View Full Version : Walter Cronkite dies at 92
jetdawgg
07-17-09, 07:22 PM
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/walter-cronkite-iconic-anchorman-dies/
Alisium
07-17-09, 07:41 PM
Good riddance!
Phantom Blooper
07-17-09, 07:54 PM
I was close...but no cigar!:evilgrin:
awbrown1462
07-17-09, 08:00 PM
he will live in history
we have lost the war
temarti
07-17-09, 09:14 PM
"and that's the way it is, Friday July 15, 2009"
Phantom Blooper
07-17-09, 09:20 PM
Today is the 17th.....:beer:
:evilgrin:
sparkie
07-17-09, 09:24 PM
Good by,,,,, Now I guess you won't speak against us,,,,,,,,For all the shet you spoke, I hope I meet you someday. And that's the way it is,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
SgtThrasher
07-17-09, 09:25 PM
Another liberal democratic news anchor that claimed he was non partisan "and that's the way it is".
you guys are fvcked up... Micheal I can understand, but the man wasn't some satanic news anchor... he reported it the way HE saw it. Micheal tried to kill his son... and probably those kids who tattled on him in court....
sparkie
07-17-09, 09:55 PM
Petz,,,,,, after Tet, he reported we lost,,,,,,,, What a friggin lie,,,,,,,,,
Pete0331
07-17-09, 09:57 PM
you guys are fvcked up... Micheal I can understand, but the man wasn't some satanic news anchor... he reported it the way HE saw it.
News is supposed to be about presenting facts.
The way an individual sees something is an opinion.
What he presented in Viet Nam was a personal opinion that swayed the American public.
He was the forerunner of the biased media.
I am indifferent to his death.
There are far better men that deserve recognition.
News is supposed to be about presenting facts.
The way an individual sees something is an opinion.
What he presented in Viet Nam was a personal opinion that swayed the American public.
He was the forerunner of the biased media.
I am indifferent to his death.
There are far better men that deserve recognition.
I agree that he probably showed our corrupt media how to play the game, and drew us into a crap-shoot of whether or not news is factual or opinion...
but the man died... leave it at that... saying nothing is better than saying something bad about the man.
oh, and blame dawg for the thread.
sparkie
07-17-09, 10:07 PM
Ok,,,, you're right,,,,,, I'm done. Just I was there, and as I grew up and saw the truth I lost a little respect. I'll let him go,,, and I guess Hanoi Jane too,,,,,,,,,,,
jetdawgg
07-17-09, 10:50 PM
I agree that he probably showed our corrupt media how to play the game, and drew us into a crap-shoot of whether or not news is factual or opinion...
but the man died... leave it at that... saying nothing is better than saying something bad about the man.
oh, and blame dawg for the thread.
http://www.kidsuki.com/Images/scooby-doo.jpeg
Alisium
07-17-09, 10:57 PM
I agree that he probably showed our corrupt media how to play the game, and drew us into a crap-shoot of whether or not news is factual or opinion...
but the man died... leave it at that... saying nothing is better than saying something bad about the man.
oh, and blame dawg for the thread.
I actually enjoyed verbally dancing on his grave.
temarti
07-17-09, 11:13 PM
:beer:I stand correct, the 17th:beer: two shots!
Wyoming
07-17-09, 11:33 PM
you guys are fvcked up... Micheal I can understand, but the man wasn't some satanic news anchor... he reported it the way HE saw it. Micheal tried to kill his son... and probably those kids who tattled on him in court....
Here we go, Petzold.
YOU are fvcked up!!!
I send condolences to his family, but cronkite was an aszhole, fonda loving, sheitheead, McNamara loving, no good sumbish.
Pezwold, as you like to say, 'butt out'.
So butt the **** out boot!!!
When the time comes, I will **** on his fvcking grave!!!
JohnEaceHunt
07-18-09, 01:29 AM
petro and cronkinite have a few things in common. cronkinite thought we lost the War, but we didn't, and petro thinks he knows it all. boots don't know nothin. I send condolences to the Family too, as I wouldn't have wanted to be in it.
DocGreek
07-18-09, 05:48 AM
WHO??....I was, and still am...a Howard K. Smith fan. He swung more to the right, and so did his son...RIP. GOOD MEN?? They tried......DOC
petro and cronkinite have a few things in common. cronkinite thought we lost the War, but we didn't, and petro thinks he knows it all. boots don't know nothin. I send condolences to the Family too, as I wouldn't have wanted to be in it.
I just said be respectful.... not that I know it all... and I really don't know you, so you calling me petro... knock it off.
temarti
07-18-09, 10:09 AM
boots don't know nothin
Define boot, is it time in service, age, rank, work experience, life experience. Just a bit confused here. There are a lot of us on here who only know Cronkite as the man on the news after the local news.
