semite, Polish Jews used to joke. Marian Turski, who covered the Gomułka years for the Polish weekly Polityka, said, “In a way there was something in common between him and de Gaulle . . . a very selfish man with a very large, unlimited ego.”

  Gomułka was juggling at least three problems at once, all of which tugged in different directions: internal discontent partly but not entirely related to the failure of the economy, Moscow’s paranoia, and an internal power struggle with an ambitious general who plotted for years to replace Gomułka. According to Jan Nowak, head of the Polish-language service of Radio Free Europe at the time, Interior Minister Mieczyslaw Moczar began plotting Gomułka’s overthrow as early as 1959.

  Moczar had not read Marx or Lenin or, for that matter, many other books. Uneducated and unrefined, he understood power and wanted to turn the “happy barracks” into a police state run by him. He was one of a group of extreme Polish nationalists known as the Partisans who had fought the Nazis together from inside Poland. The Partisans were bitter rivals of the so-called Muscovite faction that backed Gomułka, those who had fought the Germans by fleeing to Russia and joining up with the Soviets. The Jews, forced to flee Poland, became Muscovites and not Partisans. To help bring himself and the Partisans to power, Moczar did something that had often been done in Polish history: He played the Jewish card.

  By the eighteenth century, Poland had the largest concentration of European Jewry since the 1492 expulsion from Spain. But the Poles became increasingly anti-Semitic, and during World War II many Poles, while they resisted German occupation, cooperated in the murder of all but 275,000 of the 3.3 million Jews living in Poland. After the war, Jewish survivors faced further massacres and pogroms by Poles. Socialism had not ended anti-Semitism, as it had promised, and wave after wave of Jews left Poland in response to periodic outbreaks of it. The Polish government encouraged Jews to immigrate to Israel, offering them passports and transportation to Vienna. How does a smart Jew talk to a dumb Jew? went a popular Jewish joke in Poland. The answer: On the telephone from Vienna.

  By the mid-1960s only about thirty thousand Jews remained in Poland, and most of these identified more with the Communist Party than with Judaism. Despite recurring Polish bigotry, they were oddly comfortable, convinced that communism was the only hope for constructing a just society and ending anti-Semitism. In fact, communism would make both Judaism and anti-Semitism obsolete. Anti-Semitism, like Judaism, was a thing of the past in Poland.

  In 1967, Moczar discovered that the Gomułka government had been infiltrated by Jews. Many of the Muscovites who supported Gomułka were Jewish, and many of them held high-ranking positions in his government.

  The Polish anti-Semite accepted and needed no proof that Jews were foreigners, that they were not loyal to Poland, and that they were agents of foreign governments. In Poland, a Polish Jew is always called a Jew. A Pole by definition is Christian. Jews were often accused of siding with the Soviets against Poland or with the Israelis against the Soviets. Now Moczar was suggesting that they were guilty of both.

  All of this came together in 1967 when the Arabs were defeated by the Israelis in the spectacular Six Day War. Poles congratulated Israel. Gomułka received transcripts of telephone calls of congratulations to the Israeli embassy by high Polish officials of Jewish background. Of course, the transcripts had been produced by the Moczar faction, and no such communication had taken place. But it was hard for Gomułka to ignore this accusation.

  The Israeli embassy had been getting flowers and notes of congratulations from all over Poland, though not from officials of his government. The congratulations were not all coming from Jews, either. Poles asked, were not the Israeli fighters Poles—the very people who had left Poland through Vienna? Suddenly a Jew from Poland was a Pole. Was not the Israeli Defense Force, the Haganah, founded by Poles? Actually, it was founded by a Jew from Odessa, Vladimir Jabotinsky, but it was true that many Israeli soldiers were of Polish origin. Had not the jojne, an anti-Semitic stereotype of the cowardly Jew, gone to war? Jojne poszedl na wojne—the jojne went to war—it even rhymed in Polish. And the jojne even won, beating Soviet-trained troops in six days. It was a wonderful joke, and everyone—not the Jews, but the Poles—was laughing a little too loudly.

  Gomułka was not a great lover of Russians, but he knew this was not a good time to be laughing at them. Since the fall of the Soviet Union it has been learned that at the time of the Six Day War, Brezhnev sent nuclear submarines into the Mediterranean. He then called Johnson on the hot line, and the two labored to keep Israel from marching to Damascus. While this was going on, Gomułka and other Eastern European leaders were meeting with Brezhnev. Notes by Gomułka’s secretary indicate that news of the Arab defeat, step by step, was reaching Brezhnev while he was meeting with Gomułka and other leaders. The Russians had a sense of not only defeat but humiliation. Gomułka returned to Wars
aw, deeply troubled, saying that the world was inching toward war, and then he received reports from Moczar, the minister of the interior, and the head of the secret police that Polish Jews were sympathizing with Israel. The report said nothing about the fact that non-Jewish Poles were doing the same thing.

  On June 18, 1967, in a speech to the trade union congress, Gomułka spoke of “Fifth Columnist” activities, and that speech was interpreted as a signal that the purge of Jews or, as it was known, “the anti-Zionist campaign” could now begin. The terms Fifth Columnist, to indicate an underground traitor, and Zionist were now to be found in proximity. Zionists were to be rooted out and removed from high places. The worker’s militias, always available in the service of the government, dutifully began demonstrating against the Zionists. But the word syjoninci, meaning “Zionist,” was not well known, and some workers, told to demonstrate against the syjoninci, carried placards saying, “Syjoninci do Syjamu”—“Zionists Back to Siam.”

  While Gomułka had Moczar on one flank and Moscow on the other, a Polish dissident movement was growing among students. University students were an unlikely source of discontent, since they were the privileged children of good communist families. From the rubble of a society that became a nightmare, their parents had built through communism a society of greater social justice and, for those of Jewish origin, a society that did not tolerate racism.

  Toward the end of World War II, with the Red Army rapidly driving the Germans west, the Polish Home Army rose up against the Germans in Warsaw, expecting the Soviet arrival. But the Soviets didn’t come, and both the Home Army and the capital city were destroyed. The Soviets said they were held up by German resistance, the Poles say the Germans wanted a crushed and supplicant Poland. According to the Soviets, Warsaw was 80 percent destroyed. According to Polish historians, it was 95 percent rubble.

  When the Red Army entered the capital, only a tenth of the population, 130,000 people, still lived in Warsaw, huddled on the far side of the river or camped in dangerously unstable ruins. For the Polish communists, almost the first order of business was to rebuild the historic center of Warsaw, the cultural showcase of the capital, with its fine old pastel buildings, the imposing Roman-style national theater with tall colonnades and bas relief ornament, and the university with its gardened and gated campus. There, behind the black iron gates on the leafy campus, in the restored historic center of a ruined city, the daughters and sons of the communists who built the new Poland studied peacefully.