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TechnoratiBeyond the Hype: Cronkite and the Vietnam War
But facts are facts, and history is history -- including what Cronkite actually did as TV's most influential journalist during the first years of the Vietnam War. Despite all the posthumous praise for Cronkite's February 1968 telecast that dubbed the war "a stalemate," the facts of history show that the broadcast came only after Cronkite's protracted support for the war.
In 1965, reporting from Vietnam, Cronkite dramatized the murderous war effort with enthusiasm. "B-57s -- the British call them Canberra jets -- we're using them very effectively here in this war in Vietnam to dive-bomb the Vietcong in these jungles beyond Da Nang here," he reported, standing in front of a plane. Cronkite then turned to a U.S. Air Force officer next to him and said: "Colonel, what's our mission we're about to embark on?"
"Well, our mission today, sir, is to report down to the site of the ambush 70 miles south of here and attempt to kill the VC," the colonel replied.
Cronkite's report continued from the air. "The colonel has just advised me that that is our target area right over there," he said. "One, two, three, four, we dropped our bombs, and now a tremendous G-load as we pull out of that dive. Oh, I know something of what those astronauts must go through."
Next, viewers saw Cronkite get off the plane and say: "Well, colonel, it's a great way to go to war."
The upbeat report didn't mention civilians beneath the bombs.
That footage from CBS Evening News appears in "War Made Easy," the documentary film based on my book of the same name. Routinely, audiences gasp as the media myth of Cronkite deconstructs itself in front of their eyes.
Also in 1965 -- the pivotal year of escalation -- Cronkite expressed explicit support for the Vietnam War. He lauded "the courageous decision that Communism's advance must be stopped in Asia and that guerilla warfare as a means to a political end must be finally discouraged."
Why does this matter now? Because citing Cronkite as an example of courageous reporting on a war is a dangerously low bar -- as if reporting that a war can't be won, after cheerleading it for years, is somehow the ultimate in journalistic quality and courage.
The biggest and most important lie about an aggressive war based on deception is not that the war can't be won. The biggest and most important lie is deference to the conventional wisdom that insists the war must be fought in the first place and portrays it as a moral enterprise.
From the "War Made Easy" film transcript:
NORMAN SOLOMON: "A big problem with the media focus is that it sees the war through the eyes of the Americans, through the eyes of the occupiers, rather than those who are bearing the brunt of the war in human terms."
WALTER CRONKITE: "We have been too often 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."
SOLOMON: "In early 1968, Walter Cronkite told CBS viewers that the war couldn't be won."
CRONKITE: "It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate."
SOLOMON: "And that was instantly, and through time even more so, heralded as the tide has turned. As Lyndon Johnson is reputed to have said when he saw Cronkite give that report, ‘I've lost middle America.' And it was presented as not only a turning point, quite often, but also as sort of a moral statement by the journalistic establishment. Well, I would say yes and no. It was an acknowledgement that the United States, contrary to official Washington claims, was not winning the war in Vietnam, and could not win. But it was not a statement that the war was wrong. A problem there is that if the critique says this war is bad because it's not winnable, then the response is, ‘Oh yeah, we'll show you it can be winnable, or the next war will be winnable.' So, that critique doesn't challenge the prerogatives of military expansion, or aggression if you will, or empire."
36 Comments so far
Show AllI have found evidence for two bombing missions in WW2 on which Cronkite flew as a reporter. Both had military targets:
As a war correspondent, Cronkite flew with a squadron of heavy bombers that bombed German artillery near Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944. ("The weather was lousy," he later wrote, "but through the broken clouds I had a good look at the unbelievable armada of Allied ships.").
Cronkite was one of eight American reporters who got permission from the Army Air Corps to fly on B-17 bombing missions. The reporters got their chance on February 26, 1943. The mission was to bomb the German submarine yards at Wilhelmshaven, on the North Sea. Eight reporters took off, but only seven returned. Bob Post of the New York Times was shot down.
When I was 7, I thought that if my teeth touched the flat circle of bread in my mouth at Roman Catholic communion, I’d physically hurt Jesus Christ.
When I was 33 in 1987, I flew to Moscow and Kiev with friends and saw beautiful couples walking their new babies around a park and sharing ice cream cones. I said to myself, “THESE are the people we want to obliterate with nuclear weapons? THESE people belong to the (Reagan-termed) ‘Evil Empire.’?”
