As the Vietnam War escalated into an inferno, CBS responded with Gomer Pyle, an Andy Griffith spin-off with Jim Nabors as a guileless small-town marine, and Hogan’s Heroes, a comedy set in a Nazi POW camp. (With the toothless military comedies McHale’s Navy and The Wackiest Ship in the Army respectively, ABC and NBC came no closer to Vietnam than CBS did.) Each night, CBS chronicled the increasingly tumultuous strains tearing at America on Walter Cronkite’s newscast and then spent the next three and a half hours of prime time trying to erase them from their viewers’ minds.
