Walter Cronkite

• 1. Introduction

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  Walter Cronkite took off his glasses, glanced at the clock, and told a watching nation that President Kennedy had died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time, some 38 minutes earlier. He paused, swallowed hard, and put the glasses back on before he could continue. That moment, on the 22nd of November 1963, became one of the most remembered in American broadcasting. The man who delivered it was an anchorman whose audience came to call him simply Uncle Walter. For nearly two decades, polls named him the most trusted man in America. How does a dentist's son from Saint Joseph, Missouri, become the voice a country turns to in its darkest hours? Why did one editorial about a war reportedly cost a president the country? And what made his sign-off, four plain words, into something a generation never forgot? This is the story of Walter Leland Cronkite Jr., born on the 4th of November 1916, and what he came to mean to the people who listened.

• 2. The Voice Of Authority

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  For most of his 19 years as anchor of the CBS Evening News, Walter Cronkite was described as the predominant news voice in America. The trust ran so deep that it outlasted his career; for years after he left, polls still ranked him among the most trusted figures in the country. USA Today wrote that few television figures ever held as much power as Cronkite did at his height.

  That trust was built partly on craft. Cronkite trained himself to speak at 124 words per minute so viewers could clearly understand every word. Americans average about 165 words per minute, and the fastest, hardest-to-follow talkers approach 200. He deliberately slowed himself down for the audience.

  Not everyone treated him with reverence, and he seemed to enjoy that too. On the situation comedy All in the Family, the character Archie Bunker would grumble about the newsman, calling him Pinko Cronkite. CBS allowed the gentle ribbing of its star, a sign of how secure his standing had become.

  He wore the role lightly. Asked about retiring, Cronkite rejected comparisons to a father figure or an uncle and described himself instead as a comfortable old shoe to his audience. That worn-in familiarity was the source of his authority, and it would carry him through the assassinations, the wars, and the launches still to come.

• 3. Becoming A Correspondent

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  In the fall of 1935, Cronkite dropped out of the University of Texas at Austin in his junior year to chase journalism. He had entered in 1933, worked on the Daily Texan, and once appeared in a play alongside fellow student Eli Wallach. The newspaper jobs won.

  Radio came first, at WKY in Oklahoma City, where he worked as an announcer. In Kansas City in 1936, while calling sports for the station KCMO, he broadcast under the name Walter Wilcox. Stations at the time feared announcers would take their listeners with them if they used real names and later left. That same period brought him the United Press, which he joined in 1937, and his future wife, Mary Elizabeth Maxwell, whom everyone called Betsy.

  The war made his reputation. Cronkite sailed aboard the battleship Texas during Operation Torch off North Africa. To beat a rival correspondent and file the first uncensored reports on the operation, he was flown off the ship in a Vought OS2U Kingfisher and granted permission to fly the rest of the way to Norfolk. He was one of eight journalists chosen by the Army Air Forces to fly bombing raids over Germany in a B-17 Flying Fortress, a group called The Writing 69th, and during one mission he fired a machine gun at a German fighter. He landed in a glider with the 101st Airborne Division during Operation Market Garden and covered the Battle of the Bulge.

  Edward R. Murrow noticed. Murrow offered Cronkite a place among the Murrow Boys, the CBS team of war correspondents, to lead the Moscow bureau. Cronkite first accepted, then took a United Press counteroffer instead. The decision angered Murrow, who held a grudge for years. After the war Cronkite covered the Nuremberg trials and served as the United Press main reporter in Moscow from 1946 to 1948.

• 4. Building The Evening News

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  In 1950, the same Murrow who had been spurned recruited Cronkite again, this time into the young television division of CBS News. Cronkite started at WTOP-TV in Washington, anchoring a 15-minute late-Sunday newscast called Up to the Minute. From 1953 to 1957 he hosted You Are There, which reenacted historical events in the format of a news report, closing each episode with the line, And you were there. He also fronted The Morning Show in 1954, where his on-air duties included chatting about the news with a lion puppet named Charlemane, which he called one of the highlights of the show.

  He took over the network's flagship newscast on the 16th of April 1962, succeeding Douglas Edwards. On the 2nd of September 1963 the program was renamed the CBS Evening News and expanded from 15 to 30 minutes, making Cronkite the anchor of American network television's first nightly half-hour news program.

  The climb to the top of the ratings was slow. For much of the 1960s, NBC's Huntley-Brinkley Report drew more viewers. As the decade went on, RCA decided not to fund NBC News at the levels CBS provided, and CBS earned a reputation for greater accuracy and depth. By 1967 the CBS Evening News began overtaking its rival during the summer months. When Chet Huntley retired in 1970, Cronkite's broadcast finally dominated the audience, and he stayed top-rated until his retirement in 1981.

  His closing line became a trademark, four words followed by the date. He left it off on nights he ended with opinion or commentary, keeping to standards of objective journalism. Beginning on the 16th of January 1980, Day 50 of the Iran hostage crisis, he added the count of the hostages' captivity to the close, ending only on Day 444.

• 5. Four Dark Days

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  On Friday the 22nd of November 1963, Cronkite was standing at the United Press International wire machine in the CBS newsroom when the bulletin of the president's shooting broke. There was no working camera in the studio; the technical crew was still setting one up, a job that normally took at least twenty minutes. So he was sent to the CBS Radio booth, and his voice was played over the television airwaves.

  A CBS News Bulletin slide cut into a live broadcast of the soap opera As the World Turns at 1:40 p.m. Eastern. Over the slide, Cronkite read the first of three audio-only bulletins, reporting that three shots had been fired at the president's motorcade in Dallas. As the second bulletin came in, a staffer was heard saying Connally too, the news that Texas Governor John Connally had also been shot in the limousine.

