Douglas Brinkley’s biography of Walter Cronkite tells you all any sane person would want to know about the subject, and tells it fluently and with rigorous attachment to sources.
It also tells a greater tale, of the ideological and policy uniformity of the U.S. national media in the 65 years following World War II, and of the unself-conscious solidarity of the liberal media-academic complex, serenely oblivious to the alternative interpretations of their antics in the Vietnam War and the Watergate affair. There is not the slightest consideration, in the mind of the author or his subject, that Vietnam could have been won; that, the war having been started by the Kennedy-Johnson Democrats, there was any plausible alternative, morally or in policy terms, to ensuring the swiftest possible defeat of the United States and aCommunist takeover of Indochina. Nor, in 667 pages of text, is a syllable of consideration invested in the possibility that hounding Nixon from office and tearing the administration apart was anything but an act of courageous professional munificence and national purification.
Those seeking to discover the wellsprings of the public rage against the national media that has been the fertile ground from which have grown Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Hannity, Beck, and the entire Tea Party, scores of millions of people shaking their fists at the liberal journalistic-academic and Hollywood and Wall Street establishment, need look no farther than this book.
Walter Cronkite was a personally decent and convivial man, who literally couldn’t kill a fly, was kind to his children, generally helpful to juniors, authentically curious about the news, and, in his time, an energetic reporter. And he had humanitarian qualities not widely shared among his soulmates; he credited Richard Nixon with a dignified exit and approved President Ford’s pardon of him. The source of his prominence, though Brinkley does not exactly write this, was serendipitous luck: He had the reassuring voice of a country doctor on his house calls, and a moustache that was mature and comforting, not raffish and worrisome like Errol Flynn’s or Clark Gable’s, much less absurd, like Hitler’s. His vast cult of Middle American unaffected worldliness was a scam: He influenced the color and sequence of stories with his liberal biases, carefully disguised behind his earnest, homely mask.
Further, and I knew him slightly and can attest to this, the dirty little secret about Walter was that he was not intelligent outside his craft
And what about the unexamined conservative presuppositions?
@Liberal1 (objectivity):
Go ahead and list them, Lib1. Let’s have an honest discussion about conservatism for once, instead of reading your demagogue-riddled comments and outright lies. C’mon, be a man for once and get into an honest discussion with us here.
@ Curt,
Possibly the most condemning statement in this article by Conrad Black comes in the latter part, “. . . . Cronkite contributed importantly to the destruction of the integrity of American journalism.”
And more pointedly on the resulting political firmament, he writes, “This is an informative life of Walter Cronkite, but more importantly, a demonstration of the size and vigor of the virulent liberal aneurysm that still threatens the American political bloodstream.”
Black may have helped himself to $74 million of his company’s money, but damn, he can sure slam some good ones out of the park with his pen.
Somehow I’m not surprised that Lib1 has not engaged in any conversation about “unexamined conservative presuppositions”. I’d be more surprised if he actually did engage in an honest debate on a topic rather than his typical drive-by postings filled with inane chatter.