Legendary newsman Walter Cronkite dies at 92

“He was a great broadcaster and a gentleman whose experience, honesty, professionalism and style defined the role of anchor and commentator. For almost two exciting and turbulent decades during the 1960s and 1970s he helped inform our nation, and bring us together. In so doing, he transcended his field to become the most trusted man in America,” said CBS president Leslie Moonves.

During Cronkite’s heyday, syndicated columnist Nicholas von Hoffman said, “He’s the national security blanket. He’s America’s old shoe. I’m very disturbed when he’s off. It’s like somebody misplaced the Statue of Liberty.”

Cronkite’s stolid, brushy-lipped presence was that of a news-bearing family member. The press dubbed him “Uncle Walter,” and a 1973 public opinion survey listed him above both the president and vice president as the country’s most trusted public figure.

Cronkite and his deliberate, basso delivery is what much of America’s collective memory recalls detailing two decades-worth of culture-altering events: the Kennedy assassination (his voice broke and his eyes teared); moon launches (“Go, baby, go!” he shouted as Apollo 11 lifted off); the Vietnam War (his commentary that the war was unwinnable after a 1968 visit to battlefields is believed to have influenced Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to run for re-election); and Watergate (Nixon accused him of deliberately broadcasting untruths).

Cronkite returned to live TV amid nostalgic fanfare in 1998, at age 81, to co-anchor CNN’s coverage of the launch into space of John Glenn, whose 1962 Earth orbit Cronkite covered for CBS.

‘To do anything else would be phony’

But Cronkite — who among countless awards considered the Presidential Medal of Freedom granted by Jimmy Carter as his most treasured possession -- always sounded astonished by his notoriety. His recognition was so far-reaching that a variation of his German surname, Cronkiter, came to mean “anchorman” in Sweden. Writer Frank Deford remarked of his cultural standing: “Once upon a time, everybody knew four people: the president of the United States, Walter Cronkite, Santa Claus and the heavyweight champion of the world.”

Cronkite once claimed not to devote “a minute” to considering the way he looked or talked before a camera. “That my delivery is straight, even dull at times, is probably a valid criticism,” he said. “But I built my reputation on honest, straight-forward reporting. To do anything else would be phony. I’d be selling myself and not the news.”

Added Betsy Cronkite, his wife of more than 60 years who died in 2005, and with whom he had three children, “Walter is not ambitious. But he is very competitive.”

In his later years, Cronkite became one of TV news’ most vocal critics. He deplored the current media environment, which he saw as trivializing news and pandering to viewers’ basest instincts, all in the name of bigger profits.

“I don’t envy those many serious broadcast journalists on both sides of the microphone who must live in this environment,” Cronkite wrote in “A Reporter’s Life,” his best-selling 1996 memoir. “The lack of respect in which they are held by their network managers is rubbed in their noses every day when the network-owned stations put the trashy syndicated tabloid ‘news’ on in the preferred evening hours once occupied by genuine news programs.

“It is not too far a stretch to say that the public’s dependence on television for the bulk of its news endangers the democratic system.,” Cronkite continued. “... For those who cannot or will not read... television lifts the floor of knowledge and understanding of the world around them. But for the others, through its limited exploration of the difficult issues, it lowers the ceiling of knowledge.

“Thus,” he concluded, “television news provides a very narrow intellectual crawl space between its floor and ceiling.”

For many, Cronkite represented the best that TV news could be. Observers say his secret was simple: He genuinely cared — about what he reported, and how he reported it. And Yet while he spent little blow-dry time with his on-air appearance (“I don’t consider myself an entertainer or a personality. I am a reporter”), his performer’s instincts were manifest in an easy, calming, anti-star star quality. summed up by a Soviet weekly’s description of Cronkite’s “kind, open face.”

“When the news is bad, Walter hurts,” said former CBS News president Fred Friendly. “When the news embarrasses America, Walter is embarrassed. When the news is humorous, Walter smiles with understanding... People like the smell and the looks and the... elan of Walter Cronkite.”

Added author David Halberstam: “I think he’s the definitive centrist American who reflects the essential decency of American society as much as anyone can.”

‘I never went to classes, so I got awful grades’

For TV news purists, Cronkite was a Son of Murrow — the next generation of no-frills news voices to follow in the legendary steps of CBS News pioneer Edward R. Murrow. In fact, while covering World War II in London as a print reporter for United Press, Cronkite turned down a job offer at CBS by Murrow that would have doubled his $67-a-week salary. At the time, Murrow concluded Cronkite was a man of pedestrian tastes. (While in London, Cronkite also met General George Patton, who upbraided the reporter for his scruffy attire.)

