Walter Cronkite, who spoke to generations of CBS News viewers with unmatched eloquence on the assassination of President Kennedy, Vietnam and Watergate but wasn't too proud to exclaim, “Oh, boy!” at the splendid wonder of men landing on the moon, died Friday night in New York.
Cronkite, 92, whose career at the anchor desk coincided with the rise of television as a dominant news medium, passed away at his home in New York, a CBS spokesperson said. His family said he had been suffering recent months from cerebrovascular disease.
President Barack Obama on Friday praised Cronkite as the “voice of certainty in an uncertain world.”
“He was the consummate television newsman,” Don Hewitt, the onetime executive producer of the CBS Evening News, told CNN. “He had all the credentials to be a writer, an editor, a broadcaster. There was only one Walter Cronkite, and there may never be another one.”
His death came on the eve of the 40th anniversary of one of the significant events with which he is associated, Apollo 11's landing on the moon in 1969. And the scope of his life and career — from the battlefields of World War II and Vietnam, through the despair of assassinations and political intrigue and the wonders of space travel — represent, in the words of one biographer, “an incredible window upon 20th-century America.”
“It's looking at our life and times through the life and times of the most respected journalist that America has ever produced,” said Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley, whose biography of Cronkite,And That's the Way it Is: Walter Cronkite and American Journalism, will be published next spring.
“He was known as the most trusted man in America — Uncle Walter — and that remained true. You'd be hard-pressed to find any human being that didn't like Walter Cronkite.”
From age 6, when he recalls pontificating on the death of President Warren G. Harding, into his 80s, while dictating his oral memoirs to Don Carleton, director of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas, Cronkite remained the consummate newsman.
“He was such a good journalist because he focused on the news,” Carleton said. “We would be working in Manhattan, and fire trucks would come by on the street below and I would have to talk him out of trying to follow them. He would say, ‘There's news going on down there.'”
To his successors at the network anchor desks, Cronkite, who worked for CBS News from 1950 through 1981 and was anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News for 19 years, remains the standard by which they are judged and by which they judge themselves.
“He set the standard, and it's a standard all of us have in the back of our minds,” ABC News anchor Charles Gibson said this week. “He established norms that still exist in this business. He is the little voice that speaks to you.”
Raised in Houston
Cronkite was born Nov. 4, 1916, in St. Joseph, Mo., the son of the former Helen Lena Fritsche and Dr. Walter Leland Cronkite, a dentist. When he was 10, his family moved to Houston, where he was editor of the San Jacinto High School newspaper before attending the University of Texas and, in 1937, joining the United Press wire service.
When the United States entered World War II, he was a war correspondent in North Africa and in Europe, where he covered the Allied invasion of the Netherlands and the Battle of the Bulge.
After postwar duties covering the Nuremberg war crimes trials and as UP's Moscow correspondent, he was recruited in 1950 by Edward R. Murrow to join CBS News.
His earliest network duties included discussing the news of the day with a puppet lion named Charlemagne as host of the CBS Morning Show.
But it was when he replaced Douglas Edwards as anchor of the CBS Evening News on April 16, 1962, that he began the role for which he will be most remembered.
Assassination milestone
An early defining moment came Nov. 22, 1963, with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas. Cronkite, in shirt sleeves with his tie loosened, announced word of the president's death.
“From Dallas, Texas, the flash — apparently official. President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time, 2 o'clock Eastern Standard Time, some 38 minutes ago,” he said. He removed his glasses as he spoke, and he later wrote, “The words stuck in my throat. A sob wanted to replace them. A gulp or two quashed the sob, which metamorphosed into tears forming at the corners of my eyes. I fought back the emotion and regained my professionalism, but it was touch and go there for a few seconds before I could continue.”
Vietnam War reports
Five years later, his observations about the United States' military efforts in Vietnam, as delivered in a CBS special report on Feb. 27, 1968, after a visit to South Vietnam during the Tet offensive, was seen as a turning point in public opinion.