When I was 49 and was recovering from a month-long medically induced coma, I thought I could see Jesus inbetween my hospital room and my neighbor’s—in a sort-of different universe only visible at that time to me.
When my mother died of myelofibrosis no doctor or nurse told her she had only one month to live. When the doctors stopped coming to see her as often, she buttonholed one and asked “Am I dying?” He said, “Get your affairs in order.” She said, “Thank you!” She preferred the stark truth to a cover-up.
My father died two years later of a massive stroke, paralyzing him so he could only move his left arm and curl up the left side of his mouth. He couldn’t speak. No one told him that the tubes plunged into his skin contained only saline and sugar solutions—that he would starve to death in less than 10 days. One of his children had to tell him. His eyes blurred with tears, but he relaxed with the truth. I’m sure he began to pray more then.
Lately, President Barack Obama has refused to release photos of torture afflicted on non-Americans in worthless attempts to gain terrorism information or because of just-plain sadism. Todd wants to not prosecute the brutes who re-introduced torture to the world and to the U.S. Torture that most thought had ended with the Salem witch trials.
The Nazis knew how to lie to people. The sign above Auschwitz’s gate was “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Sets You Free). Prisoners marching underneath that sign into the camp STILL believed that it was just a “work camp” even as they walked past a bonfire into which Nazis were throwing screaming, flailing babies and toddlers.
The truth is tough, but leads to breakthroughs. But evolution has given us incredible defense mechanisms, such as denial and delusions and hallucinations. We differ from the mammals just below us on the evolutionary ladder mostly because our brains allow us to “read other humans’ minds.” To read intent. Our brains--even though we are not in the fire, remember matches we’ve touched or stoves we’ve gotten too close to--and re-enact that pain with representations that send weak signals to our muscles, so that we actually flinch when we see someone else getting burned, even though it may just be in a movie.
Still, though, there is NOT enough empathy. It’s so hard to empathize with others or see their point of view, even though we CAN read intent or “read minds.” Just ask any husband or wife, no matter how long they’ve been married.
It seems that 99 percent of people lack enough empathy. Ninety-nine percent of conflicts, such as the Israelis’ imprisonment and starvation of citizens confined to the Gaza Strip this summer or the deluded terrorist pilots of the airliners on 9/11 had no realization that babies and the ill were laying for days slowly starving or bleeding to death or that nearly 3,000 unsuspecting people would be burned alive, crushed, or forced to jump 100 stories to their deaths.
When I was 17, a 15-year-old fellow high school mate of mine was paralyzed from the neck down for life while making a tackle in a football game. At that time, I “sure felt bad” for him and his family. But try as I might, I couldn’t imagine the horror he must have felt when full realization of his dilemma kicked in.
It took that month-long medically induced coma when I was 49 for me to understand that high school mate’s experience. My muscles had atrophied and I could neither move nor speak for nearly six weeks. Only then could I empathize with that 15-year-old football player.
Our lack of skill with our empathy, I suppose, is an evolutionary trait that helps people survive the horrors of this world—and to commit some of the horrors of this world.
Empathy—humanity’s greatest aid in taking over the planet from other animals remains in its infancy. Only a rare person has too much empathy, such as Alexander Hamilton’s daughter who went insane when she learned her brother had been killed in a duel (still popular only 200 years ago).
If we could place ourselves in the other persons’ shoes, disputes would be settled more quickly, in the Middle East, between sex partners, or about nuclear arsenals.
Perhaps Big Pharma should take its gigantic profits and do more R&D on a drug to induce empathy, to speed its evolution. Surely, hiding the truth that someone is dying is immoral. Hiding our recent dirty, torturous deeds as a nation also is immoral. Not prosecuting the brutes who brought back torture is immoral. The truth hurts, but would lead to breakthroughs in the evolution of our arrogant species.
http://crush.typepad.com (emasculation-blues)
http://apocalypse-blues.typepad.com/
Excellent article. The point is clear and absolutely right, about the need to denounce criminal wars and never support them in any words whatsoever. Whining about US wars being unwinnable is a SICK, dark joke that only murderers and their supporters would employ. Instead, the wars have to be condemned, and the war makers stopped.
This should make a good resource article to refer people to whenever coming across anyone who pretends that Cronkite deserves serious respect. If he made good contributions to news media, as Robert Parry claims in his article posted at CD also July 20th, "Cronkite's Unintended Legacy", then good, but the flaw that Norman Solomon describes is such a critically bad one that I doubt anything good Cronkite did for news media is very or really important; imo, anyway.