Pete0331
07-18-09, 10:11 AM
Define boot, is it time in service, age, rank, work experience, life experience. Just a bit confused here.
What a Boot thing to say. :marine:
temarti
07-18-09, 10:14 AM
Haha, then I have succeeded :marine:
Pete0331
07-18-09, 10:26 AM
Time in service, Time in grade, rank, time in unit, time in country, social standing, etc.
It is really difficult to explain when a Marine stops being a Boot.
What people forget is that no matter how senior you think you may be, you are always a Boot to someone else.
temarti
07-18-09, 10:46 AM
So, we are boots to the Cronkite era:beer:
well, I'm apparently a boot to a Cpl... so yeah.
Pete0331
07-18-09, 11:26 AM
well, I'm apparently a boot to a Cpl... so yeah.
Age counts for something when you have as many years as some of the salts on here. :marine:
CH53MetalMan
07-18-09, 11:28 AM
News is supposed to be about presenting facts.
The way an individual sees something is an opinion.
What he presented in Viet Nam was a personal opinion that swayed the American public.
He was the forerunner of the biased media.
I am indifferent to his death.
There are far better men that deserve recognition.
The Pentagon Papers
Page 9
On May 8 1950 Washington announced that it would provide economic and military aid to the French in Indochina, beginning with a grant of $10-million.
The first step had been taken. “The U.S. thereafter was directly involved in the developing tragedy in Vietnam,” the account says. Ultimately, the American military aid program reached $1.1-billion in 1954, paying for 78 per cent of the French war burden.
10 years later …..
In August 1964 the Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred, or at least, so the American public was told. “While on routine patrol in international waters,” it was announced from Washington, “the U.S. destroyer Maddox underwent an unprovoked attack.” An invisible enemy vessel, it seemed, had fired an invisible torpedo, which obviously missed the Maddox. Shortly afterwards a similar incident took place involving another U.S. naval vessel.
Johnson soundly denounced this “open aggression.” He appeared in national television to inform the American citizenry that “renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the military forces of the United States to take action in reply.” Congressional leaders of both parties, he said, had assured him of passage of a resolution making it clear “that our government is united in its determination to take all necessary measures in support of freedom and in defense of peace in Southeast Asia.”
The Gulf of Tonkin resolution passed on August 7 1964. Promptly following the congressional resolution, American planes began their first bombardment of North Vietnam. In 1965 more than 200,000 American troops poured into South Vietnam.<O:p</O:p
CH53MetalMan
07-18-09, 11:45 AM
Pentagon Papers, government study of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. Commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara in June, 1967, the 47-volume, top secret study covered the period from...
usmchauer
07-18-09, 12:19 PM
I don't know enough to have an opinion about the man. However Dawg, the tags you use are friggin hilarious!
I don't care who you are... if we paid 78% of the Frenches war effort and they left... I call that a lose... financially of course...
all for the Michelin rubber plantations..
jetdawgg
07-18-09, 12:40 PM
I don't know enough to have an opinion about the man. However Dawg, the tags you use are friggin hilarious!
Hey, I did not put all of those tags there:usmc:
hehehe... yeah, that was me!
why would you put dies as a tag?
CH53MetalMan
07-18-09, 01:15 PM
I don't care who you are... if we paid 78% of the Frenches war effort and they left... I call that a lose... financially of course...
all for the Michelin rubber plantations..
Sadly the American people did not start learning about this untill June 1971.
Some still don't know. And they continue waving the flag, saying we should not have left South Vietnam to defend themselves.
well... it's pretty messed up to have started a huge conflict, infused the north with more willing fighters by pushing the neutrals over by burning their villages... and then walking away....
that fight was going on for 1000 years before the french and us got involved.... who attrified (sp) and who go stronger?
Pete0331
07-18-09, 01:59 PM
On May 8 1950 Washington announced that it would provide economic and military aid to the French in Indochina, beginning with a grant of $10-million.
US involvement in the area began before that.
Before WWII the area was a French colony.
Japan took it in WWII.
We helped fund and train the forces of the predominate guerilla leader in the area to get rid of the Japanese.
His name was Ho Chi Minh.
CH53MetalMan
07-18-09, 02:27 PM
US involvement in the area began before that.
Before WWII the area was a French colony.
Japan took it in WWII.
We helped fund and train the forces of the predominate guerilla leader in the area to get rid of the Japanese.
His name was Ho Chi Minh.
All this is indeed true, but as a matter of CBS war coverage with Walter Cronkite, I didn't mean to go back quite that far.
Whatever info Ho Chi Minh was providing us during WWII was not a factor in determining the outcome of the war. Afterwards, when the French went back to Indo-China, we should have stayed netural, but no, that is seldom the case when corporate interests are at stake.
yeah... 'cause it also caused the middle eastern issues because we HAD to draw lines in the sand for OUR benefit and not theirs which would have been to split the different cultures up...
greed sure has made a mess of things...
