The fact is that Cronkite was “a man of the left,” as Brinkley later put it in a C-SPAN interview. He called the Chicago police “a bunch of thugs,” wondered why more Americans weren’t livid about the My Lai Massacre, implied that Barry Goldwater was some sort of neo-Nazi, and dedicated nearly two thirds of the Evening News to Watergate coverage—just days before the 1972 election.
