Walter Cronkite was a guest on Larry King Live on September the 10th (the 11th in Japan), and acquitted himself in his usual dignity and straightforwardness. The frank honesty that made him so popular with America remains undiminished. And in the recent times of mass patriotic obeisance to the Bush administration, Cronkite’s no-nonsense truthfulness was a breath of fresh air. There is so much I would like to quote from this interview, but cannot. I am posting a fair amount, but I strongly urge you to read the entire transcript. For here and now, some key excerpts from the interview:

KING: John Ashcroft will be here tomorrow night. He’s, as you know, going around the country on behalf of the Patriot Act. What do you think of that Act?

CRONKITE: I think it is disastrously severe. When you darn well know that we must be exceedingly careful these days and we need new rules and regulations in order to be as safe as we possibly can be from the terrorist threats, but the Patriot Act goes far too far. Far too far. […]

One of the principal things that bothers so many of us is this incredible business of giving the FBI the right to go into any library, any bookstore, and look at all of their records to find out what people are reading, what individuals are reading. Clearly it is the reverse side of freedom of speech and press. This is the freedom to think, the freedom to research one’s faith. What business does the government in doing that? If they have legitimate reason, they have a suspect in mind, then they could go to a court and get the proper authority to do that kind of search which is in the law anyway. But they are waiving all of that. They don’t have to go to court at all. They are — doing a pro forma thing of going to a particular court in this regard, but that court is closed to public examination. The public isn’t permitted into the court, and its rulings are not even printed. And actually, it’s a rubber stamp for the FBI’s to go anywhere they want.

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KING: I mean, Lincoln suspended habeus corpus. We put Japanese Americans in interment camps. […] Both of which are highly anti-constitutional.

CRONKITE: Sure, as this is, as what the attorney general is doing now with the Patriot Act. There are moves in Congress, as you know, to amend that act so that some of these more heinous, I would say, actions, which severely impact upon our freedom as Americans, and in that case we’ve got to balance certainly our protection from the terrorists and our own freedoms. If we destroy our own freedoms in order to protect ourselves from the terrorists, what is the value of protecting ourselves from the terrorists in the first place if what we think of as America is gone?

We can’t put up with that, it seems to me. And also, you know, this whole idea of patriotism is a very important part of the course of our souls, our very bodies. But it’s got to be defined very carefully. The charge of those who are unpatriotic because they disagree with the government at any given moment on any given issue is very likely a false accusation.

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KING: Were you opposed to the war in Iraq? Were you opposed to going?

CRONKITE: Yes, I was. I was indeed. I felt that we were not giving the inspections time enough. I felt there was a mistake going unilaterally. I thought it was a great mistake to bypass the United Nations, and I think we’ve been proved — those of us who felt that way — right. If we’d stuck with our — with the United Nations in the first place and played along with them and gotten their permission eventually, making some concessions, of course, to the French, the Germans and the Russians, but at the same time getting a United Nations action, we wouldn’t be in this mess we are in now. It would already be internationalized.

KING: But Saddam Hussein would still be running that country.

CRONKITE: Maybe. I’m not so sure of that. I don’t — I’m not so sure that we wouldn’t have gotten the United Nations’ approval if we’d gone at it perhaps a little more diplomatically, if we — had the president had not in that original speech he made, where he made a perfectly good case for going into Iraq, but he ended that speech by saying, “On the other hand, it doesn’t matter what you do at the United Nations. We’re going in anyway, unilaterally.” Well, that was hardly the way to get an agreement out of the United Nations. I think we might have done it if we’d played our hand a little differently.

KING: What are you — what’s your worst fear about the current situation?

CRONKITE: Well, my worst fear is that we are indeed inspiring a hatred greater than existed before among the Arab peoples for the United States and out intervention in their affairs, as they would interpret it. The — as much as they might have agreed, many of them, that they should get rid of Hussein and his regime, we have in a sense overplayed our hand, and they’re angry. […] We haven’t handled this very well.

[…] We’re having to eat crow, is what we’re doing, and we might as well admit it. We’re having to go to the United Nations and say, “We’re sorry, the way we treated you before. Now come along with us. Now come along — now that we’re in the hole, now it’s going to cost you more. Now it’s going to cost you more people, more troops than it did before, but still we need you desperately. Please help us.”

KING: Do you think this is a mistake or do you think we were misled? […] By the administration, weapons of mass destruction and the like, fed to the United States.

CRONKITE: Oh, yes. I think we were misled. I think it’s a question seriously of whether that was deliberately done or whether it was just their vocabulary got ahead of their thinking.

KING: Do you think they wanted to go to war in Iraq?

CRONKITE: Oh, I don’t have any doubt about that, no. They saw this as a necessity and they were making whatever case they could to convince us all that we had to go and go then.

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CRONKITE: I like California. I enjoy it. I have a lot of dear friends out there. Visit it every chance I can get. But this misuse of democracy…

KING: The recall, you mean.

CRONKITE: For the recall […] is a dangerous move. If other states adopt that similar thing, our elections mean nothing. […] I personally would like to see the recall fail. I have no particular — I’m not carrying a dossier here for the present governor, but just to preserve the democracy and the way it works. If you can recall the governor anytime that you decide that he’s not functioning well, you’re going to have chaos around the country.