Pete0331
07-18-09, 06:30 PM
yeah... 'cause it also caused the middle eastern issues because we HAD to draw lines in the sand for OUR benefit and not theirs which would have been to split the different cultures up...
greed sure has made a mess of things...
That sounds suspiciously like anti-imperialist socialist propaganda mixed with the lies perpetrated by higher academic institutions.
The middle east is probably the best example of how "drawing lines in the sand" can work.
They only place it didn't work was in the non-Muslim African nations.
what!
you can't put all those descriptors together like that... you make yourself sound paranoid.
and if you honestly think "drawing lines in the sand" worked in the middle east then there is no hope for you.
MOUNTAINWILLIAM
07-18-09, 07:46 PM
Good riddance to another consummate liar, I reckon he's in for some hard questions from ol' St. Pete.
thedrifter
07-19-09, 08:25 AM
Roundup: Talking About History
Jeff Gralnick: Remembering Walter
Source: Huffington Post (7-18-09)
[Jeff Gralnick is a 50-year veteran of broadcast news who was fortunate enough to work for and with Walter Cronkite from 1961 to 1970. He is currently acting as Special Consultant on Global Business Development for NBC News.]
The "memories of Walter" rush is on and rightfully so.
No doubt many with bolder face names than mine are dictating or at keyboards knocking out their "I remember when" pieces as we all try to both honor the memory and pin down the fact that "we were there with The Man when" which is a natural instinct. I was lucky enough to be one of those who was in the dozen or so years when my starter career at CBS News in the early '60s and his exploding one connected. I worked directly with him in the early days of broadcast news and his ascendancy to a rightful and earned place as "most trusted man."
My stories?
All brief, so bear with, and culled to get at what I think is essential not to lose now: That no matter how big he became there was an essential decency and humanity along with his drive to know and understand each story that he never lost. All that contributed to that "most trusted" thing and it begins for me with his ability to say and say in public "I was wrong."
It's 1965, and it pre-launch for one of the Gemini manned space missions. As Walter's "anchor assistant" which was a grab bag job title of researcher and producer and hand holder and security blanket, I helped prepare him for the story he was about to broadcast. After taking Walter step-by-step through a piece of orbital mechanics arcana that was key to the mission, Walter told me flatly: "Damnit you're wrong" and I told him equally flatly that he didn't know what he was talking about.
There I was at barely 25 nose-to-nose with WAL-ter CRON-kite, going at it and losing on a point that had to be won if was to be right on air but wasn't winning and to boot was being chewed out hard and in public by The Guy.
We went on the air, broadcast the launch and the start of the mission and at some point it became clear to me that Walter had finally gotten it. No light bulb is visible in the playback tape but clearly it had gone on. And when we got off the air, Walter stood up and told a crowded broadcast trailer studio: "I was wrong. This young man was 100% right and I should have listened." A public apology from Walter; an admission that he was wrong? Who'da thunk? Only those who didn't really know him I discovered that day.
Walter and I in Phu Bai in 1968, Credit: CBS News cameraman Jimmy Wilson
Flash forward three years and it is Viet Nam where I am with Walter in February of 1968 where I was having my Hemingway-war correspondent moment and trying to figure out which side of the camera I belonged on. I was asked to step away briefly from that to join the production team put together for the special half hour he was going to do on the war and the TET offensive.
And this little story is all about Walter's need to "experience it as it was" in order to know the story he was covering.
We were in Hue after a ride in on open truck full of replacements through very much contested territory during which one young marine looked up, saw Walter in flak jacket and helmet and said as only a Marine could, "****, if Cronkite is here, this must be big." When it came time to bed down, the question was where? I said I was taking the film crew to the safest place I knew which was the stone basement of Hue University. Be a helluva rocket to get us there was clear but it was going to mean a stone floor for a bed and Meals Ready to Eat coffee heated in canteen cups for breakfast. Our military escorts (Walter WAS very well escorted) offered up a tent with cots and blankets in a relatively secure somewhat rear area that came with a hot breakfast.
Walter had none of it. "You guys," he said to his more senior producers, "can go, but I'm going with those guys" meaning us and he did. Slept on the floor. Flinched at the sound of incoming and outgoing with the rest of us. Hated the coffee but thanked us for it and he experienced the war at the Grunt's level and it made his reporting what it was as did the only ride possible out of Hue. It was on a Marine helicopter the crew and I helped load with dead Marines. He wanted to experience it and wasn't afraid to do what it took.
Flash forward again but this time only five months.
