Legendary TV newsman Walter Cronkite dies at 92

Walter Cronkite, shown here on the anchor desk in 1969, was known as "the most trusted man in America." His name became synonymous with "news anchor" around the world: in Sweden, anchors are known as "Kronkiters," and in Holland they are "Cronkiters." CBS/Getty Images)

And America loses yet another icon...

The most trusted man in America--newsman legend Walter Cronkite--died tonight at 92 years old.

Cronkite was the newsman, the anchor. He showed his contemporaries and those who followed how it's done. He defined the role of the TV network news anchor.

He sat behind a small desk and a big microphone and reported events as they happened, without the bells and whistles of today's newscasts.

Cronkite was breaking news when these were broadcast via radio waves. He was researching stories and reporting them without the aid of the high technology that today's reporters and anchors rely on--teleprompters, personal computers, cellphones, beepers, fax machines, the Internet.

I planned to gather a lifetime of facts and anecdotes to write my own story, but while working on it I ran into the one published just hours after his dead by the Washington Post and realized that this is the story I wanted in my blog.

So I inserted some photos, and here it is:

America's Iconic TV News Anchor
Shaped the Medium and the Nation

By Bart Barnes and Joe Holley

Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, July 18, 2009

Cronkite was America's preeminent television journalist during the 1960s and 70s who as anchor and managing editor of "CBS Evening News" played a primary role in establishing television as the dominant national news medium of that era, died last night at age 92.

CBS Vice President Linda Mason said Cronkite died at 7:42 p.m. with his family by his side at his home in New York after a long illness. He had been suffering from cerebrovascular disease, his family said recently.

Cronkite's career reflected the arc of journalism in the mid-20th century. He was a wire service reporter covering major campaigns of World War II before working in radio and then joining a pioneering TV news venture at the CBS affiliate in Washington. Later in New York, he anchored the network's nightly news program from 1962 to 1981, a period in which television established itself as the principal source of information on current events for most Americans.

In a statement last night, President Obama called Cronkite "more than just an anchor." He was "someone we could trust to guide us through the most important issues of the day; a voice of certainty in an uncertain world," Obama said.

Describing him as "family," the president said Cronkite " invited us to believe in him, and he never let us down. This country has lost an icon and a dear friend, and he will be truly missed."

CBS was widely considered the best news-gathering operation among the three major networks, and Cronkite was a major reason why. With his avuncular pipe-and-slippers presence before the camera and an easy yet authoritative delivery, he had an extraordinary rapport with his viewers and a level of credibility that was unmatched in the industry. In a 1973 public opinion poll by the Oliver Quayle organization, Cronkite was named the most trusted public figure in the United States, ahead of the president and the vice president.

"He was the voice of truth, the voice of reliability," said Todd Gitlin, a Columbia University journalism professor and sociologist. "He belongs to a time when there were three networks, three oil companies, three brands of bread." He was the personification of stability and permanence, even when, in Gitlin's words, his message was "that things are falling apart."

In the decades before media outlets and media audiences splintered into numberless shards, Cronkite's broadcasts reached an estimated 20 million people a night. His name became permanently linked in the minds of millions of Americans with the major news events of his time: the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert and of Martin Luther King Jr.; the triumph of the first moon landing; the Watergate scandal; the return of American hostages after the Iranian Revolution; and a cavalcade of political conventions, national elections and presidential inaugurations.

Seminal Moments

Cronkite was often viewed as the personification of objectivity, but his reports on the Vietnam War increasingly came to criticize the American military role. "From 1964 to 1967, he never took anything other than a deferential approach to the White House on Vietnam," Gitlin said, but added, "He's remembered for the one moment when he stepped out of character and decided, to his great credit, to go see [Vietnam] for himself."

Walter Cronkite and a CBS Camera crew use a jeep for a dolly during an interview with the commanding officer of the 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, during the Battle of Hue City on Feb 20, 1968. (Picture courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration)

In 1968, after the surprise Tet Offensive of the Communist North Vietnamese, Cronkite went to Southeast Asia for a firsthand look at the war. His reports on the "Evening News" and in a half-hour special were instrumental in turning the tide of American public opinion against U.S. policy.

"To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past," he said, casting doubt in the minds of millions of Americans on official versions of the war. Cronkite's viewers were certain that he would never lie to them, and the White House and the Department of Defense did not command that level of credibility.