I brought up the case against the hagiography of Walter Cronkite recently, and I'm so glad to see Norman Solomon lend his voice to bringing this hot air to screeching halt. Again let me thank you Solomon for telling the truth, and it didn't hurt that you had done a documentary on this top of the mainstream US media have been beating drums for war since the Cold War arrived on the scene every time the USA has gone to war.
AD
Not to dampen enthusiasm for a decent man and fine journalist, it is puzzling to consider the adulation for Cronkite for his turnabout in 1968. At least one of us, in the summer of 1965 researched the Indo China/Viet Nam War. A group of high school students mounted a humanitarian-based protest to the Viet Nam War in the fall of 1965. In December of 1965, a friend and I were appeared in a photograph and article on the front page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, wearing black armbands. I'd say reporter Cronkite, was following, not leading the public's turn against the War. He could have, and probably should have taken a stand, much, much sooner. Countless lives might have been saved. .
We may not believe in journalistic "objectivity" today in the way Cronkite and other newspeople did then. We may claim it can not even truly exist. Or that a journalist has a moral obligation to speak out against immoral wars. That is, if he believes they are actually immoral.
But in judging Cronkite we have to attempt to put ourselves in his place. And as a veteran journalist who covered the Second World War I think he still believed that the United States was basically well intentioned. These are not simple issues. And, indeed, during the Vietnam War the average high school student appeared to understand that war better than many in government. They saw through the rationalizations and lies. Much like Norman Solomon.
Cronkite, I think, was honest enough. And as a journalist believed he had to maintain some objectivity. For objectivity, removing the self from a story, was a commonly accepted professional standard then. We have leaped far beyond Cronkite today in our skepticism regarding our nation's elected leaders. We have been lied to too often, but in the early sixties there still remained some faith in the government's good intentions. Is it fair, then, to judge him entirely in current terms, with current attitudes toward our government? For Cronkite it must have been quite a bold leap to actually take a public position about the Vietnam War. Something journalists weren't supposed to do.
How is this, from Crokite:
"Also in 1965 -- the pivotal year of escalation -- Cronkite expressed explicit support for the Vietnam War. He lauded "the courageous decision that Communism's advance must be stopped in Asia and that guerilla warfare as a means to a political end must be finally discouraged."
objective? Cronkite wasn't objective. Cronkite did take a public position. He supported the war. He supported the idea that guerrilla resistance to a foreign invading force needed to be crushed.
Right you are..... from a leftist point of view.
My point is that the country at that time still had faith and trust in the government. Just as Cronkite supported the United States during World War Two he supported the US in Vietnam. Journalistic "objectivity" did not extend to supporting the "enemy."
Today we we would be much more skeptical. We were lied to about Vietnam, other wars. WW2 too, for that matter. But Cronkite reflected his society at that time. And in judging him we should try understand that. Or at least take it into consideration.
As I said, the average high school kid in the late sixties understood that war better than most in government, or the mainstream, or the establishment. The general skepticism and disillusionment we know today came slowly. Of course, Bush 43 nearly pushed the country over the top with his outrageous whoppers about Iraq, Saddam, and terrorism etc.
By the way, I'm over on the "left," too. As far as I'm concerned this is only an exercise in attempting to be fair to the man, who had his good points too. Not a defense of US foreign policy.
BRAVO NORMAN,
Had a similar article as below:
Cronkite Belatedly Called War in Vietnam Unwinnable, Not An Atrocity
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Cronkite-Belatedly-Called-by-Jay-Janson-090718-320.html
DESCRIPTION:
The death of one of corporate media's own is being used to portray him as having been trustworthy, and extend that trustworthiness to the U.S. media cartel justifying continuing brutal wars of occupation and promoting the predatory financial globalization of human and planetary resources. Sadly, Cronkite for years, like other reporters, cooperated, did not report what would have made the public stop a murderously immoral war.
Tags: Culture Of Deception, Media Complicity, Media Distortion, Media Fake News, Media Hypocrisy, Media Shills, Vietnam, War Asymmetric Media, War Criminal- Crimes
TEXT:
Walter Cronkite, toward the end of his life looked like your typical gentle grandfather. This death of one of corporate media's own is being used to portray him as having been trustworthy, and extend this portrayal of trustworthiness to the U.S. media cartel justifying continuing brutal wars of occupation and promoting the predatory financial globalization of human and planetary resources.