  For more than an hour, Cronkite anchored a story that kept refusing to confirm itself. His early years as a wire service reporter had taught him to wait for official word, and he stressed that the reports of Kennedy's death, including one from CBS correspondent Dan Rather, were only reports. At 2:38 p.m. Eastern he was handed a new bulletin, took off his glasses, and made the official announcement. Then he reminded viewers that Vice President Johnson would presumably take the oath of office shortly and become the 36th President.

  On the day of the funeral, Cronkite closed the CBS Evening News with a meditation on the meaning of the previous four days. He asked whether they were the harbingers of blacker days to come, or like the black before the dawn, and wondered whether violent words could lead only to violent deeds. He ended with the words, This is Walter Cronkite, good night. Recalling the broadcast years later in an interview with Nick Clooney, he admitted, I choked up, I really had a little trouble, my eyes got a little wet, before he grabbed hold.

• 6. If I've Lost Cronkite

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  In mid-February 1968, urged on by his executive producer Ernest Leiser, Cronkite traveled to Vietnam to cover the aftermath of the Tet Offensive. The two dined with General Creighton Abrams, deputy commander of all forces in Vietnam, an officer Cronkite had known from World War II. By Leiser's account, Abrams told them, we cannot win this Goddamned war, and we ought to find a dignified way out.

  Back home, Cronkite and Leiser each wrote an editorial. Cronkite, an excellent writer, preferred Leiser's text to his own. On the 27th of February 1968 he closed a special report on Vietnam with it. He told viewers that the only realistic, if unsatisfactory, conclusion was that the war was mired in stalemate, and that the rational way out would be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy.

  President Lyndon B. Johnson is claimed by some to have responded, If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America. The account has been questioned. When the editorial aired, Johnson was in Austin at Governor Connally's birthday gala. His aide George Christian later said the president apparently saw clips the next day, while in a 1979 interview Christian said he had no recollection of what Johnson had said. Cronkite himself wrote in his 1996 memoir, A Reporter's Life, that he was at first unsure of his impact, and was eventually persuaded by an account from Bill Moyers, a journalist and former Johnson aide. Weeks later, Johnson announced he would not seek reelection.

  That year tested him again. Anchoring the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago amid violence inside and outside the hall, Cronkite watched Dan Rather get punched to the floor on camera by security. I think we've got a bunch of thugs here, Dan, he said.

• 7. Whew, Boy

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  On the 20th of July 1969, as the Apollo 11 lunar module put the first men on the Moon, Cronkite rubbed his hands together on camera, smiled, and uttered, Whew, boy. His enthusiasm for the space program was visible and genuine, and it ran from Project Mercury through the Moon landings to the Space Shuttle.

  The numbers followed the excitement. During the Apollo 11 and Apollo 13 missions in 1969, with former astronaut Wally Schirra as co-host, Cronkite drew the best ratings and made CBS the most-watched network for the missions. He anchored John Glenn's first space flight in 1962 and returned to anchor Glenn's second in 1998.

  His space coverage carried a curious limitation. Because Cronkite was colorblind, when he covered Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China he had to ask others what color coat First Lady Pat Nixon was wearing as they disembarked in Peking.

  The honors were fitting. On the 1st of March 2006 he became the first non-astronaut to receive NASA's Ambassador of Exploration Award, and he was the only non-NASA recipient of it. NASA also gave him a Moon rock sample from the early Apollo expeditions, which Cronkite later passed to Bill Powers, president of the University of Texas at Austin, for the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History.

• 8. The Conscience Of A Newsman

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  After his last broadcast on the 6th of March 1981, when CBS policy mandated retirement at age 65, Cronkite refused to fade away. In his farewell he called it a transition, a passing of the baton, named his successor Dan Rather, and promised to keep coming back for more. He did, narrating the IMAX Space Shuttle film The Dream Is Alive in 1985, voicing Captain Neweyes in the 1993 animated film We're Back: A Dinosaur's Story, and hosting the annual Vienna New Year's Concert on PBS from 1985 to 2008.

  Free of the anchor chair, he grew openly political. He wrote a syndicated column for King Features Syndicate and called for free airtime for political candidates, noting that of all the major nations professing democracy, only seven did not offer it, placing the United States with countries like Ecuador, Honduras, and Taiwan. In his column he repeatedly condemned President George W. Bush and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and in 2006 he said he felt the same about Iraq as he had about Vietnam in 1968.

  He was a proponent of limited world government on the American federalist model. Accepting the 1999 Norman Cousins Global Governance Award at the United Nations, he argued that Americans would have to yield up some of their sovereignty, calling it a bitter pill that would take courage and faith. Contrasting himself with the religious right, he ended a barbed passage by saying he was glad to sit at the right hand of Satan.

  His honors filled rooms. He held two Peabody Awards, a George Polk Award, an Emmy, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, given by Jimmy Carter in 1981. A minor planet, 6318 Cronkite, discovered in 1990 by Eleanor Helin, bears his name, as does the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

  Walter Cronkite died on the 17th of July 2009 at his home in New York City, aged 92, believed to have died from cerebrovascular disease. At a memorial service at Lincoln Center, President Barack Obama eulogized him as a voice of certainty in a world that was growing more and more uncertain, a man who never lost the plainspoken style he gained growing up in the heartland. He was cremated and buried beside Betsy, his wife of nearly 65 years, in the family plot in Kansas City, the city where he had once announced sports as Walter Wilcox.