Cronkite Quotes

“Cronkite had mastered the intentional pause, the need for frozen seconds of long silence at certain historic moments. Nobody before or after Cronkite had mastered the art of communicating news on television nightly without ever becoming an irritant.”
― Douglas Brinkley, Cronkite: The Definitive Biography of the Legendary News Anchor Who Shaped American Journalism

“When he (Walter Cronkite) drank, he had an appetite for both history and political bullshit.”
― Douglas G. Brinkley, Cronkite

“He followed an ironclad rule. He NEVER WATCHED HIMSELF.”
― Douglas G. Brinkley, Cronkite

“Cronkite is not a genius at anything except being straight, honest, and normal.”
― Douglas G. Brinkley, Cronkite

“Cronkite would flip-flop on the question over whether he was in any way responsible for LBJ’s surprise March announcement. His most succinct answer occurred in a Q&A with Richard Snow of American Heritage. “I don’t feel that a journalist’s influence is so great that you can change the course of human events by a single broadcast,” he said. “Whether it’s a president’s decision to act or not act, it doesn’t work that way. It’s just one more straw.”
― Douglas Brinkley, Cronkite: The Definitive Biography of the Legendary News Anchor Who Shaped American Journalism

“If life were fattening, Walter Cronkite would weigh 500 pounds.”
― Douglas G. Brinkley, Cronkite

“Cronkite was always one step short of disillusionment.”
― Douglas G. Brinkley, Cronkite

“Most Americans didn't distinguish fame from accomplishment.”
― Douglas G. Brinkley, Cronkite

“Cronkite was nothing if not rivalrous. Years later, he shamelessly bragged about CBS’s scoop over NBC and ABC, a boast that, if written by anybody else, would have seemed ghoulish. (“We beat NBC onto the air by almost a minute,” he proudly recalled in his memoir.)”
― Douglas Brinkley, Cronkite: The Definitive Biography of the Legendary News Anchor Who Shaped American Journalism

“never get into a pissing match with folks who buy ink by the barrel”
― Douglas Brinkley, Cronkite: The Definitive Biography of the Legendary News Anchor Who Shaped American Journalism

“President Johnson no longer trusted Cronkite and his CBS ilk. At a March 1967 dinner party, he told reporters that CBS and NBC were “controlled by the Vietcong.”
― Douglas Brinkley, Cronkite: The Definitive Biography of the Legendary News Anchor Who Shaped American Journalism

“Smith, quoting British philosopher Edmund Burke, ended Who Speaks for Birmingham? by saying: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
― Douglas Brinkley, Cronkite: The Definitive Biography of the Legendary News Anchor Who Shaped American Journalism

“The popular director of OWI was Elmer Davis, an ex-CBS radioman with an admiration for the wire services and Murrow. Working closely with the Librarian of Congress, the poet Archibald MacLeish, who headed the Office of Facts and Figures, Davis believed that truth was the smartest type of propaganda. This was in stark contrast to the Axis nations, which banned opposition newspapers, censored stories, and screened every dispatch. Fortunately,”
― Douglas Brinkley, Cronkite: The Definitive Biography of the Legendary News Anchor Who Shaped American Journalism