President Lyndon B. Johnson was widely quoted as having told aides, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America."

Cronkite took pride in being unemotional on the air, but the one occasion when he lost his composure, for the briefest of moments, became an indelible part of the nation's communal memory.

Walter Cronkite fought back tears when telling the nation that President John F. Kennedy had died on Nov 22, 1963.

"From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official," he reported Nov. 22, 1963, while sitting at his newsroom desk in shirtsleeves, "President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time . . . "

He removed his black horn-rimmed glasses, paused as he choked back a sob and then continued reporting about the whereabouts of then-Vice President Johnson, soon to be sworn in as president.

At the other end of the emotional spectrum, he exhibited almost a boyish glee when reporting on U.S. space triumphs.

"Man on the moon! . . . Oh, boy! . . . Whew! Boy!" was his description of the spacecraft Eagle's landing on the moon on July 20, 1969. "Boy! There they sit on the moon! . . . My golly!"

Walter Cronkite keeps his eyes on the monitor as NASA's Apollo 11 mission touches down on the moon on July 20, 1969. The journalist, who grew passionate about the space program, called the moon landing a career highlight. (CBS/Getty Images)

Known as "old ironpants" for his durability, Cronkite spent 27 of the next 30 hours on the air.

The Original Anchorman

News was a stepchild of the television industry in 1962 when CBS asked Cronkite to be its evening news "anchorman," a term CBS coined and a job Cronkite shaped for decades to come. At the time, network executives did not see television news as a profit center; it would take "60 Minutes," created in 1968 by Cronkite's former executive producer Don Hewitt, to change that belief about profitability. Nightly news programs lasted only 15 minutes, which permitted little more than a bare summary of the day's front-page news.

On Sept. 2, 1963, Cronkite and CBS made television history with the first half-hour edition of "CBS Evening News." It included an exclusive interview with President John F. Kennedy. Two weeks later, NBC expanded its nightly news program, with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, to 30 minutes. ABC went to a half-hour format in 1967.

On Sep 3, 1963, the first broadcast of the "CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite" featured an interview with President John F. Kennedy in Hyannis Port, Mass. (CBS/Getty Images)

By 1968, Cronkite and CBS had established a dominance in the evening news viewer ratings that would remain unchallenged for the rest of his tenure as anchor and managing editor. He became the standard against which other television network anchors were judged, and his face became one of the most recognized in America.

So widely did Cronkite become known that eventually it interfered with his ability to cover politics, which had always been one of his passions. "I get off the bus in some small town and the crowd is around me rather than the candidate," he once said. "Not only is it embarrassing, it gets in the way of working. Instead of getting the crowd's reaction to the candidate, I'm dealing with the crowd's reaction to me."

His newscasts were based on a fundamental premise: "to tell it like it is without gimmicks," and he signed off each night's broadcast with the same line, "And that's the way it is."

The Competitive Journalist

Cronkite may have been a calm, unflappable presence on the air, but "he was always a hard-driving, fiercely competitive newsman off camera," David Shaw of the Los Angeles Times noted in 2003. The Times media critic recalled spending a day with him for a 1979 magazine profile.

"Throughout the day," Shaw recalled, "he was calling sources, prodding subordinates, asking questions, editing copy, deciding how stories would be played on that night's broadcast. At one point, when someone handed him a statement that had come in earlier from the Iranian Embassy, answering several questions he'd been pursuing, he exploded.

"He continued to fume and fret and drive and demand through the day, right up until 6:28, when he combed his hair, put on his jacket and -- two minutes later -- began the broadcast with his calm and customary, 'Good evening.' "

Cronkite said he never anchored a single newscast that left him fully satisfied. He watched NBC's nightly news program each evening after finishing his own, and his staff lived in mortal terror of the explosion of anger that would surely follow if NBC had a story or even a fact that had not been on Cronkite's show.

"I want to win," he once said. "I not only want to win, I want to be the best. I feel very badly if I can't be."

Birth of a Newsman

Walter Leland Cronkite Jr. was born Nov. 4, 1916, in St. Joseph, Mo. He grew up in Kansas City, Mo., and later in Houston, where his father served on the faculty of the University of Texas Dental School. As a junior in high school, he read a short story about the exploits and adventures of a foreign news correspondent, and he decided then and there that he wanted to be a journalist. He got his first look at television at the 1933 World's Fair in Chicago.