News ran deep in Cronkite’s veins.; it long preceded his 1950 arrival on TV. He wasn’t a TV guy who got into news. He was a hard news guy who wound up in TV. Born Nov. 4, 1916, to a Missouri dentist, his father moved the family to Houston. Cronkite decided to become a journalist while in junior high school, enthused by the exploits of a foreign correspondent he’d read about in a story published in American Boy magazine. He worked on the high school newspaper and yearbook, then enrolled in 1933 at the University of Texas, in Austin. He studied political science, economics and journalism.

Cronkite also worked part time as a campus correspondent for the Houston Post. He was a sports announcer for a local radio station and a state capitol reporter for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain.

By his junior year at UT, Cronkite had enough of this hectic double life: he dropped out of college to work full time for the Houston Post.

Though Cronkite later wrote that he regretted for the rest of his life not getting a college degree, at the time he never looked back.

“Covering the state capitol was a lot more exciting than studying political science in school,” he said. “Besides, I never went to classes, so I got awful grades.”

Cronkite left the Post after a year and moved to Kansas City, where he held a series of jobs: news and sports editor at one radio station, football announcer at another, public relations man with Braniff Airways.

He quit his radio news job after a program manager ordered him, without first checking with the fire department, to broadcast a hot tip about a city hall fire that forced two men to jump from the roof. Turned out it was a small trash fire, in which no one was hurt; the program director got the tip over the phone from his wife.

He then joined United Press and was shipped overseas to cover World War II. It was there Cronkite established an unflappable reputation, covering many of the war’s major battles, including Normandy, where he was chosen (by lot) to be the only reporter to cover the invasion there from the air. Newsweek once wrote that he might have been the only foreign correspondent in history whose favorite expletive was “Gosh!” But Cronkite was in the thick of things; he once crash-landed in a glider, his London apartment was rocked by a buzz bomb.

“I remember when I was assigned to the Air Force,” he recalled. “I was in many bombings, and most of the trips were horrible,” he recalled. “Like the raid we went on with the first Flying Fortress to raid Germany. We had German fighters all over, attacking us. One out of five was shot down. I was scared to death.”

Years later, he downplayed any heroics attatched to his work during the war and explained his lifelong respect for fighting men: “The truth is that I did everything only once. It didn’t take any great courage to do it once. If you go back and do it a second time — knowing how bad it is — that’s courage.”

But Harrison Salisbury, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter with The New York Times who was stationed in London with Cronkite, recalled him as “a very brave man.”

After the war, Cronkite re-established UP bureaus in Belgium, Luxemburg and the Netherlands, covered the war crimes trials in Nuremburg (“I wanted to spit on them,” he wrote of the Nazi defendants) and worked as a Moscow bureau chief (his wife packed 200 golf balls for him; there were no golf courses in Moscow).

Having once turned down a Murrow job offer during the war, Cronkite came to CBS in 1950 with an understanding he’d cover the war in Korea. But at the last minute CBS assigned him to a news show for its Washington, D.C., outlet.

“I was madder than hell,” he recalled. “Sold down the river to a lousy local TV station!”

But his “sell out” became his salvation. He appeared on national public affairs programs such as “It’s News to Me” and “Man of the Week.” He anchored the network’s 1952 political conventions, doing a bang up job and getting moved to New York, where he also began narrating the long-running historical documentary series “You Were There.”

By 1962, Cronkite was anchoring the evening news, at the time just a 15 minute nightly summary whose terrain was dominated by NBC’s “Huntley-Brinkley Report.” But Cronkite anchored the first 30-minute newscast, on Sept. 2, 1963 — one week ahead of NBC. It featured a one-on-one interview with President Kennedy. (CBS was first on the air 12 weeks later with news of Kennedy’s shooting, but last to confirm his death.)

CBS News overtook NBC in the ratings by the end of the decade, but it wasn’t always smooth sailing for Cronkite. He became such a fixture at political conventions that some frustrated CBS correspondents complained were little more than “Walter to Walter” coverage, He was replaced at the 1964 Democratic convention after NBC beat CBS in the ratings during the earlier Republican gathering.

The move prompted 11,000 letters of protest in a week. CBS never replaced Cronkite again.

‘ I don’t have any policy on how to run the country’

By the mid-’60s, Cronkite became synonymous with many of the long-running events whose unfoldings he anchored: political campaigns, space flight, Vietnam, Watergate.

