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It was winnable. Are you doubting the United States possessed the firepower to win the war? We could have easily destroyed its ports and turned Hanoi into another Dresden.

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The war was always winnable, if the US was willing to pay the price. That's what Tet was about: Tet was a huge US victory but it made clear how high the price for victory would be, and the civilians just weren't willing to go that far.

One thing those under 40 probably can't appreciate is to just how widely Cronkite was viewed as an honest broker of the news. Everyone from Richard Nixon to Abbie Hoffman believed that Cronkite called the news as objectively and honestly as possible. There simply isn't anyone like that in today's era of rubber-chicken "journalists" like Olbermann. When we thought about it at the time we'd admit Cronkite might have gotten this or that wrong, but nobody *right or left* thought such might be the result of bias or carelessness with the truth.

Jim Lehrer may be closest to that today. He certainly tries to be an honest broker but Cronkite had the status that everyone from one end of the spectrum to the other believed it.

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This was the first conflict where due to the press and their liberal views along with McNamara's business school philosophy we fought a PC war. We could have put a couply of carriers up near the Chinese border and just blasted every supply convoy coming down from there, blockaded the ports and turned their major cities into parking lots.