“To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past,” he said. “To suggest that we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. …
“It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out, then, will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.”
As President Lyndon Johnson listened to the broadcast, according to aide Bill Moyers, he said, “If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America.”
Carleton, whose interviews with Cronkite formed the basis for his autobiography, A Reporter's Life, said Cronkite knew his words would have impact.
“If anything, he regretted that it wasn't big enough, because the war went on for five more years,” Carleton said.
Fan of space program
Cronkite was a starry-eyed spectator as man landed on the moon on July 20, 1969. It was, he wrote, “the most extraordinary story of our time” — so much so, in fact, that it left him at a loss for words.
“ ‘Oh, boy! Whew! Boy!' These were my first words, profundity to be recorded for the ages,” he wrote.
But by 1972, Cronkite found himself in the position of defending CBS from the assault of a Nixon administration determined to intimidate reporters from reporting the facts of the Watergate break-in and the cover-up.
“The finest thing that ever happened to me in TV news was the way our CBS management allowed us to stand up to the pressures of the Nixon administration,” Cronkite told the Chronicle in 1989.
As the cover-up crumbled, Cronkite was at the anchor desk on Aug. 8, 1974, when Richard Nixon announced his resignation as president. He continued throughout the 1970s as the nation's most-watched newscaster, and he was credited in 1977, after interviews with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, with helping pave the way to the first peace treaty between the two nations.
In 1979, he informed CBS management that he intended to retire in November 1981, when he turned 65. He restated those plans in 1981 and agreed to step down in March, rather than November, to ensure that CBS could keep his successor, Dan Rather, from jumping to another network.
He delivered his trademark sign off, “And that's the way it is,” for the last time on March 6, 1981.
“This is but a transition, a passing of the baton. A great broadcaster and gentleman, Doug Edwards, preceded me in this job and another, Dan Rather, will follow,” he said. “Furthermore, I am not even going away. I'll be back from time to time with special news reports and documentaries. … ”
Frustrated in retirement
In retirement, however, Cronkite was frustrated by cutbacks at CBS and other network news operations and the general decline of network news divisions as cable news became ascendant.
“All of us in those early days of television felt, I'm sure, that we were establishing a set of standards that would be observed or at least have an influence on generations of news professionals to come,” he wrote in his autobiography. “How easily those were dismissed.”
However, his relationship with Rather was far from cordial. When Rather left the CBS Evening News in 2005 after 24 years at the anchor desk, Cronkite had abandoned mincing words. He criticized his successor as “playing the role of newsman” rather than being one. Rather should have been replaced years earlier, he said.
However, in a statement Friday night, Rather praised him. “Walter loved reporting and delivering the news, and he was superb at both. He deserves recognition and remembrance, too, for the way he solidly backed his correspondents and producers, defending them vigorously in coverage of difficult stories such as the Vietnam War and the Watergate crimes.”
Cronkite was married for nearly 65 years to Betsy Maxwell Cronkite, whom he met in Kansas City. The couple had three children, and Cronkite has four grandchildren. Betsy Cronkite died in 2005.
He received the George Polk Award in 1970 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1981. The School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Arizona State is named in his honor, and the dean of Texas' College of Communications occupies the Walter Cronkite Regents Chair in Communication.
After retiring from CBS, Cronkite hosted shows for CNN, National Public Radio and Discovery Channel. His voice still introduces theCBS Evening News, now anchored by Katie Couric.
“His may be the only voice of a television newsman that we still hear in our heads,” Brinkley said. “The way he delivered the news was so memorable and distinctive, but it was never grating. It was reassuring.”
He was an example for all who followed — in Sweden, anchors were known as cronkiters — and his singular stature endures as news delivery systems morph into the 21st century.
“The most trusted voice on the Web?” Carleton said. “It's kind of hard to imagine that happening.”
