Where's Our Cronkite?

Another passage I liked from the New York Observer story:

Still, those moments were there—as when Walter Cronkite addressed his CBS audience at the end of his Feb. 27, 1968, broadcast. An anti-war movement was gaining strength and volume at home, and the North Vietnamese had swept into the streets of Saigon with the shocking Tet offensive. Mr. Cronkite himself was just home from a trip to Vietnam.

“To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion,” Mr. Cronkite said. “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.”

The declaration shook the press and the nation. “If I’ve lost Cronkite,” President Lyndon Johnson told his aides, “I’ve lost Middle America.”

The current President has long since made it clear that he doesn’t care what the media have to say. Even if he did, there is no Walter Cronkite to say it.