Cronkite Was Right About This 'War,' Too

Walter Cronkite, once the most trusted man in America and a leading figure in broadcast journalism's Mount Rushmore, believed the nation's war on drugs was unwinnable, and he said so on television. A decade after his years with CBS News, Mr. Cronkite succeeded in raising public awareness of the war's futility - an impressive accomplishment.

Of course, Mr. Cronkite is famous for having reached the same correct conclusion about the Vietnam War in 1968. All of his obituaries have recalled Mr. Cronkite's special report from Vietnam, his characterization of the war as stalemate and his call for a negotiated peace. President Lyndon B. Johnson was famously quoted as saying, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America." Later that year, Mr. Johnson decided not to seek re-election.

In the 1990s, when Bill Clinton was president, Mr. Cronkite narrated a series of investigative reports for the Discovery Channel. One of them, in 1995, was "The Drug Dilemma - War or Peace?" In it, Mr. Cronkite said: "Just about every American was shocked when Robert McNamara, one of the master architects of the Vietnam War, acknowledged that not only did he believe the war was 'wrong, terribly wrong,' but that he thought so at the very time he was helping to wage it. That's a mistake we must not make in this tenth year of America's all-out war on drugs."

One of the "Cronkite Reports" for Discovery focused on three women who had been incarcerated for drug possession. Ethan Nadelmann, founder of the Drug Policy Alliance, noted that, "the extraordinary lengths of the prison terms to which they had been sentenced, for relatively minor participation in the illicit sale of drugs, combined with the impact on their children and families, and the absurd amount of money being spent to punish rather than help and treat - all this shaped Cronkite's devastating indictment of the drug war.

"Walter Cronkite got it - and he got it early. He knew a failed war when he saw one."

It's interesting that Mr. Nadelmann uses the word "early" there. The war on drugs dates back to the Nixon administration. It received a big push during the Reagan years and got another under George H.W. Bush. We have been locking up men and women for drug offenses since the 1970s, and drug arrests are the main reason the United States has the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the world.