Walter Conkite

Walter Cronkite has died. I remember his as the iconic evening news "anchor".

I didn't realize that he was for world government. So I was surprised to run across this in his Wikipedia page:

He was also a proponent of centralized world government, writing fund-raising letters for the World Federalist Association (now Citizens for Global Solutions). In accepting the 1999 Norman Cousins Global Governance Award at the ceremony at the United Nations, Cronkite said:

"It seems to many of us that if we are to avoid the eventual catastrophic world conflict we must strengthen the United Nations as a first step toward a world government patterned after our own government with a legislature, executive and judiciary, and police to enforce its international laws and keep the peace. To do that, of course, we Americans will have to yield up some of our sovereignty. That would be a bitter pill. It would take a lot of courage, a lot of faith in the new order. But the American colonies did it once and brought forth one of the most nearly perfect unions the world has ever seen."

I admire that. This is a sign of his intellectual honesty. He didn't follow any "party line" and didn't cut his views to fit some fashion. He told people facts as he saw them. I'm especially proud of the fact that he came out against the Vietnam war on February 27, 1968:

To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy's intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But 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.

I believe this helped Eugene McCarthy's campaign and surprise challenge in New Hampshire which forced Johnson to call off his campaign. Sadly Johnson wouldn't let the American people pick their own candidate. He foisted Hubert Humphrey, the grinning goon, on the American people and ensured Nixon's election. A tragedy. But Cronkite had his heart in the right place.

If Johnson had taken Cronkite's advice, some 30,000 US troops would have lived and not died, a couple hundred thousand US troops wouldn't have been wounded saving Nixon's face, and a million Vietnamese and half a million Cambodians would not have been killed so that no US president would have to say that he "lost" a war. Sad. Cronkite gave good advice, he told the news honestly. I don't believe those days will come back until there is fundamental change, not the "change we can believe" silliness that Obama is now selling, but real change that removes the dead hand of corporate power and sold-out politics from the levers of power in Washington.

Cronkite represents the "can do" attitude Americans had as they went into WWII and saved the world from fascism. He was the face of the country at the high tide of optimism. Sadly he presided over the slide into the abyss as the people's expectation of change were destroyed by Southern racism that blocked change at every turn, race riots broke out in cities under the heavy hand of racist cops, by the military-industrial complex that Eisenhauer warned of which got a choke hold on the Congress, by the internal fight over Vietnam that culminated in the State using militia to kill unarmed students demonstrating against the war in Kent State, by the cultural wars that let rabid right wing crazies take control in the wake of the idealistic Sixties and replace that with anti-abortion marches, anti-gay hate speech, family "values" as practiced by politicians and preachers who spend more time with hookers than their own wives, and all the other sleaze of modern "spin" politics that Karl Rove perfected.

An era has passed.

Update 2009jul18: Cronkite anchored during a brutal, terrible time in the US: assassinations, riots, police murders, militia firing on its own people, corrupt politicians, racist and sexist elites beating down people. Here is one such moment...



Update 2009jul19: Here is a comment by Glenn Greenwald in Salon that is a fitting memorial to Walter Cronkite:

Tellingly, his [Cronkite's] most celebrated and significant moment -- Greg Mitchell says "this broadcast would help save many thousands of lives, U.S. and Vietnamese, perhaps even a million" -- was when he stood up and announced that Americans shouldn't trust the statements being made about the war by the U.S. Government and military, and that the specific claims they were making were almost certainly false. In other words, Cronkite's best moment was when he did exactly that which the modern journalist today insists they must not ever do -- directly contradict claims from government and military officials and suggest that such claims should not be believed. These days, our leading media outlets won't even use words that are disapproved of by the Government.