The late CBS Evening News anchorman Walter Cronkite is named in a just-released FBI document from 1986 as being targeted in a Soviet “active measures” campaign against President Reagan’s anti-communist foreign policy. Cronkite is named as a possible member of a U.S. delegation that would sign a pro-Soviet “People’s Peace Treaty.”
Cronkite, once known as “the most trusted man in television news” because of his influence during the time when three network news programs dominated the national dissemination of news and information, bears a great deal of responsibility for the American military defeat in Vietnam and the communist conquest of that Southeast Asian country. — Cliff Kincaid