SAMPLE QUESTION ONLY: DRAFT FORMAT
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The following passage is taken from a book that examines the relationship between
politics in the United States and television.
In early 1968 [when President Lyndon Johnson was running for reelection], after
five years of steadily increasing American commitment of troops and arms to the war in
Vietnam, President Johnson was still holding fast to the policy that the war could and
must be won. However, his favorite television newsman, CBS’s Walter Cronkite, became
increasingly skeptical about the stream of official statements from Washington and
Saigon that claimed we were winning the war. So Cronkite decided to go to Vietnam and
see for himself. When he returned, he broadcast a special report to the nation, which
Lyndon Johnson watched. Cronkite reported that the war had become a bloody stalemate
and that military victory was not in the cards. He concluded: “It is increasingly clear to
this reporter that the only rational way out . . . 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.”
On hearing Cronkite’s verdict, the President turned to his aides and said, “It’s all
over.” Johnson was a great believer in public opinion polls, and he knew that a recent poll
had shown that the American people trusted Walter Cronkite more than any other
American to “tell it the way it is.” Moreover, Johnson himself liked and respected
Cronkite more than any other newsman. As Johnson’s aide Bill Moyers put it later, “We
always knew . . . that Cronkite had more authority with the American people than anyone
else. It was Johnson’s instinct that Cronkite was it.” So if Walter Cronkite thought that
the war was hopeless, the American people would think so too, and the only thing left
was to wind it down. A few weeks after Cronkite’s broadcast Johnson, in a famous
broadcast of his own, announced that he was ending the air and naval bombardment in
most of Vietnam—and that he would not run for another term as President.
Source E
Ranney, Austin, Channels of Power: The Impact of Television on American
Politics. New York: Basic Books, 1983.