When Uncle Walter Replaced Uncle Sam
August 23, 2007 at 7:28 pm
On tonight’s NBC Nightly News report about Iraq, Brian Williams cited LBJ’s famous quote about losing Walter Cronkite.
Last year Cronkite gave this context to Esquire magazine:
When President Johnson heard my report that said we should get out of Vietnam, he snapped off the TV and said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” A couple of days after that, Johnson said he was not going to run for reelection. Later on, somebody made the joke that Johnson had gotten it wrong. What he should have said was, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost all of America.” To be honest, I was rather amazed that my reporting from Vietnam had such an effect on history.
Ontario Emperor said,
August 23, 2007 @ 8:17 pm
It’s hard to put ourselves back in the mindset of the 1960s to understand Cronkite’s amazement. Perhaps Cronkite was still thinking that people depended upon the newspapers, not TV, as their major source of information.