Cronkite’s report was significant. It contributed greatly to the shift in public opinion against the war. But there was no immediate, radical turn. Most polls would continue to show narrowing but clear public support for the war for years to come. Richard Nixon was elected later that year, and vigorously prosecuted the war for six years more. If Cronkite was wrong, if the war was in fact being won and winnable, there were ample resources, time and commitment to prove it. In fact, Cronkite was right. The war was not being won, nor would it be.

It was not a war that could be won by firepower, even overwhelming firepower. Edward Lansdale, the country’s foremost expert on counterinsurgency, and one with long experience in Vietnam, had counseled as much from the beginning. As the military historian Max Boot writes in his superb biography of the man, “The Road Not Taken,” Lansdale told Defense Secretary Robert McNamara on their first meeting in 1961, after dumping a sample of the relatively primitive weapons and rubber sandals and equipment used by the Vietcong on his desk at the Pentagon:

“The people that are fighting there on our side are being supplied with our weapons and uniforms and shoes and all of the best that we have, and we are training them. Yet, the enemy is licking our side. Always keep in mind about Vietnam, that the struggle goes far beyond the material things of life. It doesn’t take weapons and uniforms and lots of food to win. It takes something else, ideas and ideals, and these guys are using that something else. Let’s at least learn that lesson.”

We never did. Our ally in Saigon was not a democracy. It was a notoriously corrupt, one-party, authoritarian state whose only virtue, in American eyes, was that it was not Communist. It survived only through an exorbitant investment of American money, guns and lives.

Cronkite had been a believer. He had no objection to the war on moral or even strategic grounds and for years had been faithfully reporting on his nightly broadcast the official accounts of American progress. He did so even as many prominent print journalists filed damaging reports and even as the reports on his own program by journalists like Morley Safer and Jack Laurence told a different story altogether.