Trusted television anchorman who broadcast all the news that fits:THE DEATH at 92 of Walter Cronkite, the CBS television news anchorman whose solemn tones heralded his country's best of times and worst of times, means the passing of a man who was repeatedly voted the most trusted man in America. In the 1960s and 1970s, millions of Americans relied on his richly reassuring bass to inform them of the truth or otherwise of the rumours they had heard.
He wept as he announced President John F Kennedy’s assassination, shouted encouragement when the Apollo astronauts lifted off for the moon, probably did more than anyone to turn middle America against the war in Vietnam, and his nightly count of the number of days US diplomats had been held hostage in Tehran crippled the Jimmy Carter presidency.
No one thought to question the phrase that became his trademark, intoned at the end of each nightly bulletin: “And that’s the way it is.” That, in fact, was the way it appeared to Cronkite. As one of the founding fathers of US network television news and as managing editor of the CBS evening news for 19 years, his evaluation of world events helped shape his country’s electronic reporting into the insular and inadequate chronicle it became.
During Cronkite’s reign, the standard television bulletin, from which most Americans drew their picture of the world, lasted for 22 minutes. The consequent pressure to condense or omit meant that events in vast tracts of the globe remained unknown across the world’s most powerful nation.
For all Cronkite’s insistence that he was a reporter rather than a front man, there was little evidence that he tried to inculcate a mission to inform at CBS. The philosophy was, and remains, to offer all the news that fits. With no national press to fill the gap, it has meant that for generations of Americans the broad sweep of foreign policy has wavered on tides of popular ignorance.
Walter Cronkite was born in St Joseph, Missouri, and lived through some of the worst effects of the Depression. He recalled later that "while my mother denied it to her dying day, I know darn good and well that she made hamburgers out of dog food". The family moved to Texas when he was 10, and he gained his first journalistic experience as a student at the University of Texas, doing part-time sports reporting for a local radio station. When the Houston Postoffered him a job, he abandoned his studies. After announcing at KCMO radio, in Kansas City, Missouri, he joined the United Press news agency at 23 and became one of its first war correspondents.
America was not yet a combatant in 1939, so he was assigned to Europe. He used to tell a rueful story of how he missed his first chance of a world scoop at the time of the D-Day landings. He had embarked on a bombing mission over the Normandy beaches on the understanding he could break the invasion news on his return. But while Cronkite was awaiting transport from RAF Molesworth to London, Gen Eisenhower broke the news himself.
Cronkite later reported on the Nuremberg Nazi trials and was appointed UPI’s bureau chief in Moscow, as the Cold War began. He returned to the US in 1948.
In 1950 he was poached by Edward Murrow of CBS to develop news coverage at the network’s Washington TV station. “We literally figured it out as we went along,” he said. Television, as Marshall McLuhan observed, itself became the message, and Cronkite was one of those who failed to resist the trend.
Important developments for which there was no film were reduced to soundbites. Nor, as became apparent in crises like Carter’s dithering over the neutron bomb, had a mechanism been devised to give viewers a coherent account of policies and ideas, except to make them crudely personalised.
Washington being the village it is, an exception was made for big political conventions. For years they got wall-to-wall treatment, usually reserved for sport.
From 1952 onwards, Cronkite was the CBS anchorman at these five-day marathons, and his reputation grew. In time his career had so far outlasted those of politicians that he outgunned them in popularity. Presidential hopefuls were desperate to be interviewed by him to help secure national exposure.
This evident power meant he certainly did not remain the detached reporter he claimed to be. He may have kept his voting preferences secret, but his approach rarely left viewers in much doubt of his editorial view. He so riled Kennedy during the 1960 presidential campaign that the candidate tried to get him removed from the CBS roster.
The most famous comment he voiced, in a 1968 documentary, was made after the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, when he said it was time for the US to negotiate with North Vietnam, “not as victors but as an honourable people”. A startled President Lyndon Johnson said to his press secretary: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.”
Cronkite’s period as CBS anchorman lasted from 1962 to 1981 and, though he was then designated a CBS special correspondent, the network seemed so concerned he would overshadow his successor that it made little use of him. “It’s not the way I wanted it,” he said.
While at KCMO, he met Betsy Maxwell, and they married in 1940. She died in 2005, and he is survived by two daughters, Nancy and Mary, and a son, Chip.
Walter Leland Cronkite, journalist, born November 4th, 1916; died July 17th, 2009