The Fromson File

I had dinner with Walter Cronkite the first night he arrived in Saigon on what was his personal fact finding trip “into country” after the Communists’ 1968 Tet Offensive. He was a hawk, a supporter of the conflict in Vietnam like so many Americans of his generation. Walter clearly was troubled by the visual images [...]

It has taken me nearly a week to reflect on how figures like Robert McNamara contributed to the erosion of the American people’s trust in so many of their institutions. It was his arrogance and self-confidence that so diminished whatever he had to say about Vietnam from the time the war began. McNamara was so [...]

Those were the dying words uttered by Colonel Walter Kurtz, the half-crazed Special Forces officer portrayed by Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, the classic war film about Vietnam. It could have been a precursor to Afghanistan or Pakistan. From my encounters in all three countries going back more than 50 years the future is not [...]

If you wonder what you’ll be missing when newspapers vanish, consider two stories that appeared in morning newspapers that have yet to make it to the online geniuses who will decide the content of alternative journalism in the near future. Both examples deal with the infuriating decisions rendered by the bureaucrats in the service of [...]