CBS News reporting Walter Cronkite has died

[savafan]

Breaking news: Former CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite has died, CBS news is reporting

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[savafan]

http://www.newsday.com/entertainment...,3986441.story

Walter Cronkite, once known as the "Most Trusted Man in America" and the reigning symbol of broadcast journalism itself, has died at age 92.

From 1962 to 1981, Cronkite was peerless in TV news - the nation's top-rated anchorman on the nation's top-rated network, CBS. For members of recent generations, he may seem a remote figure. But for older Americans and the huge Baby Boom generation, Cronkite occupied a central position in their collective memory, during a tumultuous time in American history that spanned Civil Rights, Vietnam and Watergate.

He was to become the voice of authority and the widely proclaimed avatar of trust - the Most Trusted Man in America, according to poll after poll - during a period in American life when "authority" and "trust" were under active assault.

For a vast majority of Americans, he was their only direct link to Vietnam, while his nightly reports on battlefield deaths and casualties were a grim, and indelible, reminder of an unpopular and hugely divisive war. His sign-off, "And that's the way it is," was a verbal sleight-of-hand that implied omniscience and completion, and in fact, a day was not complete for millions until they heard those six words.

How Cronkite achieved such prominence was one of the miracles of the TV age, and an improbable one at that. He was not an especially imposing man, nor movie-star handsome. His delivery was arrow-straight, and to see Cronkite actually smile on the air was - while not unheard of - certainly a momentous occasion.

By nature and inclination, Cronkite was, most comfortable taking the middle ground. Only rarely did his opinions seep into his coverage of world events. The punditry he engaged in talk shows or syndicated columns over the last decade was something he avoided assiduously as the "Evening News" anchor.

The one time he ventured into opinion - he spoke out against the Vietnam War in four "Evening News" commentaries after a 1968 trip to South Vietnam - became news itself. (Then- President Lyndon B. Johnson supposedly told aides that if he had "lost Walter Cronkite," he had 'lost middle America.").

He had his critics. The rap on Cronkite was that he was too middle-of-the-road, that he took his stand on Vietnam only after the rest of the country had swung against it, or that his fervent support of the space program during the '60s and '70s crossed the lines of objectivity into boosterism.

Cronkite has worked hard at the trust game over the years. Dating back to his days as a star United Press correspondent covering World War II, his self-avowed work ethic was always to give just the news, without favor or bias, and he often appeared to succeed.

He was born on Nov. 4, 1916, the only child of Dr. Walter LeLand Cronkite, a dentist, and Helen (Fritsche) Cronkite in St. Joseph, Mo.

The family later moved to Houston, where Cronkite attended the University of Texas. But he dropped out before graduating to become a reporter at the Houston Chronicle, and from there held various journalism jobs including one at a Kansas city radio station where he met Mary Elizabeth Maxwell - Betsy - who he would marry in 1940. (She died in 2005.)

Cronkite later joined the United Press, then was a vital competitor to the Associated Press. Stateside, he became something of a star for UP, so in 1942, he was handed one of the most important assignments it had to offer - to cover the 8th Airborne in North Africa and the North Atlantic.

Following the war, Cronkite headed up a three-man United Press bureau to cover the war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg, and from there went on to Moscow. He returned to the United States in 1948 to work for as a Washington reporter for a group of Midwestern radio stations, and later got another call from Edward R. Murrow - who had wanted to hire him during the war and never fully forgave Cronkite for rejecting an earlier offer to become on of his so-called "Murrow Boys."

This time, Cronkite did join CBS, and in July 1950, set up the news department for the network's affiliate in Washington. He began to get on the air, and soon was appearing on network news programs like "Man of the Week."

He began to build his chops as a serious newsman in 1952, when he headed CBS' coverage of the nominating conventions in what was to be the first nationally televised presidential election. The '52 Republican convention from Chicago proved to be a divisive one, while viewers - and his bosses - were impressed with Cronkite's adroit coverage. He'd be CBS's lead convention anchor for the three decades - with one famous exception, in 1964, when he was dropped because CBS had panicked over the quick ratings ascendance of NBC's Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. After viewer protests, CBS relented and Cronkite would return to the broadcast booth in later elections.

He anchored the first "CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite" on April 16, 1962, when the program was only 15 minutes long and essentially recounted only the day's headlines. When it expanded to 30 minutes on Sept. 2, 1963, the program marked the occasion with an exclusive Cronkite interview with President John F. Kennedy. This also marked the beginning of "Evening News"' slow ascendance, and by the end of the decade, Cronkite's newscast was overwhelmingly dominant.

Cronkite saw the role of "Evening News" as the nation's - and world's - most important news outlet, and as writer Barbara Matusow correctly observed, "The benevolent persona that viewers saw was not a fabrication - he had a certain courtly mellow quality about him, particularly in social situations - but viewers never saw the other side: the tough, Germanic stickler who was on the whole rather aloof, even forbidding, the Cronkite colleagues saw at work." She added that his "zeal to win was so ferocious, it could fuel and entire organization."

In fact, it would for nearly 20 years, when CBS News assumed a pivotal journalistic role in the biggest stories of the '60s and '70s: civil rights, the Space Race, the Apollo missions, Vietnam and Watergate.

Cronkite retired from "Evening News" in 1981, and the role of "network anchorman" in certain ways, retired with him. His successor, Dan Rather, would never enjoy Cronkite's dominance, but then nor would any other anchor. Moreover, audience habits, technology, and network ownership changes forced the "Big Three" TV news divisions to evolve and change too. Some of these changes - like the advent of CNN in 1980- forced a leveling effect in the network anchor chair. As such, Cronkite was the last of the Great Anchors, a one-man information conduit for most Americans over a quarter of a century.

