NEW YORK, Jan 16: Former veteran CBS Television anchor Walter Cronkite, whose 1968 conclusion that the Vietnam war was unwinnable influenced American public opinion, on Sunday advised the Bush administration to get out of Iraq now.

“It’s my belief that we should get out now,” Mr Cronkite said in a meeting with reporters in California.

Mr Cronkite, 89, once known as ‘the most trusted man in America’, has been off the ‘CBS Evening News’ for almost 25 years. He’s still a CBS News employee.

Mr Cronkite told reporters that one of his proudest moments came at the end of a 1968 documentary he made following a visit to Vietnam during the Tet offensive. Urged by his boss to briefly set aside his objectivity to give his view of the situation, Mr Cronkite said the war was unwinnable and that the US should pull out.

Then-president Lyndon Johnson reportedly told a White House aide after that: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

The best time to have made a similar statement about Iraq came after Hurricane Katrina, he said.

“We had an opportunity to say to the world and Iraqis after the hurricane disaster that Mother Nature has not treated us well and we find ourselves missing the amount of money it takes to help these poor people out of their homeless situation and rebuild some of our most important cities in the United States,” he said. “Therefore, we are going to have to bring our troops home.”

Iraqis should have been told that ‘our hearts are with you’ and that the United States would do all it could to rebuild their country, he said.

“I think we could have been able to retire with honour,” he said. “In fact, I think we can retire with honour anyway.”

Mr Cronkite has spoken out against the Iraq invasion in the past, saying in 2004 that Americans weren’t any safer because of the invasion.