Only Walter Cronkite could have summed up in two words the drive that propelled him to his iconic role as the most trusted voice in broadcast news. When asked, well after his retirement in 1981, which story he would have wanted to cover, he replied, “Every one.”
Cronkite, the esteemed and beloved “Uncle Walter” to generations of CBS TV news consumers, was with family when he died yesterday in his Manhattan home. He was 92. An aide said the cause was cerebrovascular disease.
Cronkite narrated American history as it was made from 1962 until his retirement from CBS Evening News, dying just days before the 40th anniversary of one of those decades’ most memorable events: America’s manned landing on the moon. “He had a passion for human space exploration, an enthusiasm that was contagious, and the trust of his audience,” astronaut Neil Armstrong, the man who made the first footprint on the lunar surface, told the Associated Press.
Walter Cronkite
When major news broke, Cronkite often stayed on the air in marathon broadcasts that earned him the sobriquet “Old Ironpants.” He informed and shepherded viewers through the Watergate scandal led President Richard Nixon to resign, the race riots of the late ’60s, the anti-war riots of the Vietnam era, the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979, and the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Sen. Robert Kennedy – who once asked him to run for public office.
While reading bulletins after President Kennedy was shot in 1963, “Uncle Walter” famously lost his composure with the rest of the country when the news came through that the president was dead.
And it was after Cronkite visited war-torn Vietnam and declared, in a highly personal commentary that the United States was in an unbreakable stalemate, that President Lyndon Johnson said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.”
Through it all, he set what ABC News anchor Charles Gibson called “the gold standard” for broadcast journalism, and earned in his viewers something that’s no longer enjoyed by most of the news media, whether print or broadcast: trust.
“Walter was who I wanted to be when I grew up. He set a standard for all of us,” said Cronkite colleague Bob Schieffer, 72, the longtime host of the CBS newsmakers’ show, Face the Nation.
His name even made it into the Swedish idiom, where news anchors are known as “Kronkiters,” and in Holland, where they’re called “Cronkiters.” When the term “anchorman” was coined in the U.S., it was first used for Cronkite.
News services had no problem finding notable comment on Cronkite after his death yesterday, starting with President Barack Obama, who called him “someone we could trust to guide us through the most important issues of the day; a voice of certainty in an uncertain world. He was family. He invited us to believe in him, and he never let us down.”
Don Hewitt, the CBS News executive who created the seminal TV investigative newsmagazine “60 Minutes,” called Cronkite “the consummate television newsman. He had all the credentials to be a writer, an editor, a broadcaster. There was only one Walter Cronkite and there may never be another one.”
Cronkite joined CBS in 1950 after years as a wire service reporter, during which he was already covering such major stories as World War II and the Nuremberg war crimes trials that followed. One of his first assignments at the network was anchoring the presidential nominating conventions of 1952, the first time they received major TV coverage. Ten years later, he replaced Douglas Edwards as anchor of the “Evening News.”
The same year he retired, Walter Cronkite was awarded the country’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
To echo Cronkite’s world-famous sign-off today, July 18, 2009, one day after the death of a TV newsman whose career and integrity are unlikely ever to be equaled:
“And that’s the way it is.”
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