He attended the University of Texas at Austin, where he worked part time as the campus correspondent for the Houston Post, as sports announcer for a radio station and as a state capitol reporter for the Scripps Howard newspaper chain. He concluded after two years that covering the state capitol was more exciting than studying political science at the university, and he dropped out of college to become a full-time reporter.

Cronkite worked at the Houston Post for a year, then joined the staff of a Kansas City radio station, where he worked as news and sports editor. Later, he became a sports announcer for an Oklahoma City radio station, where he developed a reputation for imagination and creativity for his colorful re-creations of football games based on nothing but wire-service copy.

In 1939, he became a reporter for the United Press wire service and soon was covering combat during World War II. He covered the Battle of the North Atlantic, went along on the first B-17 bombing raid over Germany, landed with Allied forces in North Africa and waded ashore in the Normandy invasion of June 6, 1944. Later, he accompanied the Allied breakthrough at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge.

Cronkite was chief United Press correspondent at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, and then from 1946 to 1948 was the agency's chief correspondent in Moscow. He returned to the United States in 1948 and served as Washington correspondent for a group of Midwestern radio stations until joining CBS News in 1950, shortly after the Korean War broke out. He had hoped to cover the fighting but was instead charged with developing the news department of what was then WTOP-TV, the CBS affiliate in Washington.

Walter Cronkite began his career as a TV reporter for CBS in 1950 (CBS/Getty Images)

TV's Early Days

Although he came to the job with no TV experience whatsoever, he developed what he called "a gut feeling that television news delivery ought to be as informal as possible [and spoken] to that single individual in front of his set in the intimacy of his own home, not to a gathering of thousands.

Later, with the network, he covered Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's 1959 visit to the United States, the 1960 Winter Olympics at Squaw Valley, Calif., and the early space flights of John Glenn, Alan Shepard, Gordon Cooper and Walter Schirra.

When asked to anchor the evening news program, succeeding Douglas Edwards, Cronkite insisted that he also be named managing editor in an effort to emphasize that it was a news -- not an entertainment -- broadcast. Over the next several years, Cronkite worked with CBS News President Fred Friendly and others to build up a newsgathering organization that reached all parts of the globe.

As early as 1952, Cronkite had predicted that television would someday dominate American politics, and he was sensitive about the enormous potential of his broadcasts to mold and influence public opinion.

Retirement and Honors

In 1980, a year before Cronkite turned 65, CBS executives began to prod him to step aside to make way for the younger Dan Rather to lead the Evening News. At Cronkite's last convention, the 1980 Democratic National Convention in New York, the intensity of a farewell demonstration for Cronkite surpassed that of the reaction to Jimmy Carter's speech accepting nomination for a second term. Delegates gathered on the floor of Madison Square Garden chanting, "Wal-ter, Wal-ter, Wal-ter." It was a major national news event itself when Cronkite anchored his last "CBS Evening News" broadcast March 6, 1981.

Walter Cronkite led CBS Evening News for almost 20 years.

But Cronkite later came to regret having been pushed out of the anchor's chair before he was ready to leave.

Six weeks before stepping down, Cronkite received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. As a special correspondent, he covered the 40th anniversary of V-E Day, the 40th anniversary of the D-Day invasion, the funeral of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and the 25th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian uprising.

As the years passed, he lost some of his reporter's reluctance to express an opinion and gave voice to his conventionally liberal ideals. In 2006, he told a gathering of reporters that his proudest moment as a journalist was the night he delivered his editorial about the futility of the Vietnam War. Had he still been a network anchor, he said, he would have tried to deliver a similar editorial about the Iraq war.

Cronkite married Mary Elizabeth "Betsy" Maxwell, a columnist and women's editor for the Kansas City Journal, on March 30, 1940. She died three weeks before their 65th anniversary.

They had three children, Nancy, Kathy and Walter L. "Chip" Cronkite III. As a widower, Cronkite was the companion of opera singer Joanna Simon, the older sister of pop singer-songwriter Carly Simon.

He was deeply disappointed that outer space remained beyond his reach.

"He keeps looking into the sky at night and saying, 'I have to go there,' " his wife once recalled.

There will never, ever, ever be another one like him. Ever.

Walter Cronkite
1916-2009

Sources: CNN, Washington Post, AP
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