A Cronkite Moment?
Jonathan Tasini is president of the Economic Future Group.
I experienced a Walter Cronkite moment last week that signaled to me that something is in the air about what people feel about the Iraq war. No, it didn't come from Ted Koppel's reciting of the Iraq war dead, nor the polls showing declining support for the war, nor from any of the other pundits, prognosticators, analysts and experts who fill the airwaves and pages of what we see and read. My moment came after reading Rick Reilly's column in Sports Illustrated. Yes, SI, magazine to the sports-obsessed (to which I proudly belong).
A quick history reminder: On Feb. 27 1968, Cronkite anchored a CBS special on the Vietnam War, concluding that: "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 say that we are mired in a bloody stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory conclusion." Bill Moyers, at the time President Lyndon Johnson's press secretary, reported later that Cronkite's statement led Johnson to believe that, if he had lost Cronkite's support, he had lost the support of middle America.
In the May 3 issue of SI, Reilly, in his regular back-page column "The Life of Reilly," wrote a piece under the headline "The Hero and the Unknown Soldier." The hero in Reilly's column was Pat Tillman, the former star football player who was killed in Afghanistan. After 9/11, Tillman had given up a multimillion-dollar contract to volunteer for the Army Rangers. He was lionized throughout the country for his sacrifice.
The Unknown Soldier was Todd Bates. Bates drowned in Iraq. His death went virtually unnoticed except to his family and friends. The man who raised Bates, Charles Jones, refused to go to the funeral, refused to eat or relate to others; he died just four weeks after the funeral. "He died of a broken heart," Bates' grandmother, Shirley, who also raised him, told Reilly. "There was no reason for my boy to die. There is no reason for this war. All we have now is a Vietnam. My Toddie's life was wasted over there. All this war is a waste. Look at all these boys going home in coffins. What's the good in it?" Reilly, in barely controlled rage, concludes his piece about Tillman and Bates:
"Both did their duty for their country, but I wonder if their country did its duty for them. Tillman died in Afghanistan, a war with no end in sight and not enough troops to finish the job. Bates died in Iraq, a war that began with no just cause and continues with no just reason.
Be proud that sports produce men like this.
But I, for one, am furious that these wars keep taking them."
Reilly, in his eloquence, was expressing opinions already delivered in places like The Nation and op-ed pages around the country. But that's the point. With all due respect, The Nation,"of which I am a subscriber and supporter"and its ilk will not change the course of history because they speak to the already converted.
What's important here is that Reilly's audience is not the typical Nation reader. He speaks to the so-called NASCAR dads, the Sunday golfers, the Monday-morning quarterbacks and the couch-potato referees. He speaks, SI estimates, to 31 million people (3.1 million subscribe to the magazine, 21 million adults read the magazine as it is passed around the family and 10 million more see the column on SI's website). It's a sizable audience"of Cronkite-like size"which can fairly be described as generally mainstream, and, on the whole, slightly more conservative than the average America.
Well, it's an expensive magazine to get and, it being 50 years old, has a patina of Americana to it," [Reilly says via e-mail.] "I mean, everybody had an uncle or a grandad who kept every issue. The cover of SI is a sacrosanct place and Americans protect it. You should see the mail we get when we put something like a dog on it, or a wrestler. It's as though it belongs to the people and perhaps it does. The SI reader is generally pretty well-off and tends to be conservative. But the fact that they pay a pretty penny for a magazine that has gone down in history as one of the finest ever produced in terms of great photography and great writing, says that they're very literary and therefore, perhaps more open-minded than your basic conservative.
Indeed, Reilly is hearing from these types of conservatives that something is deeply troubling to them about the war. "I did a piece for Time on the Marine town of Jacksonville, N.C., which you'd think would be 100 percent pro-war, and I was amazed at how many people were packing their sons up for war and saying, 'I really don't understand why we're going over there,'" he says.
The response to Reilly's column has been overwhelming"both pro and con, he says. Reilly usually gets a couple hundred responses to his columns; so far, he's received more than 2,000"most of them messages of agreement. It may be an overstatement, today, to say Reilly's column had the same impact as Cronkite's national commentary more than 36 years ago. But, as Reilly told me, sports is a tightly woven part of the fabric of our lives, an activity through which we can converse and reach huge swaths of the public. Who knows who Reilly touched?
Click here to subscribe to our free e-mail dispatch and get the latest on what's new at TomPaine.com before everyone else! You can unsubscribe at any time and we will never distribute your information to any other entity.
Published: May 07 2004