Cronkite reported on location during the Vietnam War, and of course for years made no waves, and was no more trustworthy than other reporters who managed to stomach what was being done to that beautiful Buddhist society of ancient cultural roots.
Following Cronkite's editorial report during the Tet Offensive that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, President Lyndon Johnson is reported to have said, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America."
Johnson's whimper reminds us that Cronkite was for years not reporting the real conditions in South Vietnam, not reporting the deceptions that led to the creation of the puppet government, not reporting Eisenhower's and South's refusal to hold promised elections, not reporting that Ike confessed, U.S. W.W.II ally Ho Chi Minh would have won by 80% the all Vietnam election blocked, the rampant corruption at every level, the brutal French colonial history, the carnage from years of bombing the delta. Cronkite and CBS had acted like servants and sycophants of our government, dutifully trumpeting almost every lie and distortion passed to them by the Pentagon and White House.
During the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Cronkite was anchoring the CBS network coverage as violence and protests occurred outside the convention, as well as scuffles inside the convention hall. When Dan Rather was punched to the floor (on camera) by security personnel, Cronkite commented, "I think we've got a bunch of thugs here, Dan."
Cronkite would have never in thousand years have called the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force, crucifying the agrarian French colonial population of Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, "a bunch of thugs."
Now, as in Walter Cronkite's lifetime, major humanity is still in a fight for a billion lives against the military and banks of the Anglo-American Empire, with the EU, NATO and Japan in tow, China and Russia going along for now, the Third World watchful and apprehensive. Conglomerate owned satellite powered media is not on the side of major humanity, but the tool and protection of its capitalist governance.
But Walter Cronkite's death should not be an occasion of our criticizing him for what he was not. Nor for propaganda to make media be seen as trustworthy. Walter worked in corporate media, a regular guy, pretty much in mainstream. He was no Gandhi, no Nelson Mandela, no Martin Luther King Jr. or Albert Einstein, who were trustworthy and always honest about imperialist foreign policy, but Cronkite did have a few moments of realization that U.S. use of military in foreign policy was less than sane.
The deceased deserve their rest in peace, with some respect for their contributions. Commercial media hype to distract us from conglomerate owned media's mission of war-mongering, support for empire and predatory global financial hegemony is obvious, insensitive and inappropriate to our mourning the passing of a fellow human being.
Beautifully expressed and insightful, Jay Janson! Well done.
· Yr Obd't Servant
I'll take Dan Rather any day....
Space Cadet
I think a more relevant question for the mainstream journalists to have asked on or soon after 9/11/01 was to inquire who was in a better position to orchestrate those attacks, a very tall bearded man with a computer living in a a cave in Afghanistan that day or those in the higher echelons of government and the top people in the military command structure. Very few people, if any, liberal or conservative, had the courage and integrity to ask that question of their government and about their government during that time period.
Cronkite had to be a corporate stooge or else none of us would have ever heard of him. NO ANCHORMAN or JOURNALIST that works in the mainstream media is permitted to questions things like the legitimacy of a war. Did anyone remember Dan Rather or Wolf Blitzer at 9-11 ask the reasons why Osama chose to strike the World Trade Center, Pentagon and (probably) the White House? Did anyone in the MSM come out and say that the invasion of Iraq is illegal and that if the excuses used for invading (weapons of mass destruction) prove to be false, then those responsible should face criminal prosecution? Such 'inquiry' would lead to an immediate dismissal. Nothing has changed since Vietnam except that the corporate noose has tightened.
Cronkite... circa 1968
Glenn Beck... circa 2009
Now THAT"S progress!
Cronkite was a fraud pretending to be a journalist. The same Obama's a cancer pretending to be the cure for social diseases.
what, where, why or when? It's easy to denigrade somebody when that person isn't here anymore, right? Any way, Walter Cronkite as the trusted spokesperson of CBS should have realized that the big boys running things at CBS were pretty much in the "money". More than once uncle Walt should have reflected on Eisenhower's proclamation: The Military Industrial Complex, which in a sense has been running the former War Dept. as well as now and recent history, the Pentagon and therewith US Foreign Policy. Added to that is this country's inherent claim: We're number one. Are we?
