By Joseph Farah, Worldnetdaily
Walter Cronkite is dead at 92 – but most Americans, many of whom considered him “the most trusted man” in the country during his reign as CBS News anchor – still don’t know what motivated him and how he secured such an influential and lofty position.
He was like a grandfatherly institution in the early days of TV. People believed him. Uncle Walter wouldn’t lie, America believed.
Thus, when he gave his opinions, they had impact. One example was his report on the Tet offensive in Vietnam, which is credited with swinging the tide of opinion against the war.
Even in his death, however, nobody has addressed how and why an otherwise obscure figure at the time was elevated to become the most prominent anchorman on television.
The story was told publicly in the July 10, 2000, edition of the Nation, a Marxist-oriented journal, in a report on death of Blair Clark, who served as editor of the Nation from 1976 through 1978: “Whether it was calling on Philip Roth to recommend a Nation literary editor or persuading CBS News president Richard Salant to make Walter Cronkite anchor of CBS Evening News, Blair had a gift for the recognition and recruitment of excellence.”
Clark was not only the editor of the Nation, he was also heir to the Clark thread fortune, a Harvard classmate and friend of John F. Kennedy, a buddy of Washington Post Editor Ben Bradlee and the manager of Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.
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Having personally grownup during Walter Cronkite’s heyday as the CBS Anchorman, I can honestly say that during that period of time most everyday American Citizens were niave and somewhat innocent as to the greater picture that was playing out behind the scenes even here at home; consequently, we certainly had very little or no knowledge about what was going on in the world as a whole. We only knew what we were told and thinking back to those seemingly simpler times I am now quite sure that all of the information that was released to us–the majority of American Citizens had been well-censored prior to its release to the media for disemmination across the airways and to be published in all levels of the newspapers. Because we were not privileged to have the full-knowledge that “the-powers-that-be-during-those-days” evidently wanted us all to be “ignorant of” most of us did not have enough information in order to be able to formulate any kind of intelligent questions but at the same time we were not aware that we were being well-shielded from the truth of what was actually taking place all around us. Therefoe, it was a whole lot easier to just simply fall-in-line with whatever the party lines were and vote accordingly. The explosion of knowledge today has made it extremely difficult for those very same powers (both Democrats and Republicans) who used to have quite an easy time of it when it came to “snowing the public-at-large” are now finding that they have a much more difficult job on their hands today with true freedom of information because “WE THE PEOPLE” are no longer buying into all of their lies like we automatically used to do. I was seriously sorry to hear that such a respected and loved TV Anchorman like Walter Cronkite played such a huge part in the wholesale deception of the American People during all of those years when we faithfully tuned-in to CBS News every night to learn from him what we honestly believed to be that day’s news. At least with the internet today, we have a real opportunity to discover “what the truth is” if, we are willing to make the effort it takes to find it by Googling away until we find it. Otherwise, we just roll-over and play dead like “Fido” and pretend that all is well with our world-at-large until we are actually somehow shocked and forced into having to face the true reality of the world in which we all live!