Cronkite

by Douglas Brinkley

Cronkite trained himself to speak at a rate of 124 words per

minute in broadcasts

By all outward appearances, he looked like a serious man. His French-cuffed shirts, many bearing the monogram WLC (for Walter Leland Cronkite), were always starched.

only he was the calm eye of the news-gathering storm, creating an overall impression of gentility, equanimity, and decency.

compared Cronkite to the erudite columnist Walter Lippmann—a high compliment indeed.

Lippmann had the capacity to truly understand the complexity of an issue.

Murrow had a marvelous ear for news. But Cronkite was the master of modern communication.

An engrossing chronicle could be written, he believed, about how his mother’s grandparents both left Bavaria in the mid-nineteenth century for the green pastures of America. But his genealogical memory was tilted toward the Cronkite clan.

His mother instilled tolerance and liberalism in him. She also made him go to church most Sundays.

Cronkite explained that he had a “Presbyterian-Lutheran kind of Calvinist background.” (As an adult, he became a token Episcopalian.)

While Cronkite was in high school in the 1930s radio became all the rage.

30.5 million sets by 1935.

Inept in gathering and delivering straight news, radio invented what it

called the news commentator: someone who would describe some current event with either style or authority or both and then editorialize lightly

diligence, a quality that remained

with him as a journalism trademark. The contest taught the valuable lesson that the first rule to being a top-flight journalist is being well informed about the world at large.

Cronkite never lost touch with his high school friends, and they occupied a special place in his heart. Every five or ten years, he would return to Houston for reunions to swap stories over cocktails.

A well-rounded knowledge of world affairs, it seemed, was a prerequisite for an aspiring broadcaster.

Also for a "Superforecaster", per Philip Tetlock book of that name

Cronkite focused on learning the gritty trade of journalism in a hands-on, tangible way, even as he took UT courses.

For Cronkite, early May 1940 was the most eye-opening moment of the war thus far—violating the neutrality of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, Nazi Germany unleashed the Luftwaffe fire.

Cronkite’s ancestral homeland, under the threat of continued German bombing, surrendered;

the real genius behind CBS’s European operation was William S. Paley, the network’s energetic president.

What Cronkite and Mudd had—since they both came out of the print media world—was an always-rigid determination of what constituted real news.

the power of broadcasting increased with the addition of some point of view, carried in the words, the pictures, or the invisible hand of the editing. White would have argued that the impact increased temporarily, but that a steady diet of slanted reports would only train the viewer to think twice about every report, and to

take none at face value.

an honest reporter’s view.

he is not indentified as an editorialist, but as a reporter of great objectivity.”

Cronkite had come to epitomize old-fashioned values in an era of rote lies. America asked for truth about Vietnam, and Cronkite dutifully delivered.

Ironically, this marked the end of TV network news anchormen’s never taking

policy positions. Opinion sold. Worries about editorializing became a quaint public policy notion no longer religiously adhered to.

If he regretted any aspect of his Tet special, it was that he had opened the floodgate for the line between co...

Nobody in America circa 1971 had a better Rolodex than Cronkite. He was encyclopedic about the comings and goings of bluebloods, military officers, and corporate CEOs. He made it his habit to trade in career updates, summer vacation plans, and casual gossip with the rich and otherwise powerful in American life.

Cronkite knew that Nixon was a brilliant political strategist. He thought the president’s decision to visit China in the spring of 1972 was a stroke of genius. But Cronkite also feared that Nixon had something pathologically wrong with him.

Some CBSers trace the beginning of Cronkite’s disapproval of his then forty-one-year-old protégé to Rather’s aggressive grandstanding in Beijing and Shanghai.

A competition occurred to tell the worst Barbara Walters stories known to mankind.

Robert F. Kennedy once said, “The wise man hangs a lantern on his problem,”

He already knew what Nixon would learn the hard way during Watergate: the cover-up is often worse than the crime.

he was a master of graceful thank-you notes, condolence letters, and Christmas cards.

Rigid ideology and political correctness bored him.

For the 2004 election season, Cronkite watched Tom Brokaw of NBC News during his final season as anchor. The contrast between Brokaw’s classy comportment and Rather’s look-at-me arrogance told Cronkite who his real heir was. CBS News faced one of its darkest moments shortly after Labor Day: anchorman Rather claimed that President Bush had often been AWOL from duty when he was a lieutenant in the Texas Air National Guard from 1968 to 1973.

In July 2006, PBS aired the ninety-minute documentary Walter Cronkite: Witness to History (narrated by Katie

Couric). The program elegantly drew Cronkite’s career into focus. Five months later, Cronkite had a flurry of health scares.

At long last he seemed to have slowed down. A condition called cerebrovascular disease—with symptoms that included personality changes, loss of consciousness, loss of memory, inability to speak, difficulty reading or writing, paralysis of body ...

he could tell stories about the Suez Crisis of 1956 but would forget that George W. Bush was the current president.

Cronkite’s memory was failing.

Cronkite understood that his days were numbered.

On July 17, 2009, Walter Cronkite died. He was ninety-two years old. His health had been slipping for weeks. His children, Kathy, Nancy, and Chip, were at his side. Lying next to him were his beloved cats, Blackie and Kisa. “Everybody who loved Dad just surrounded him,” Kathy recalled. “He was at peace with everything.”

Cronkite’s death was a national embarrassment because of how badly TV journalism had fared in his absence.

By the time of his death, television news had been driven into Swamp Hollow because of its abandonment of public service values.

What had once been just Cronkite making a cameo on The Mary Tyler Moore Show had descended into broadcast journalists thinking they were Hollywood celebrities.