I now have a little time to elucidate on my thesis, that color TV lost the war in Vietnam.Ask any Vietnam vet (I don't qualify: I was in USN boot camp in April 75, when the last helo launched off the roof of the embassy in Saigon), and 99% of the time he will say we had that war won multiple times. But at home, we saw something different. We saw jungle green, not a shade of grey. We saw green fatigues on our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines. And our Doctors and Nurses. But we saw something else: White bandages. Red blood. Suddenly, it was made shockingly clear to all who were watching the 6:00 evening news: Our brothers, our fathers, our sons. Their blood was RED. Yeah, we all knew that intellectually. But this visceral punch in our national psyche's gut was almost too much. And so. After Tet, Cronkite gets on TV, in his tailored fatigues the members of the press would wear, and with a beautiful green jungle backdrop, tells Americans that American blood is RED. And that more of that RED blood will be shed unless we quit, and admit it's a stalemate. Thus it was that LBJ admitted political defeat, knowing that if he had lost Walter Cronkite, he had lost Middle America. Thus my thesis: Had we not seen the Vietnam War in living color, while eating our supper, being narrated by those who had lost their will, we might have prevented a Communist takeover of South Vietnam.