In "retirement," Cronkite maintained a frenetic schedule: He was frequently on the lecture circuit, and gave hundreds of interviews, often in connection with his special interests.He remained a CBS "special correspondent," although this was largely an honorary position. He was also a CBS board member, who wielded considerable behind-the-scenes influence on the company, as well as on the news division.

All the while, he toyed with the idea of retiring for good "from a perch yet to be determined," as he recalled in his 1996 autobiography, "A Reporter's Life." "I just hope that wherever that is, folks will still stop me, as they do today, and ask: 'Didn't you used to be Walter Cronkite?"

He is survived by three children.

[PedroBourbon]

A LEGEND in his field. John Chancellor, Tom Brokaw, and Ted Koppel couldn't carry his jock.

RIP Walter.

[savafan]

7 Memorable Walter Cronkite Broadcasts

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-a...te-broadcasts/

[RFS62]

"And that's the way it is."

RIP, Mr. Cronkite.

[Mario-Rijo]

And the hits just keep on coming. Sorry to hear it about Cronkite but he lived a long and incredible life no doubt.

[Tom Servo]

He was taken way too early from us.

[westofyou]

News Icon from the small media age, when the Networks ruled the world of broadcasting.

Great figurehead, way more credible than the carved out of cheese wasteoids littering the so called news channels today.

Get off my lawn!

And that's the way it it is....................

[cumberlandreds]

And that's the way it is,July 17,2009. My dad watched his newscast every night when I was growing up. He was a reporter first and the one's today need to take his queue and be more like him. RIP Walter Cronkite.

[MrCinatit]

Unfortunately, I was too young to see him live - but just seeing a few of his clips were always a joy.

[redsmetz]

A couple of tidbits from the NY Times' obit:

He was so widely known that in Sweden anchormen were once called Cronkiters.

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As a teenager, after the family had moved to Houston, he got a job with The Houston Post as a copy boy and cub reporter. At the same time, he had a paper route delivering The Post to his neighbors. “As far as I know, there were no other journalists delivering the morning paper with their own compositions inside,” he wrote in his autobiography.

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In 1968, he visited Vietnam and returned to do a rare special program on the war. He called the conflict a stalemate and advocated a negotiated peace. President Lyndon B. Johnson watched the broadcast, Mr. Cronkite wrote in his 1996 memoir, “A Reporter’s Life,” quoting a description of the scene by Bill Moyers, then a Johnson aide.

“The president flipped off the set,” Mr. Moyers recalled, “and said, ‘If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.’ ”

[This broadcast was on 2/27/68, on 3/12/68 LBJ nearly lost the NH primary and withdrew from the race on 3/31/68]

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While visiting Kansas City, Mo., he was hired by the radio station KCMO to read news and broadcast football games under the name Walter Wilcox. (Radio stations at the time wanted to “own” announcers’ names so that popular ones could not be taken elsewhere.)

He was not at the games but received cryptic summaries of each play by telegraph. These provided fodder for vivid descriptions of the action. He added details of what local men in the stands were wearing, which he learned by calling their wives. He found out in advance what music the band would be playing so he could describe halftime festivities.

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In 1954, when CBS challenged NBC’s popular morning program “Today” with the short-lived “Morning Show,” it tapped Mr. Cronkite to be the host. Early on he riled the sponsor, the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, by grammatically correcting its well-known advertising slogan, declaring, “Winston tastes good as a cigarette should.”

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At the time the broadcast was lengthened, Mr. Cronkite inaugurated his famous sign-off, “And that’s the way it is.” The original idea, he later wrote, had been to end each broadcast with a quirky news item, after which he would recite the line with humor, sadness or irony.

Richard S. Salant, the president of CBS News, hated the line from the beginning — it ate up a precious four seconds a night — and the offbeat items were never done.

“I began to think Dick was right, but I was too stubborn to drop it,” Mr. Cronkite wrote.

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In an interview with The New York Times in 2002, Mr. Cronkite scrunched his eyes and lowered his voice into a theatrical sob when asked if he regretted missing out on the huge salaries subsequent anchors had received.

“Yes,” he said, adding, “I frequently call myself the Mickey Mantle of network news.”

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But he knew he had to stop sometime, he allowed in his autobiography. He promised at the time to continue to follow news developments “from a perch yet to be determined.”

“I just hope that wherever that is, folks will still stop me, as they do today, and ask, ‘Didn’t you used to be Walter Cronkite?’ ”

[GAC]

He came from an age, at least when I was growing up, when anchormen actually meant something, had an impact, and weren't so ideologically partisan. They reported the news, and people trusted these guys. Guys like Cronkite, Chancellor, and of course, Huntley-Brinkley. When my Dad got home, and 6 PM rolled around, you didn't sit in his chair, and you didn't make any sound in the living room, because the evening news was on. It seemed, in comparison to today, that it was far more relevant then. Of course we didn't have the expanded information age then that we do now. They were THE SOURCE.

I still remember his broadcasts on the JFK assassination and the lunar landing.

RIP Walt. You were one of a kind.

[goreds2]

Some great memories sitting with mom, dad and sis watching his news broadcast in the 1970's.

What a great life he had.

Sail on Walter.

[Unassisted]

I've waited a while to post this because I know it won't be popular. I was 16 when Cronkite retired, but at the time, he had always been my least favorite anchor on the 3 networks. I found his delivery dry and uninteresting and I had trouble sitting through his newscasts unless there was breaking news.

Nowadays, I'd probably enjoy watching him more than either Rather or Couric, both of whom IMO tried/try too hard to add sizzle to their stories. Although I do respect that Cronkite has a well-deserved place in the pantheon of American journalism, I'd still watch Charles Gibson.