I'm back from my six months having agreed to return in time to pick up as Walter's anchor assistant trading foxholes in Viet Nam for a pit under the anchor desk where I became the unseen body attached to that hand passing 5x7 file cards up to Walter's left hand. I cannot remember which night is was that they showed the memorial film for Bobby and Martin whose assassinations I had essentially missed intellectually and emotionally while covering the war. They died. Their deaths interrupted what we were doing, were worked into the fabric of our coverage and then we moved on. Neither had hit me.
As that film spooled out for the delegates I was destroyed. King whom I had covered and gotten to know in the South was now actually dead for me and so was Kennedy which brought back the range of emotion I felt when covering his brother's death five years before.
I was unable to function and worried about what would Walter "do" as I sat up against the desk and wept. And what he did was reach down; pat me on the shoulder; and say "take the time you need. When you're ready come back to me." It was a moment of empathy and humanity I have never forgotten and it was part of the essential man.
America may not have known it, but it saw that essential man twice that I am aware of while he was on the air and both times he took his glasses off.
The first was when he had to report that President Kennedy was dead. Glasses came off. He wiped the corner of his eye then took a breath and moved on. He felt the moment and let it be known as best he could while controlling it so he could move the story on. And the second was the night 40 years ago when man landed on the moon. When it was clear Armstrong and Aldrin were safely down at Tranquility Base the glasses came off and the "Holy Cow" Walter uttered softly was the essential man out there for the entire world to see. Feeling the moment and letting those on the other side of the glass know that he felt the relief and emotion and the pride that they did.
That was Walter. He was every bit a "what you saw was what you got" kind of guy and it is that made him unique and earned him that "most trusted" thing which to his credit he never really bought.
Posted on Saturday, July 18, 2009 at 2:40 PM
Ellie
didn't someone mention that Ed Palmer died in march?
DocGreek
07-19-09, 09:52 AM
PETZ....OUR Ed Palmer????
no... sorry.
I'm retarded... seriously... I meant Ed Freeman, but I see Palmer around here so much I wrote his name down...
I appologize for the mis-understanding this caused anyone.
greensideout
07-19-09, 01:59 PM
The Real Walter Cronkite
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=104399
Good riddance!
When this thread was first posted I wanted to reply much as Alisium (above) did. Not until now have I found another post from a blogger name Robert Hall that zeros in on my feelings about the man and those times:
Walter Cronkite Dies
A great, highly-experienced military commander and strategist, I understand. Must have been. His pronouncement that the war in Vietnam was lost, led to a loss of public support for the war. That created the political environment where the Democrat-controlled US Congress could break our treaty obligations and eliminate promised financial support for South Vietnam. Which led to the fall of that country, as you can’t fight tanks, planes and bullets with empty hands. Which led to twice as many people in SE Asia being murdered by the Communists in the first two years after the war ended, as died in the course of the war, and a one-party government that doesn’t allow freedom of the press, freedom of speech or freedom of religion, and has been steadily exterminating the Montagnard hill peoples. Thanks Uncle Walter, the most trusted man in America. May you now be paying for the slaughter you did so much to help create.
And we wonder why pre-democracy folks in the Middle East don’t trust America to keep its pledges and stand by them?
I believe now, as I did 40 years ago, that when US troops are in the field and giving their lives every day in pursuit of a US objective, that anyone who in any way gives help and comfort to their enemies is something worse than a traitor. Makes no difference what the national objective is, or whether or not the "purists" in our society decide whether or not it is a "just" or "unjust" war.
My Brothers who are in the field deserve all of the respect and support that may be given to them by the US government and public.
We were in Viet Nam, just as we are now in Iraq and Afghanistan, carrying out objectives that were established by the officials we elected to the Presidency and the Congress. Criticism of the objective, IMHO, must wait until all of our troops are safe and out of the field of combat. Then if the Powers-That-Be decide that the Constitution should be changed to preclude involvement in that particular type of struggle, so be it. If it is decided that POTUS or others exceeded their authority, then impeach and convict them of that crime, and remove them from office.
Until the foregoing events occur, every citizen of this great nation, and those we elect to lead us in attaining national objectives, must give up his.her right to freedom of speech if by exercising that right he endangers our Brothers fighting and sacrificing their lives to achieve those national objectives.
In other words, the argument comes down to this: Are any rights granted by our Constitution superior to those of the cardinal right that our Soldiers have of the "Right To Life?. Does anyone question that Life trumps Speech each and every time? Let those who ignore this, the Fondas and Cronkites of this society, suffer the consequences. Semper Fidelis, Sully
Southern Man
07-25-09, 04:39 PM
Well put, Shrink. Instead of reporting the almost total annihilation of the Viet Cong as a fighting force in the South thanks to American troops during TET 68, Conkrite's liberal point of view got in the way and paved the way for our leaving a few years later. An American icon - I don't think so.
Troutzilla
07-25-09, 10:07 PM
Walter Concrete.....an arrogant blockhead that won't be missed by me.
Excellent point Sully !!
Semper Fi
:flag: