Last night the General and I watched a documentary on Netflix dedicated to the work of Dan Rather, an American journalist, commentator, and former national evening news anchor.
The documentary took me back in time as reruns of previous news broadcasts were included in the documentary. When I was a kid growing up, the 6:00 evening news was a must watch for my parents. However, my memories take me back farther than that. Before television, my folks listened to the news on the radio.
Television wasn’t available in the Permian Basin until 1953. The first television station was KMID-TV. I was a first grader at the time. KMID television subsequently became exclusively an NBC affiliate. KOSA-TV came to Odessa in 1956. It was the CBS affiliate.
The thing about the news that I remember from my childhood was the sense of reliability that what we were hearing on the news was a presentation of the facts. Ours was a very different world back then. Are, was it?
Perhaps there are none so blind as those who refuse to see. The importance of truth was never questioned. As I watched reruns of the news last night, the disconnect between Dan Rather’s live broadcasts from Vietnam at what really was taking place didn’t square with the rhetoric that came our way from the Oval Office.
Patriotism was ingrained in our family values and the possibility of elected officials in high places camouflaging truth and lying to the public was not something we thought possible. How could we have been so blind?
In a recent interview with a reporter from Texas Monthly who is writing a story about my brother’s return from Vietnam 51 years after his plane went down, he asked how we were personally impacted by the war protesters?
Truthfully, we mostly ignored news dedicated to protesters and envisioned somehow that they were anti-American because they did not support the official stance and rhetoric coming out of the Oval Office.
Let me simply say that I know more now than I knew then. If history has proven anything, it is that elected officials in high places are not aways credible and vested interests and economic concerns often override ethics and truth.
In recent years, I watched the movie “The Chicago Seven” which is based on seven war protestors that disrupted the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. Five months later they were arrested and charged with “crossing state lines” to incite a riot.
At the end of the trial, one of the defendants is given a chance by Judge Hoffman, who feels the defendant is genuinely remorseful, to make a case for a lenient sentence. However, over Judge Hoffman’s objections, the defendant uses his closing remarks to name the 4,752 soldiers who were killed in the Vietnam since the trial began. This act prompts many in the court to stand and cheer.
Watching the movie, I was as incensed at the Judge’s violation of laws and courtroom protocol, as I was the behavior of those on trial. For example, the judge has one defendant removed to another room and beaten because he repeatedly alleged his constitutional rights were being violated.
Accountability and truth must prevail. I miss the days of Walter Cronkite who seemed to walk a fine line of valuing the truth and somehow not making it political.
All the Best!
Don
Carpe Diem 