The Nod

this is a repost from july 2009, reposted as it speaks to my present frame of mind, and particularly to my newest post, Mitigating Factors.


Just try to ignore Robert McNamara over there on the left. I may or may not get to him in this post, but -- even dead -- I need to keep an eye on him today. Let me know if he makes a move.

I'm in a downsizing frame of mind, an excellent thing.

Thrift: It makes me think of my nana and her wax paper milk cartons full of food scraps, ready to be taken out to compost. Her homemade biscuit dough, rolled out and cut into circles with a drinking glass (that little pfffft sound as she sinks the edges in!) somehow never leaves enough scrap to fashion more than one last deliciously flaky, leavened offering.

She didn't care about the world much. The vegetable and flower gardens, yes. Where her son was busy dropping bombs? No. His career in the Air Force meant that she collected jewelry from around the world, baubles never worn but carefully stored, to be given to me, the only granddaughter, when she died. It never seemed to occur to her that there'd be a kind of natural redundancy, given that I traveled with the man -- he "won" custody of us after Mommy Dearest walked away. I was 4; Brother Grader Boob was 8; and Brother Tumbleweed led the pack at 12.

And when Brother Tumbleweed [TW], now of draft age, raged against the Vietnam War during that long hot summer we spent with our grandparents, she responded by fussing at him about how he dried her dishes. How he left water spots on her silverware by not carefully drying each piece. He preferred letting them sit a few minutes in the drainer, then laying them all on a towel and doing a group dry job.

TW made a lot of money that summer, working as a caddy at the nearby country club.
The following year, he would be gone. No Vietnam for him! No more water spots for Nana!

Nana and Grandaddy were CBS folk. They believed Walter Cronkite was talking to them and sat themselves down in their parlor -- not a living room, but an oriental-rugged, loveseated parlor -- to watch him present and explain the nightly news.

Ha! It just occured to me... Nana's greatest claim to fame, in her opinion (I have my own ideas about her areas of greatness), was having taught Connie Chung to read. I tell you, the inroads my family has made in the educational history of this fine republic! Ms. Chung sent her an annual Christmas card, so I will always know her as a kind person, for those cards meant the world to that old pre-ESL-era schoolteacher.

Connie Chung's career spanned most all the networks, but for our purposes, Gentle Reader, we will consider her time at CBS as Washington correspondent during part of Cronkite's 19-year run at the helm of the CBS Nightly News, as being formative.

But Nana is long gone -- and whatever personal secretary saw to the delivery of those holiday cards to former teachers? Doubtless long gone, too.

And now Walter Cronkite is gone. Niney-two is an admirable age to have achieved, though I would have wished him more. I'm surprised I wrote that. I even paused and allowed my index finger to hover over the delete button -- but decided it is Too True. I would have wished him more...


Two things I choose to remember about Walter Cronkite. That's not to say that I don't know about, or enjoy learning about, the many things there are to recall and celebrate from his life.

I'm just being thrifty.

The one I share with many: those moments when, young as I was, I felt The Nod. For some reason, most of my young nods took place at the dining room table, and unless disguised, were usually met with open derision by my father, and sometimes with punishment.

The Seige at Khe Sahn.
The Tet Offensive.
Summary executions with the evening meal.
Cronkite travels to Vietnam.

My Dad was flying mission after mission, first doing ancillary things from Travis, then eliminating all the middle men when he flew from Clark. He had local fame as pilot of the Flying Hospitals, that fame coming mostly in the form of cheering nurses calling out his various nicknames when their jeep pulled abreast of his Cadillac avec famille. Kudos to him that he always grew flustered.

He got no shout outs for later cruising Laos and Cambodia, though you certainly didn't learn about that hobby here. Nor will we discuss his stint as co-commander of an air base in South Vietnam a few years later -- I remember naively protesting that he surely didn't need to actually serve in-country when he had logged all those hours in the air, flying in peaceful silence in the skies over Cambodia -- what were known as "incursions." (Shhhh. *Those* never happened, and I don't know *where* I got the idea...)


I think, though, that if you hear "incursion" instead of "mission," you may feel comfortable Doing the Nod. Or, if you like, you can continue the folklore of those USAF visitations as pure reconnaissance, simple map-making trips that were best done at night, without running lights. Or permission.


(Stopping the train of my thought: I just have to direct you to something I read in preparation for writing this post. In case you had any doubt about the lengths to which I go {sigh}? Check this crap out! How anal is it to research the origins of running lights? Have I nothing better to do? Choooooooooooooooooo!)

