Snake Eyes

By Hendrik Hertzberg
The New Yorker

21 August 2006 Issue

On February 27, 1968, Walter Cronkite, the longtime anchorman of the CBS Evening News and the gruff but kindly voice of what was then called Middle America, signed off his broadcast on an unusual note. Freshly returned from Vietnam, where the Tet offensive had just ended, Cronkite offered what he called "an analysis that must be speculative, personal, subjective." "We have too often been disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds," he said. "To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic yet unsatisfactory conclusion." Like the famous issue of Life devoted to photographs of a week's worth of American dead, Cronkite's polite demurral came to symbolize the long migration of opposition to the war in Vietnam from the fringe - the campus firebrands, the radical clerics, the flowers-in-gun-barrels hippies, the papier-mâché puppeteers - to the wide, upholstered center of American political life.

The center of American politics is no longer as roomy (or as comfy) as it was then. The fringe, now luxuriant only at the rightmost edge of the political prayer rug, has gone online and wired itself for AM radio and cable TV. And nowhere in the cacophonous, atomized "media environment" of today is there anyone capable of deploying the wall-to-wall avuncular authority that was Cronkite's stock-in-trade. Even so, in this August of 2006 a palpable, '68-like shift in sentiment is in the steamy air. Among foreign-policy élites and the broader public alike, it has become the preponderant conviction that George W. Bush's war of choice in Iraq is a catastrophe.