Besides, does anyone really think W and Dick had that much gumption to start a war and bring it to a glorious conclusion. No, they had help, lots of it and we're all paying and paying for it, with no end in sight.
And leave Obama out of it. That's another story involving Single Payer Healthcare, Afghanistan and persuing recent war crimes, committed in our name.
You make absolutely no sense. Denigrating someone dead is just as valid as denigrating someone alive. At the same time, it's hypocritical to praise someone, or avoid criticism of them, just because they're dead. Cronkite was a propagandist of the powers that controlled the government and the media at the time. His reputation as "trustworthy" and "courageous" only made him more dangerous. Cronkite never criticized Vietnam because it was wrong and inhuman to go in the first place, but because the US was losing the war. Shameful, fraudulent and perverse.
Leave it to Solomon to find the worst in the best of us... Be it Cronkite or the Dalai Lama...
There are no sacred cows in politics, and I commend him for taking the lonely road of truthseeker...
It is never a popular stance to point out the hypocrisy or weaknesses of our heroes...
especially those held near and dear on the Left...
There aren't many examples of integrity out there for adults to look up to...
That is why it takes a child, or someone with courage, to point out the naked kings amongst us...
How many journalists out there acknowledge their mistakes? Not many IMO. I showed this story to some friends of mine and one of them quoted that "hindsight is 20/20." Cronkite should be commended for taking the next step. I like Solomon 99% of the time but this time, I think he bit off more than he could chew this time
Solomon's point is that bombing of all civilians is immoral. Solomon's point is that war, in general, not just the Vietnam war specifically, is the problem. Whereas Cronkite's problem with the Vietnam war wasn't that war is the problem, but that an unwinnable war is the problem. Solomon's disagreement and criticism of Cronkite has nothing to do with the hindsight of whether the Vietnam war was winnable or not. Solomon's criticism of Cronkite has to do with Cronkite's support of war, Cronkite's support of bombing civilians.
This is Solomon's point:
"Also in 1965 -- the pivotal year of escalation -- Cronkite expressed explicit support for the Vietnam War. He lauded "the courageous decision that Communism's advance must be stopped in Asia and that guerilla warfare as a means to a political end must be finally discouraged."
Guerrilla warfare against a foreign invading force must be finally discouraged? And how will that discouraging be achieved? By massive bombing of civilians.
Why exactly is Cronkite some hero?
Sometimes left journalists lapse onto orthodoxies. Solomon, my guess is, opposed the war before '68 and hasn't forgiven Cronkite for ever supporting it. Quickly looking at his Wickepedia biography I see he became an activist quite young, and distinguished himself by being able to obtain an FBI file in his teens.
Though Cronkite's antecedents were far more serious than today's ambitious corporate "spray heads" he did climb to the pinnacle of the mainstream. He was true, or, rather, real, enough, and Americans could relate to him. But those who opposed the "establishment" had a more dour eye.
I have fond memories of Cronkite, though. And think his lack of independence wasn't so much conformity but a belief in the good intentions of the country. After all, he covered WW2. It took some time after that for the mainstream to become skeptical of US intentions. Only the far right indulges in jingoistic chest beating today. Cronkite, in fact, was appalled.
Thanks Quinty. That was a good response.
Compared to the spray heads who currently dominate the MSM's tv news subdivision, Cronkite appears the soul of honesty. That's how low things have sunk.
Remember trying to "break the Viet-Nam syndrome" back in 1991?
The media portrayed it as we left with our tail between our legs and we needed something to prove we COULD win a war!
Go team Go!
"Remember trying to 'break the Viet-Nam syndrome' back in 1991?"
daddie bush said it was "buried in the sands of Iraq".
his idiot kid just had to go and dig it up again.
Nice comment vdb!
While Norman Solomon is undoubtedly correct in making the analogy between Cronkite's stating in 1968 that the U.S. could not win in Viet Nam [while never wondering, as Solomon, correctly noted, as to whether the U.S. was morally in the right for being in Vietnam in the first place] and his enthusiasm for the U.S. war effort in 1965, the same thing, unfortunately, could be said of him. In mid 2009 Solomon has finally expressed reservations concerning the militant nature of Barack Obama while he had endorsed the candidacy of Obama in 2008 despite the fact that Obama had made his intentions known for keeping American soldiers in Iraq and escalating the war in Afghanistan. As Solomon points out in his essay, the time to speak out against a war and its imperialist leaders is in its embryonic stages and not when the realization that a war and its advocates are not what they seem. Solomon had a chance to back a genuine antiwar third party candidate but chose instead to support someone who, like LBJ, drops bombs on innocent civilians.
here's a dream -
Gravel/Ellsberg 2012.
