Walter Cronkite

Walter Cronkite

1916­–2009

As anchorman of the CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981, Walter Cronkite was the man to whom millions of Americans turned each day to learn what had happened in their world. It was “Uncle Walter,” as he was widely known, who told the country that President Kennedy had been assassinated, that men had walked on the moon, and that the Vietnam War could not be won. At a time when only three TV networks offered national news broadcasts, Cronkite was so dominant and well respected that public-opinion polls in the 1970s routinely named him “the most trusted man in America.”

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“His ambition to cover news began in boyhood,” said The Philadelphia Inquirer. As the 6-year-old son of a dentist in St. Joseph, Mo., Cronkite once recalled, “I went running down the hill through our neighborhood to spread the news of President Harding’s death.” While attending the University of Texas, he wrote for the Houston Press and announced sporting events on the radio. Cronkite joined United Press in 1939 and soon distinguished himself as a war correspondent: He covered the Allied invasion of Normandy, “went on bombing missions over Germany, dropped into the Netherlands with the 101st Airborne, and covered the Battle of the Bulge.”

In 1950, Cronkite joined CBS to help shape its early TV broadcasts, said the Los Angeles Times. He struggled to define his role in the infant medium, even hosting a morning show that featured a lion puppet named Charlemagne. But “CBS officials saw that Cronkite had two crucial abilities: He could ad-lib and make the complex sound simple.” And his outstanding coverage of the 1952 Republican National Convention “made clear television’s new dominance over radio.” Cronkite steadily rose at CBS and, in 1962, took over the evening news.

By 1967, said Newsday, he had made the show the No. 1 nightly news broadcast, eclipsing NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report. How he did so “was one of the miracles of the TV age.” The mustachioed, portly Cronkite “was not an especially imposing man, nor movie-star handsome.” He rarely smiled; as he acknowledged, “I am overcautious to the point that people think of me as kind of remote.” But it was precisely because he was so “arrow-straight” that Cronkite connected with the country. “His sign-off, ‘And that’s the way it is,’ was a verbal sleight of hand that implied omniscience and completion.”

Much of Cronkite’s appeal stemmed from his capacity for “guiding viewers through national triumphs and tragedies alike,” said The New York Times. When President Kennedy was assassinated, in 1963, Cronkite was seen “taking off his black-framed glasses and blinking back tears.” At one point, his voice briefly cracked. Although he regretted his display—“Anchormen don’t cry,” he said later—on that day, “he registered the emotions of millions.” Six years later, he offered a happier emotional turn when he exclaimed, “Go, baby, go!” as Apollo 11 rocketed to the moon. When the astronauts landed, he grinned and, rubbing his hands together, remarked, “Whew! Boy!” But perhaps his most powerful evocation of the public mood occurred in 1968 when, after a reporting mission to Vietnam, he remarked, “We are in a no-win situation and it’s time for us to get out.” President Lyndon Johnson told his aides, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” It is generally thought that Cronkite’s assessment helped dissuade Johnson from seeking re-election.

When Cronkite retired from CBS at 64, he “was supposed to have a continuing relationship with the network,” said USA Today. “But it didn’t work out that way.” Although his bosses named him to the board of directors, they gave him a reported “$1 million a year to do virtually nothing.” Cronkite nonetheless kept busy, producing documentaries for the Discovery Channel and other outlets, becoming an elder statesman of the press, and often wishing he could return to the workaday world of journalism. “I just hope that wherever that is,” he wrote in his 1996 memoirs, “folks will still stop me, as they do today, and ask: ‘Didn’t you used to be Walter Cronkite?’”

Cronkite’s wife of 64 years, Betsy, died in 2005. Two daughters and a son survive him.