Robert MacNeil writes in today’s Washington Post that the presumptive power and influence of Walter Cronkite, the former CBS News anchorman, “has morphed into a general civic belief.”
Let’s hope not.
Let’s hope the opposite effect is becoming more pronounced — that Cronkite’s presumed influence is slowly being recognized for the myth that it is.
MacNeil, the former co-anchor of the PBS News Hour program, takes up the notion of Cronkite’s power to move national events in a review of the Cronkite biography that came out at the end of May.
The biography, written by Douglas Brinkley and titled Cronkite, appeared for a short time on the New York Timeslist of non-fiction best-sellers. I found the book hagiographic, especially its treatment of the so-called “Cronkite Moment” of late February 1968.
That was when Cronkite declared on the air that the U.S. military was “mired in stalemate” in Vietnam and suggested that negotiations might lead to a way out.
But as I pointed out in my 2010 book, Getting It Wrong, Cronkite’s “stalemate” characterization was hardly novel and exerted little demonstrable effect on the policy or decisions of the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson. The myth also has it that Cronkite’s “mired in stalemate” commentary prompted Johnson not to seek reelection in 1968.
MacNeil in his review notes the doubts about whether Cronkite’s assessment exerted much influence on Johnson but asserts nonetheless the “idea [that it did] has morphed into a general civic belief.”
It’s regrettable that MacNeil didn’t pause to consider the implications of the morphing, or reflect on why the myth of the “Cronkite Moment” is so appealing and so eagerly retold, despite the considerable evidence that can be arrayed in debunking it.
Cronkite himself (until late in his life) rejected the notion that his “mired in stalemate” assessment was all that influential, likening the effect to that merely of a “straw on the back of a crippled camel.”
Indeed, other news organizations in February 1968 were offering assessments far more pointed that Cronkite’s. For example, the Wall Street Journal said a few days before Cronkite’s “mired in stalemate” commentary that the U.S. war effort in Vietnam “may be doomed.”
National political figures likewise were expressing downbeat opinions about the war that month. George Romney, then a long-shot Republican candidate for president, declared in mid-February 1968:
“We haven’t been told the truth about Vietnam. They’re winning; we’re not winning: we’re losing, thus far.”
Such observations obviously were more emphatic than Cronkite’s tentative “mired in stalemate” assessment.
And yet, MacNeil in his review favorably notes a passage from Cronkite, that “America asked for truth about Vietnam, and Cronkite dutifully delivered.”
Americans in February 1968 had many sources other than Cronkite for analysis about Vietnam — analysis that was far sharper and far less equivocal.
It’s been 45 years since George Romney committed one of the greatest gaffes in American political history — a misstep that supposedly inspired one of the most devastating putdowns in American political history.
Interestingly, though, crucial details about the devastating putdown remain rather murky.
Romney’s gaffe, which effectively destroyed his run for the presidency before it officially began, came in an interview taped on August 31, 1967, and aired September 4, 1967, on a Detroit television station.
In the interview, Romney, then governor of Michigan and a presumptive Republican candidate for president, referred to his visit to South Vietnam in 1965 and declared:
“You know, when I came back from Vietnam, I’d just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody could get. … Well, not only by the generals but by the diplomatic corps over there. They do a very thorough job.”
The assertion that he had been duped into supporting America’s war effort in Vietnam revealed Romney’s muddled thinking and an uncertain command of foreign policy. (“Could the country afford a President who was so easily deceived?” the New York Times wondered.)
Forty-five years on, Romney’s comment remains striking both for clumsiness and self-destructiveness. And it’s been recalled not infrequently in recent months as Romney’s son, Mitt, has campaigned for the presidency.
When it is recalled, the “brainwashing” gaffe often is coupled with the stiletto-like rejoinder attributed to Eugene McCarthy, then a second-term U.S. senator from Minnesota.
McCarthy supposedly said that rather than brainwashing, “a light rinse” would have sufficed in Romney’s case.