True heroes of the Vietnam war.
Can anyone here recall how Cronkite reported the release of the Pentagoon Papers?
I'd left the states by then
Cronkite was always mainstream. And like the mainstream didn't come around to opposing the war until fairly late, '67 or '68 or even later.
When Cronkite offered his skepticism in that famous broadcast it represented a watershed, of sorts, in that mainstream American support for LBJ's war had crumbled.
That was the significance of that broadcast. And LBJ understood that, which is why he chose not to run in '68. He knew he was no longer widely backed.
And, yes, that does illustrate Cronkite's influence and power as the top news anchor of his time. Myself, and others, on the streets protesting the war were actually grateful, at the time, to see that Cronkite had come to our side. It was a sign of hope and optimism. Of progress opposing the war. Though Nixon, of course, needlessly prolonged it.
Although the commanders of the US Air Force in WW II were unhappy with the "obliterate the German cities" strategy of British "Bomber Harris" because they preferred to hit military and economic targets such as refineries or ball bearing plants they usually went along with "BH" because they did not want to "offend an ally". For that very reason the USAF participated in the ugly bombing of Dresden in 1945.
Mr. Cronkite flew on at least one bombing mission over Germany. Does anyone know whether the target of that mission was civilian or military? Civilian here means "random bombing of a city".
The great social and cultural historian, Lewis Mumford, wrote an essay in the Atlantic Monthly 50 years ago--1959--titled The Morals of Extermination. Mumford drew on his own experience in the upper reaches of military policy making in WW II where he points out that given the worldwide revulsion to the Nazi bombing of Guernica, Spain, US officials were debating whether it was morally legitimate to bomb and carpet bomb cities with their vast civilian populations, thus mirroring the detested actions of the Nazis. It wasn't long before the decision and actions showed what the answer reached was: Yes, it was fine to bomb cities without mercy: firestorm bombing of Hamburg, Tokyo, Dresden--see Vonnegut's Slaughter House Five-- and the finale of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, essentially civilian/non-military cities.
Mumford wondered if the advent of nuclear weapons meant ending human civilization through the morals of extermination applied on all sides. Still an open question today.
Thus it was no change in policy when at the peak of the US bombing of SE Asia (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos) the explosive equivalent of a Hiroshima a week was being rained down on the lands and people, producing between 4 to 6 million deaths. In the midst of brutal war and widespread devastation, who could count even roughly close? As the late Harvard historian, Samuel Huntington, wrote: the US had accidentally stumbled on a way to modernize and urbanize a backward rural peasant population by aerial bombing till the survivors fled to the protective hamlets and cities. Now you know why the anti-war movement tagged him Samuel Mad Dog Huntington.
"...For that very reason the USAF participated in the ugly bombing of Dresden in 1945..."
- I understand what you mean, but you're making it sound like the USAF had "more moral" instincts than Harris & the Brits; & only went along with the bombing of Dresden because of the "bad influence" of our allies. Needless to say, the firebombing of Tokyo & the nukings a few months later disprove that theory.
Um, the USAF was not formed until 1947. Prior to that it was the Army Air Corp.
Rich M.
I had no intention to argue that the USAF commanders were more "moral" than Bomber Harris. However, they had come to the conclusion that the bombing of cities was wasteful. The losses of US planes and flying personnel for these missions were substantial. The USAF commanders argued, correctly in my opinion, that the destruction of Germany's potential to produce fuel for their tanks, trucks, and planes would bring the war to a quicker end than the destruction of cities.
My reading on the Dresden raids tells me that your statement "because of the bad influence of our allies" is wrong. The USAF commanders and even more so the crews that flew the planes to Dresden were reluctant to participate. The crews were stunned when they were informed what the target would be. They had never flown that deeply into Germany. In fact, they were given permission to fly to Soviet airfields if they thought that they could not get back to France, let alone England.
Ultimately either Eisenhower or Marshall decided for "solidarity" with the Brits. They never stated that they had been "tricked" or "bad influenced" by the allies.
Do you know what mission Cronkite was on?
"This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
- From "The Man who shot Liberty Valance"
Comfortable myth will trump harsh truth nearly every time.