Walter Cronkite's greatest betrayal came after the Tet Offensive, when he stopped reporting the news and offered his own, "subjective" analysis.

Some say things haven't been right in America since the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. I'd push the date forward a bit to 1968, the year we became unraveled with the murder of RFK, the crippling of Alabama segregationist George Wallace and the shooting death of Martin Luther King, Jr. on a hotel balcony in Memphis. Black rioters caused curfews in most American cities, and allegedly spontaneous student riots erupted in Paris and on college campuses in the US. Eschatologists had a field day, with television feeding the frenzy – most notoriously the avuncular Walter Cronkite, the dean of the evening news – considered the most "trusted man in America." As the narrator of the CBS program "You Were There," he held great sway with the emerging boomer generation who were turning against the older generation

Now that Cronkite has passed away, the mass media can hardly contain itself. Lavish praise spewed out of the tube for three days, remembering Cronkite as the last great broadcaster, the man we could trust. During his days on the air, the Swedish term for an anchorman evolved into "Cronkiter," as if the man and his role were the Trinity of media secularism: father to the nation, keeper of our values and the go-to man when trouble came.

I could not make myself look or listen or read a word of the praise for Cronkite. All that went through my mind was his betrayal of America in 1968 in the aftermath of the Tet offensive in Vietnam. The US had withstood and won what appeared to be a last-gasp assault by the North Vietnamese army and the Viet Cong, their communist cohorts in the South. Although US and allied divisions held on bravely and repulsed the attack, the "heralds" of modern-day warfare – the media – following the lead of the supreme herald of all, the venerated and beatified Walter Cronkite, declared the battle a victory for the North Vietnamese.

Addressing the nation at the end of his CBS Evening News broadcast, Cronkite – still calling himself "this reporter" – told the nation he wished to depart from the news and take three minutes to offer a "subjective" analysis of Tet. He told the nation he "wasn't sure" the US had actually won the battle, ignoring the evidence the North Vietnamese had been handed a major defeat representing a "turning point" in the war in favor of the Americans, our allies and the South Vietnamese army. On the contrary, Cronkite maintained Tet symbolized that "we are mired in a stalemate" and the only solution was to "negotiate" with the enemy.

If the heralds after Agincourt had declared the French the victors over the English, history would be different. And that's what Cronkite accomplished: he used his influence to cause his own country to lose its first war. Granted, heralds of old could be second-guessed by later testimony, but Cronkite's pronouncement was disseminated as the one and only version, accepted as truth to this day. American General William Westmoreland and his staff and troops were stunned. Their efforts to counter Cronkite's pronouncement were either ignored or ridiculed by the mass media. As if on cue, the "mood of the country" turned against the war on any level. President Lyndon Johnson refused to run for a second term. The student activists and their fellow travelers against the war stepped up demonstrations and riots against their own country. The military establishment was stained with accusations for brutality that still cling.

The American defeat in Vietnam was the victory of the far Left. Mark Rudd, Tom Hayden, Bill Ayers and their cohorts made their bones undermining US war policy, and they haven't stopped yet in their goal to turn Americans against America. The mind-set that the United States is "evil and racist," as President Obama's buddy Bill Ayers puts it, is now a prevalent attitude. Schools kids now regard their forebears as slave-owning chauvinists who plundered the earth in the name of capitalism. Self-esteem is low and the future has been transformed from promise and opportunity to an ongoing mea culpa that begs the world to forgive us for being Americans.

Thanks Walter. Due to you "that's the way it is."