There is no question about Romney’s having made the “brainwashing” claim; this YouTube video cuts to the money quote:
The anecdote’s memorable quality lies not only in Romney’s befuddled claim but also in McCarthy’s “light rinse” quip. Indeed, McCarthy’s retort is said to have been so powerful that it “essentially finished Romney.”
But the precise context of McCarthy’s “light rinse” zinger is at best unclear. My research has turned up no unambiguous documentation about when McCarthy made the comment, where, and specifically to whom.
(And why does this matter? Getting it right matters a lot, especially about an insult so piercing and effective that it lives on like few others in American political lore.)
A database search of leading U.S. newspapers — including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and Baltimore Sun — turned up no published reference to McCarthy’s “light rinse” remark in 1967 or 1968, or for many years afterward.
The nearest contemporaneous hint to a “light rinse” came in a commentary published in mid-September 1967 in the Los Angeles Times, in which conservative columnist James J. Kilpatrick said of Romney:
“Brainwashed, was he? It couldn’t have been much of a laundry bill.”
Kilpatrick’s column did not mention McCarthy, who wasn’t prominently in the news in September 1967. McCarthy did not announce his candidacy for president until November that year.
The first reference found in the database search to the “light rinse” comment was in a commentary written by Fred Barnes and published in Baltimore Sun in April 1983. Barnes’ commentary, however, did not say when, where, or to whom McCarthy uttered the “light rinse” line.
Here are a few examples of the shifting versions of the “light rinse” remark:
Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, writing in her column in January 2012, quoted McCarthy as having said: “All that was needed in the case of George Romney was a light rinse.”
Syndicated columnist Jules Witcover wrote in 2007 that McCarthy “quipped that he ‘would have thought a light rinse would have done it.'”
Mark Shields, writing in the Washington Post in 1988, quoted McCarthy’s one-liner this way: “I don’t know why Romney was brainwashed; in his case, a light rinse would have been sufficient.”
And as further evidence of version variability, the “light rinse” quip has even been attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Such imprecision invites suspicion about the “light rinse” quip. (It also sounds almost too perfect to be true — not unlike, say, William Randolph Hearst’s purported vow to “furnish the war” with Spain or Lyndon B. Johnson’s supposed epiphany on the Vietnam War: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”)
American Melodrama, which was written by Lewis Chester, Godfrey Hodgson, and Bruce Page, described McCarthy’s remark as off-handed and said his aides persuaded journalists to hush it up.
According to American Melodrama, McCarthy was asked “by reporters whether he thought Romney’s ‘brainwashed’ gaffe had dealt the death blow to his chances.”
McCarthy was quoted as saying in reply:
“Well . . . er no, not really. Anyway, I think in that case a light rinse would have been sufficient.”
The book further stated:
“McCarthy’s press aides, appalled at the possible effects of this remark on Republicans, who, bereft of a dove candidate in their own party, might write-in McCarthy’s name, pleaded with reporters not to use it. They dutifully complied; though few would have done the same for Romney.”
While intriguing, American Melodrama doesn’t say when McCarthy made the comment, where, or specifically to whom.
Although self-censorship could account for the absence of contemporaneous references to McCarthy’s quip in leading U.S. newspapers, it seems implausible that an insult so delicious and devastating would have remained hushed up, even by compliant reporters, for very long.
Another version was offered by British journalist David Frost in an interview the aired on C-SPAN in 2007. Frost recalled having heard McCarthy’s comment, and said it was made in New Hampshire not long after Romney’s “brainwashing” statement.
But Frost’s recollection is faulty in a crucial respect: He said in the interview that “within a week or so” after making the “brainwashing” comment, Romney “was out of the race.”
Not so. Romney’s ended his campaign for the presidency on February 28, 1968 — six months after uttering the “brainwashing” remark and 3½ months after officially entering the race.
