Who is Walter Cronkite?

There was a time, not so long ago, when network news broadcasts in the evening were the most powerful on television. The men (and they were all men) who presented the news were icons to the American public. Walter Cronkite was the dean of television newsmen, reciting the day’s events with grace and poise, and with a solemnity that they deserved. There was no cable, no instant messaging, no Internet, no streaming news. There was only Walter and men like him.

At the height of his career, he was the most admired and trusted man in the United States. If Walter Cronkite said it, it must be true. He is our hero because he never gave us cause to mistrust him; he never abused the faith we put in him, or became haughty or proud. He always remained the same: the good and righteous man who would interpret a complex world for us every evening.

What Made Walter Cronkite?

Although he was a legitimate star, Cronkite insisted he was an ordinary working journalist and used the values he learned growing up in the Midwest to temper his reporting on some of the most compelling and controversial issues of the 20th century.

He was born on November 4, 1916, in St. Joseph, Missouri. The family later moved to Houston, Texas, in 1928. After graduating high school, he attended the University of Texas at Austin, but dropped out in his junior year. He spent a brief time in 1935 covering news and sports for a local Austin newspaper and working in public relations. He moved into broadcast journalism in 1936 as an announcer for WKY in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

He fell in love with his future wife, Mary Elizabeth Maxwell, while he was a sports announcer for KCMO-AM in Kansas City, Missouri. They would marry soon after.

In the early days of radio, broadcasters were not allowed to use their real names because the station owners were afraid the announcers would take listeners with them if they moved to another station. During his first stint as a broadcaster, Cronkite’s on-air name was Walter Wilcox.

Cronkite’s big career break came during World War II. He joined the reporting staff of the United Press (UP). He became part of a group of war journalists known as the Writing 69th. Cronkite showed he would do almost anything to get a story, including going ashore on D-Day, making parachute landings with the 101st Airborne and accompanying bombing missions to Germany. Cronkite raised his profile even higher when he was the UP reporter covering the post-war Nuremberg Trials of suspected Nazi war criminals. After that, he opened the first postwar UP office in Moscow, where he stayed for 2 years.

CBS news legend Edward R. Murrow, who achieved fame during his coverage of the London Blitz, recognized an extraordinary newsman in Cronkite and tried to get him to join the CBS radio news team during the war. Cronkite chose to stay with UP for the time being. Finally, he accepted an offer to work for CBS in 1950. The term anchor was coined for Cronkite’s work coordinating the first live national television coverage of the Democratic and Republican national conventions in 1952.

He covered other high-profile events for CBS radio and television, and hosted the television program You Are There. This show re-created historical moments, the twist being that the events were covered by television as they would be in the 1950s. Cronkite created a memorable last line for the show: “What sort of day was it? A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our lives … and you were there.”

CBS rewarded Cronkite for his hard work and obvious talent on camera by making him the successor to Douglas Edwards as the anchor-man of the CBS Evening News in 1962. At the time the show was only 15 minutes long but was expanded to 30 minutes less than a year after Cronkite took over.

Thanks to a combination of financial support of the news division by CBS and Cronkite’s own experience as a wartime reporter, the CBS Evening News soon emerged as the leader in national news shows and gave CBS a reputation for both trustworthiness and in-depth reporting.

Ironically, one of Cronkite’s first on-air interviews in the new 30-minute format was with President John F. Kennedy. Barely 2 months later, Cronkite was the first on the air with news of Kennedy’s shooting and death. One of the most memorable moments in television broadcast history happened as a visibly shaken Cronkite seemed to choke up on camera when announcing the death of the president. He later admitted he almost did not make it through the broadcast because he was so upset.

Another national tragedy that would define Cronkite’s reputation was the Vietnam War. He was originally quite hawkish on the war but managed to maintain a balanced news approach. As the war dragged on and the American death toll kept rising, Cronkite became more disillusioned with Vietnam. He traveled to the country to cover the Tet Offensive and returned to editorialize on the air, expressing his belief that the war was unwinnable. President Johnson reportedly said after Cronkite’s remarks, “If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.”

“Johnson dropped out of the presidential race, although no one can be certain it was directly related to Cronkite’s dismissal of the war.”

During this period, Cronkite stayed busy hosting other news-related television series, including Twentieth Century, Eyewitness to History and 21st Century. During the tumultuous election year of 1968, Cronkite anchored the violent and chaotic Democratic convention in Chicago. When Dan Rather was physically harassed by security guards, Cronkite said on air, “I think we’ve got a bunch of thugs here, Dan.”

Cronkite was famously associated with the NASA manned space program and especially the Apollo program, barely able to hide his enthusiasm for what was being achieved in space. During the first moon landing mission of Apollo 11 in 1969, Cronkite was on the air 27 of the 30 hours it took for Apollo 11 to complete its mission. When Neil Armstrong descended the LEM ladder to the moon, all Cronkite could get out in terms of commentary were, “Wow!” and “Oh, boy!”

Under CBS’s mandatory retirement system, Cronkite left the anchor chair in 1981 and was succeeded by Dan Rather. Cronkite has stayed very active in journalism, writing syndicated columns and broadcasting as a special correspondent for CBS, CNN and National Public Radio. Cronkite survived quadruple bypass surgery in 1997 and soon returned to an active life.

The Legacy of the Walter Cronkite

Walter Cronkite’s legacy as a consummate professional journalist and influential broadcaster will, perhaps, never be surpassed, especially in an era when news is readily available from cable television and the Internet.

Besides his continuing on-air work, he helped found the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

He has also been more politically outspoken since his official retirement. He publicly befriended President Bill Clinton during his impeachment, supported gay marriage and has repeatedly voiced his opposition to President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

Cronkite was not universally admired by other broadcast journalists. Many believed he did not take enough risks, relied too much on short, breaking stories rather than in-depth pieces and spent too much time center stage during the nightly news broadcasts.

In the current environment, Cronkite, like others in the national media, has been criticized by more politically conservative observers as being biased to both Democratic and liberal causes. No hero is ever free from some controversy!

To most Americans, however, Cronkite was one of the few people who could be trusted during a disturbing period in the nation’s history, and the fact is that much of the country believed him when he ended each broadcast with, “And, that’s the way it is …”

Courtesy

Compilations of Cronkite’s television series and copies of his specials are available on DVD and VHS. He has published his autobiography, A Reporter’s Life, (Knopf, 1996).

Cronkite has also created a number of audiocassettes and CDs of his broadcasts and other significant moments in news, including Cronkite Remembers, Simon and Schuster, 2000; Walter Cronkite’s Greatest Shows of the 20th Century, Radio Spirits, 2003; and The United States Constitution: Constitutional Convention and the Ratification Debates, Knowledge Products, 1987.