Where is our Walter Cronkite?

The Cuban Missile Crisis was a scary time for everyone in America in 1962. I was 12 at the time and remember being glued to the TV every night as the drama unfolded and the fear of a nuclear war escalated until at the last minute an agreement was made between Russia and the US to avoid WW3.

Of course our access to information was constrained by only 3 channels on the TV and our reliance on major newspapers to keep up on the developing crisis.

The upside to this was our trust in the mainstream media. Especially the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite at the anchor desk.

Each night he would give us the straight facts and we trusted him to keep us up to date and tell the truth. Whether the news was good or bad it was delivered with calm reassurance by Walter Cronkite. Most people remember him when he delivered the heartbreaking news that President Kennedy had been assassinated in Texas. But he was much more than that moment in history.

This article from Media Village and A+E Networks describes how Cronkite rose through the ranks of CBS News in the 1950s and his promotion to anchor of CBS Evening News.

HISTORY’s Moment in Media: Walter Cronkite Was the Most Trusted Man in News

He wasn’t particularly handsome. His wife said he resembled no one more than a “family dentist.” He wasn’t well educated. He dropped out of college in his junior year. Yet by the time he retired on March 6, 1981, Walter Cronkite was a voice all Americans knew and respected.

Cronkite was recruited for network TV in 1950 and served as anchor for a 15-minute Sunday evening newscast and then as the host of You Are There, which reenacted historical events. He also served a brief stint as the anchor of a short-lived morning newscast.

On April 16, 1962, however, he was given the biggest seat; anchor of CBS Evening News. Cronkite did not have an easy start. He trailed competitors in the ratings. He wasn’t known as much of an investigator. But he had trained himself to talk slowly — just 124 words a minute, as opposed to the average American speed of 165 per minute — and it won him trust and converts in the American heartland.

His plainspoken, accessible style made Cronkite an icon.

By 1981, he had been in the top chair for nearly two decades. He might have stayed there forever, too if it weren’t for the network’s mandatory retirement age of 65. Cronkite ended his last broadcast with a promise to return for special assignments and with his now signature sign-off: “Old anchormen, you see, don’t fade away; they just keep coming back for more. And that’s the way it is: Friday, March 6, 1981.”

https://www.mediavillage.com/article/Walter-Cronkite-Was-The-Most-Trusted-Man-in-News-A-Moment-in-Media-History/

Even though Walter Cronkite told us the truth in that calm reassuring voice it was the truth that he knew about in the moment. As the events unfolded in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, we only knew about the ones that were on the surface and reported by Cronkite and others on the evening news. Underneath the surface was news that we did not know about until years later.

Even now at 72 I get a shiver down my spine when I think about how close we came to full on nuclear war and the terrible aftermath that would have befallen our country and the world. Our children and grandchildren only read about that event in history books but they never really pay much attention to the details. Only that there was a crisis, the President at the time dealt with it and life went on.

But underneath that surface there lurked an incident that could have triggered WW3 and if not for one man we could have all been dead on that day or in the years of a nuclear winter to come…and he was Russian!

You may have never heard of Vasili Arkhipov. And yet life as we know it on this planet could have ended if it were not for his crucial intervention during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The follow description of those events is from Arkhipov’s Wikipedia Page:

Vasily Arkhipov - Wikipedia

Vasili Aleksandrovich Arkhipoven.wikipedia.org

In July of 1962, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreed to Cuba’s request to place nuclear missiles in Cuba as a deterrent to future US interference, pursuant to the Bay of Pigs invasion debacle a few years earlier. In mid-October, a US reconnaissance airplane produced evidence of medium and long range Soviet ballistic missiles on the site, sending alarm bells ringing in Washington DC.

US President John F. Kennedy promptly established a military blockade to prevent further missiles from entering Cuba and demanded that the missiles be dismantled and returned to the Soviet Union. Over the following days the world came close to the brink of nuclear war as the two blocks vigorously asserted their positions.

Nobody realized at the time just how close to disaster they really were. And that’s where Arkhipov would make his decisive contribution to world history.

Arkhipov was second-in-command in the nuclear-armed Foxtrot-class submarine B-59, part of a flotilla of four submarines protecting Soviet ships on their way to Cuba. On October 27, as they approached the US imposed quarantine line, US Navy ships in pursuit started dropping depth charges to force the B-59 to surface for identification — completely unaware that it was carrying nuclear weapons.

The explosions rocked the submarine which went dark except for emergency lights. With the air-conditioning down, temperature and carbon dioxide levels rose sharply. The crew was hardly able to breathe.

Unable to contact Moscow and under pressure from the Americans for several hours, Captain Valentin Savitsky finally lost his nerve. He assumed that war had broken out between the two countries and decided to launch a nuclear torpedo. He would not go down without a fight.

However, unlike the other submarines in the flotilla, the three officers onboard the B-59 had to agree unanimously to launch the nuclear torpedo. As the other officer sided with Savitsky, only Arkhipov stood in the way of launching World War III.

An argument broke out between the three, but Arkhipov was able to convince the Captain not to launch the torpedo. How was he able to prevail under such stressful conditions? He was actually in charge of the entire flotilla and as such was equal in rank to Savitsky. But the reputation he had gained during the K-19 incident may have been the decisive factor in convincing the other officers to abort the launch. That detail may have made all the difference.

The submarine eventually surfaced and awaited orders from Moscow, averting what would have been a nuclear holocaust. The Cuban Missile Crisis ended a few days later.

This crucial episode of the Cold War only became known to the West after the collapse of the Soviet Union many years later.

Oh Yes, it Happened Again in 1983

http://www.worldcitizens.org/petrov2.html

On 26 September 1983, during the Cold War, the nuclear early-warning radar of the Soviet Union reported the launch of one intercontinental ballistic missile with four more missiles behind it, from bases in the United States. These missile attack warnings were suspected to be false alarms by Stanislav Petrov, an officer of the Soviet Air Defence Forces on duty at the command center of the early-warning system. He decided to wait for corroborating evidence — of which none arrived — rather than immediately relaying the warning up the chain-of-command. This decision is seen as having prevented a retaliatory nuclear attack against the United States and its NATO allies, which would likely have resulted in an escalation to a full-scale nuclear war. Investigation of the satellite warning system later determined that the system had indeed malfunctioned.

In explaining the factors leading to his decision, Petrov cited his belief and training that any U.S. first strike would be massive, so five missiles seemed an illogical start. In addition, the launch detection system was new and in his view not yet wholly trustworthy, while ground radar had failed to pick up corroborative evidence even after several minutes of the false alarm.

Petrov said he did not know whether he should have regarded himself as a hero for what he did that day.

In an interview for the film The Man Who Saved the World, Petrov says,

“All that happened didn’t matter to me — it was my job. I was simply doing my job, and I was the right person at the right time, that’s all. My late wife for 10 years knew nothing about it. ‘So what did you do?’ she asked me. ‘Nothing. I did nothing.'"

We came so close to destroying our civilization in these two incidents. But because of the actions of two brave men we averted disaster. Bearing in mind that these two “heroes” were Russian, do you think that we can avert another disaster with Putin in charge. Will there be any Russians who step up and question any events that could trigger a world war with nuclear weapons? And would we even believe them in a world that is so full of disinformation and gaslighting.

Where is our Walter Cronkite who can give us the straight story in that calm voice. Does he exist in anyone in today’s media. In the past we read the morning paper to get the day’s news and tuned into Cronkite and others to feed it back to us at the end of the day. It was a simple time and we tended to trust our various news sources.

But today that is certainly not the case.