During the week Romney dropped out, Frost said in the C-SPAN interview, “I was interviewing Eugene McCarthy in New Hampshire, and, as we came out, there were three or four people who … wanted a sound bite. And one of them said, ‘What do you think about George Romney being brainwashed?’
“And McCarthy said, ‘I would have thought a light rinse would have been sufficient.’ Killer line. Fantastic line, I thought.”
But left unclear in Frost’s version is why journalists would have been asking McCarthy in late February or early March 1968 about a claim that Romney had made months before. Why would it have been newsworthy then?
Puzzling.
Not only that, but Frost did not say whether, or when, he reported McCarthy’s “killer line.” Or whether McCarthy’s “press aides” pleaded with him not to use it.
It has taken more than three months, but the New York Times today published a sort-of correction of its erroneous description about the napalm attack in Vietnam in June 1972 that preceded the famous photograph of children terrified and wounded by the bombing.
The photograph, taken by Nick Ut of the Associated Press, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973. It is colloquially known as the “napalm girl” image.
The Times’ error appeared in an obituary, published May 14, about Horst Faas, an award-winning AP photographer and editor who spent years in Vietnam.
The obituary said the photograph showed “the aftermath of one of the thousands of bombings in the countryside by American planes: a group of terror-stricken children fleeing the scene, a girl in the middle of the group screaming and naked, her clothes incinerated by burning napalm.”
But as I, and others, pointed out to the Times, the napalm was not dropped by the American military but by the South Vietnamese Air Force.
“You are correct that the bombing in question was conducted by the South Vietnamese Air Force. However, the obituary referred only to ‘American planes,’ and there does not seem to be any doubt that this plane was American –- a Douglas A-1 Skyraider, to be precise.”
Of course, the aircraft’s manufacturer was hardly at issue. And in the sort-of correction published today, the Times removed the reference to “American planes” in the digital version of the obituary but otherwise embraced Keepnews’ convoluted reasoning, stating:
“While the planes that carried out that attack were ‘American planes’ in the sense that they were made in the United States, they were flown by the South Vietnamese Air Force, not by American forces.”
Which makes for a less-than-clean correction.
Indeed, the correction seems begrudging, half-hearted.
And less than sincere.
It’s as if the Times were saying the South Vietnamese Air Force was doing the dirty work for the American military — which by June 1972 was decidedly winding down its war effort in Vietnam.
Richard Pyle, a retired veteran AP correspondent who was the news agency’s Saigon bureau chief from 1970-73, characterized the Times’ correction this way:
“[T]he phrasing — ‘while the planes that carried out the attack were “American planes” in the sense that they were made in the United States, they were flown by the South Vietnamese Air Force, not American forces’ — makes it sound like a bunch of teenagers borrowing daddy’s car.”
Indeed.
Pyle, who retired from AP in 2009, also had petitioned the Times for a correction in the Faas obituary. So had Hal Buell, a retired AP vice president who for years directed the news agency’s photo service.
In July, they sent a joint letter by email to the Times, pointing to the very real prospect that the error, if left uncorrected, could solidify into wide acceptance.
They wrote: “Our larger concern, beyond amending the immediate record, is that if left standing, this error will be repeated in future by the Times and any publications that might rely on it as a source, in effect causing a significant piece of misinformation to be cast in journalistic stone.”
The Times’ sort-of correction muddies rather than clarifies or fully corrects. The concerns that Pyle and Buell addressed are hardly set to rest.
The sort-of correction is disappointing, too, in light of the praise that the Times’ outgoing public editor, Arthur Brisbane, offered Sunday about the newspaper’s corrections staff.
Brisbane extolled the Times’ corrections desk as “a powerful engine of accountability” unmatched by similar operations at other U.S. news organizations.
The sort-of correction published today mocks such extravagant praise.
Let’s hope the opposite effect is becoming more pronounced — that Cronkite’s presumed influence is slowly being recognized for the myth that it is.
Media Myth Alert 