Since I’ve sort of become the Tomato’s resident obituary writer, how could I pass up the chance to post on yesterday’s passing of legendary anchorman Walter Cronkite? Below is perhaps his most famous broadcast, the one covering the assassination of President Kennedy.
Though I never saw one of his newscasts live (his last one was just over 18 months before I was born), the power he wielded over the American news media is undeniable.
In a video statement, President Obama perhaps encapsulated Cronkite’s impact best. He remarked, “In an era before blogs and email, cellphones and cable, he was the news”.
It is difficult for those of us in Generation Y to imagine that such a world existed, and that one newsman could be called “the news”. The clutter of Tweets, SMS alerts, and yes blog posts, can seem overwhelming, and it’s impossible to imagine a Brian Williams, a Katie Couric, or any future news anchor ever being able to attract the number of viewers that Cronkite’s broadcast reached every evening.
Most of the headlines read some paraphrase of: What will Palin do next? After all, she gave no clear reason for her resignation and ended her lakeside speech (she never forgets to add that rural homespun background) with a mysterious sounding quote of General Douglas MacArthur’s, “We are not retreating, we are just changing directions”. Although, we must assume that MacArthur had some vague idea of the new direction he was going in when he made that quote, otherwise they’d probably be speaking a tad more Japanese in the Philippines.
As part of the hypothetical onslaught, some of Palin’s remarks against the press have led many pundits to compare Palin’s dropout to that of Richard Nixon when he gave a quite embittered speech in November of 1962 after losing the California Governor’s race to Pat Brown. Even Nixon’s former aide, Pat Buchanan, made the comparison.
Jonathan Allen (more proof that Jonathans are a mental force to be reckoned with) published a piece chastising Buchanan for the comparison and arguing that Palin could never hold a candle to Nixon as a foreign policy expert or a political strategist. While I agree completely, I don’t think that just because she doesn’t get up to Nixon’s talent level means that she could not make a similar political comeback. She will probably spend the time off earning a significant amount of money through book deals, etc., perhaps even more than Nixon was able to earn during his interim gig as a Manhattan attorney. This could give her an ample purse (hopefully, one she buys for herslf this time) come 2016 or 2020, or if she decides to challenge Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski next year.
Perhaps somewhat lost in the latest boom of celebrity deaths, was that of Robert S. McNamara, one of the principal architects of the Vietnam War, who died yesterday morning at age 93. McNamara was the Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and in many ways could be considered the Donald Rumsfeld of his day. Over the past twenty years, he has embarked on a mea culpa tour of sorts by agreeing with many of his former detractors that the war was not winnable and should probably never have been undertaken.
In 1995, McNamara wrote a memoir, “In Retrospect: the Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam”. One of the key lessons learned that McNamara details in the book (see clip below), was that Vietnam was at its core a civil war between North and South Vietnam and that “you can not win a civil war with outside troops”.
Perhaps he became such an advocate in the hope that American public officials would never make that mistake again. Point, set, match neocons, I guess.
Still, McNamara was a fascinating figure, and despite my disgust with his actions as Secretary of Defense, it was humbling to see a man, perhaps one of the most intelligent of his generation, come to grips with his own extreme failings. I can remember seeing the 2003 documentary, The Fog of War, as a college sophomore. It came out around the same time as the “shock and awe” phase of the Iraq War was beginning. Although I had heard many of McNamara’s Vietnam epiphanies before, they had never hit home in quite the same way. The transparent format of the interview segments also left an indelible impact on me that forever changed my view of the man.
This film included many segments where the viewer is forced to focus on McNamara’s face at a camera angle that makes the former Pentagon chief look small and solemn in his thoughts. He had realized the error of his ways, and this documentary was his best shot at asking the world for forgiveness as he approached his own inevitable demise.
McNamara is now gone, but his lessons must live on. Perhaps I see him in a kinder light because I did not live through Vietnam myself. My internal bitterness towards his lies and misjudgments when he had power is naturally less than that of my parents’ generation.
Will I be able to feel this same sense of contemplative pity if Mr. Rumsfeld ever goes through a similar process? Perhaps not, though I hope he does, and I will just have to cross that bridge when I come to it.
The greatest lesson I can glean from McNamara’s life is that we are all to some degree prisoners of the times in which we live in, and that it was only once he stepped away from public life and sought a better understanding of what went wrong with Vietnam, that he was actually able to fairly analyze the situation. All too often our public officials seem stuck in the moment and unwilling to see that there is a gray area to so much in life, including international politics.
Robert McNamara’s life and times prove that an absolutist view of the world can cause immense, unecessary destruction. If our leaders could only learn from his legacy, perhaps McNamara’s decades long quest was not in vain.
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