Then, on February 27, 1968 Cronkite delivers the famed op-ed at the end of the regular news broadcast, saying:

Tonight, back in more familiar surroundings in New York, we’d like to sum up our findings in Vietnam, an analysis that must be speculative, personal, subjective. Who won and who lost in the great Tet offensive against the cities? I’m not sure. The Vietcong did not win by a knockout, but neither did we. The referees of history may make it a draw. Another standoff may be coming in the big battles expected south of the Demilitarized Zone. Khesanh could well fall, with a terrible loss in American lives, prestige and morale, and this is a tragedy of our stubbornness there; but the bastion no longer is a key to the rest of the northern regions, and it is doubtful that the American forces can be defeated across the breadth of the DMZ with any substantial loss of ground. Another standoff. On the political front, past performance gives no confidence that the Vietnamese government can cope with its problems, now compounded by the attack on the cities. It may not fall, it may hold on, but it probably won’t show the dynamic qualities demanded of this young nation. Another standoff.

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. They may be right, that Hanoi’s winter-spring offensive has been forced by the Communist realization that they could not win the longer war of attrition, and that the Communists hope that any success in the offensive will improve their position for eventual negotiations. It would improve their position, and it would also require our realization, that we should have had all along, that any negotiations must be that — negotiations, not the dictation of peace terms. For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. This summer’s almost certain standoff will either end in real give-and-take negotiations or terrible escalation; and for every means we have to escalate, the enemy can match us, and that applies to invasion of the North, the use of nuclear weapons, or the mere commitment of one hundred, or two hundred, or three hundred thousand more American troops to the battle. And with each escalation, the world comes closer to the brink of cosmic disaster.

To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy’s intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.

This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.

The Nod happens when you hear the truth, put simply, usually after a lengthy period of evasion. The Nod takes place when something long awaited finally happens.

There's little joy in it, though the sense of relief can be palpable. These truths don't set anyone free; They are more, simply, in part of the Order of Things.

Dad came back a different man, as of course does every person who prosecutes a war. He oversaw bombing missions that proved wasteful of human life and property, as the Pentagon failed to send in ground troops afterward to claim the territory he had so meticulously... cleared.

He dropped Agent Orange.

A barracks full of his men was blown up by mortar shells early one morning, while everyone slept. My Dad was, and is, a good man -- with whom I have rarely agreed, and from whom I remain estranged. I am old now and know that what seemed so easy to navigate in my eyes was a true moral conundrum in his, and that he followed his conscience.


By the way -- my punishments were basically for dinner time grunts in agreement with Uncle Walt. When I cheered him on at the '68 Chicago convention ("I think we've got a bunch of thugs here, if I may be permitted to say so."), I was sent to my room. Look, I was a kid. I probably just got off on the word "thug."


Cronkite did nothing special, I don't think, when he reported the four dead in Ohio on 4 May 1970, but I'll never forget it. Dad was in Vietnam at the time. I was, of course, and in world record time, stuck in my room. What I said at the kitchen table that evening was construed as a slap in my father's face.

There was a third blow up, but I was older, Dad was home, but tired of war, my step-Mom -- well, she didn't know what to think, and it didn't involve Walter Cronkite because we had switched to NBC. We had the distinct pleasure of shaking Tricky Dick's hand after his reelection -- down at Homestead AFB, during our temporary existence as Floridians. I was horrified by the WETNESS. It was like shaking hands with a damp sponge.

It was Watergate, of course. I went ballistic over something -- maybe over everything. And for the first time, instead of rigid-spined established consequences (No TV! Go to your room! Do the dishes for a week! You're grounded!), he yelled and said... things. All I remember is that every thing he yelled began with "I'm so tired of..."

He was so tired of protestors, draft-dodgers, disrespect. He was so tired of pulling all the weight.

So many of us back then had the war, not just on the telly, but in our homes in more insidious ways. It was an interesting find -- the article pictured below in Hal Humphrey's column to the LA Times, on Thursday, April 28, 1966.

Given what came later, it's interesting to read:

"This is the first war which TV has been able to cover and get on the air in 24 hours, but just because we have the film, and sometimes at great risk, by our correspondents, that does not mean we should always use it." Constant televising of American GIs weary and shot up may even weaken our resolve at home to continue fighting, Cronkite suggests.

There's only a few who can draw The Nod out of me now, all grownup and no wiser. I like to think of a place where Cronkite and Tim Russert might be gabbing happily away.

How many of us noticed that Robert McNamera made it to Hell a few weeks back -- 6 July? I saw it as a headline, felt The Nod. I mentioned his passing to a friend who said, "Good." Now we can always know where he is.