“In this country, during the Walter Cronkite years, the anchor position on ‘The CBS Evening News’ has become, to many, quite as prestigious as the presidency of the Republic,” author and columnist Bob Greene once wrote. “Because of Cronkite, the network anchorman has become an important and curious part of the national experience.”

Cronkite indeed possessed a clout that many politicians — sometimes even the president — often envied. While diplomatic brokering via TV is more commonplace now in an all-news all-the-time environment, it was startling when Cronkite became a kind of agent of the news — often resulting in what pundit William Safire once called “Cronkite Diplomacy.”

“When I wanted to make a point, Cronkite was one of the first people I would call,” said former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. “He had that look of a beagle in distress. You went right to the edge of telling him everything because you felt you owed it to the guy.”

When Cronkite, initially a supporter of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, returned from thatthe country Vietnam in 1968 and opined on the air — in a segment clearly labeled “commentary” — that the war was unwinnable, President Johnson reportedly said while watching the program, “If I lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America,” and was swayed by the report not to run for reelection.

In 1977, Cronkite’s interviews with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin led to the historic summit between the two (Newsweek dubbed it “The Cronkite Summit”).

During Watergate, Cronkite became a lightening rod for White House criticism of the media as practicing “outrageous, vicious, distorted reporting.”

Cronkite summed up Nixon’s reaction to his critics, “I suppose that a man under attack as Mr. Nixon is would look for anyone to lash out at.”

Cronkite never seriously considered a move to politics, though his name surfaced often; he considered himself an independent, registering as neither a Republican nor a Democrat, and sometimes not voting. Democrat George McGovern listed him as one of 10 possible vice presidential running mates in 1972, and in 1980 he was quoted in The New Republic as saying he’d be honored to to be a running mate on Republican John Anderson’s independent ticket.

“I’ve been approached by both sides,” he once told Time. “Some are sincere, but others are flatly cynical, wanting to take advantage of a name that requires no buildup, no posters. Popularity on TV might have great appeal, but I don’t have any policy on how to run the country.”

Yet as revered as he’d become by 1980, Cronkite was not unaffected by the high-stakes gamesmanship normal to network TV.

So when CBS signed then “60 Minutes” co-anchor Dan Rather to a 5-year, $8 million contract to keep him from jumping to ABC, it was clear that the hard-charging Rather had been annointed Cronkite’s successor. With CBS executives tapping their feet impatiently, it was up to Cronkite to vacate the chair — which he did, on March 6, 1981, eight months before his 65th birthday.

‘I had a pretty good seat at the parade’

Cronkite’s departure was greeted like a cultural sea change for TV news (“The Age of Cronkite Passes” declared Time; “After Cronkite” pronounced Newsweek’s cover, as though dating a civilization’s demise).

“Whether television news created Walter Cronkite, or he created television news is a question that defies resolution,” People magazine weighed in.

For many people, both inside and outside the business, it was the cultural equivilent to a death in the family.

“It’s a little dramatic for the retirement of a television newsman,” Andy Rooney said of all the fuss. “But the thought of Walter leaving evokes the same sense of terror I get from the contemplating of death.”

Cronkite insisted he wasn’t pushed out — that he’d informed CBS two years earlier that he wanted to retire at 65, and that Rather’s contract brinksmanship merely coincided with his inevitable departure, though accelerating it slightly.

Cronkite was supposed to leave only semi-retired: CBS slated him to host a new science series, and to report from the front when big stories broke.

But things changed quickly. Viewers initially deserted the super-serious, uptight-seeming Rather (he became Nephew Dan to Cronkite’s Uncle Walter), and CBS execs feared Cronkite’s presence would only make them wish for what they no longer had. When Van Gordon Sauter took over CBS news, Cronkite virtually became invisible.

“Sauter admitted that he was deliberately keeping me off the air because he felt that it would be easier to build up Dan’s audience if I wasn’t around as a distraction,” Cronkite later wrote.

His later years were filled with hosting various documentaries, accepting awards and maintaining an active life that, before his heart trouble, included yachting and tennis.

He had a lifelong ambition to travel in space, and remained a kind of unofficial ombudsman for TV news, which he saw as being increasingly eroded by the influence of entertainment.

Asked once what he considered his greatest achievement, Cronkite answered, “Helping establish some TV news standards.”

Summing up his life in news, he added, “I had a pretty good seat at the parade.”

An Esquire article on Cronkite once concluded, with a kind of back-door tribute to his influence, “Too many articles that have been written about him end with ‘And that’s the way it is.’ This one won’t.”

Neither will this one. It belongs to Cronkite.

Always will.