Thirty years ago I wrote a book about the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island. One of the central characters in that book was Jon Ward, a producer for CBS News who ran the network’s coverage of the accident. Ward had actually anticipated such an event, gathering information on all U.S. nuclear plants in case one ever melted-down. My book made Ward a minor celebrity for a millisecond and may have helped his promotion to producer of the CBS Evening News. But the story Ward still likes to tell about that experience was of the waitress at a New York restaurant who asked for his autograph, ignoring completely Ward’s lunch partner, Walter Cronkite, who found the whole event hilarious.
I met Cronkite several times. He was a cub reporter in Kansas City with my friend Martin Quigley and they were lifelong friends, which was a testament to Cronkite if you knew Quigley. Cronkite and Ward partnered for more than 25 years making documentaries and we discussed having Cronkite involved in my Moon shot as recently as last year. It would have been a unique opportunity to see the icon in a reality TV environment. If only I’d been able to raise the money quicker.
Cronkite, like my friend the late Fred Rogers, was exactly as you expected him to be, only funnier. What a great way to be remembered.
Good bye Walt. Who will be the most trusted man in America now?
Anyone remember Douglas Edwards (with the news)?
My younger brother was named after him!
Your brother is Cronkite Kunreuther?
Try again, (not so) funny guy
Sorry Kevin, but the rest of the world is behind funny guy. Get a sense of humor and deprecation.
I do.
I recall him doing an afternoon report around 2:15pm central time.
Another icon from my childhood…
Goodnight, Sweet Prince.
“Seats in Congress, seats in the state legislature, that big seat in the White House itself, can be purchased by those who have the greatest campaign resources … That, I submit to you, is no democracy. It is an oligarchy of the already powerful.” – Cronkite, 2002
Cronkite was a newsreader, an occasional interviewer, but not a newsman — except for 3 times: the moon landing, the JFK assassination and a week in Viet Nam. Remembering Cronkite for the Viet Nam piece is like remembering Edward R. Murrow for his confrontation with McCarthy: both were signal, noteworthy events but not a career. For the rest of the time, any special credibility that Cronkite had reflects less on Cronkite and more on the gullibility of the TV news watching public that believes you can understand the news in 30 minutes of 90 second news segments.
“Cronkite was a newsreader, an occasional interviewer, but not a newsman.”
While I understand your point about the difference between an anchor and a reporter, it’s unfair to say that Cronkite was only a newsman 3 times.
Walter Cronkite spent years as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post in the Thirties, then went to Europe in 1939 to cover the war for UPI. His far-from-routine assignments included flying on B-17 bombing missions over Nuremberg, landing in a glider with the 101st Airborne as part of the invasion of the German-occupied Netherlands, reporting the Battle of the Bulge, and wading ashore with the troops on D-Day.
After the war, he covered the Nuremburg trials, then served as chief reporter at UPI’s Moscow bureau for two years at a time when Stalin was still at the height of his power and Moscow was a dangerous place for Americans.
When Cronkite finally became a television anchor, he already had more than twenty years of experience as a hardworking reporter covering some of the most dangerous stories of the time. Your post does him an injustice by lumping him in with today’s glib talking-head news anchors. Walter Cronkite was a newsman’s newsman.
While you are correct about his early years, his work was undistinguished and he did, essentially, the same work that many, many, many others did. He was not the only war correspondent, he was not the only reporter at the Nuremburg trials, he was not the only … and so on. While you may feel I have done him an injustice, the hagiographies – masquerading as career reviews – have done an even greater injustice to those who toiled in obscurity actually ferreting out the news. There are those who will revere him as an icon, but they need to recognize that they are revering a TV actor: somebody who convincingly read lines written by someone else and kept a job because of ratings.
You seem to know a lot about Cronkite. I hear you’re writing a biography, too – about Jack Schitt.
You clearly have no idea of the work Cronkite did outside the 30 minutes he was on the air. Unlike Mr. Cronkite, you neglected to do your fact-checking before mouthing off.
He worked at Black Rock. If you think serious reporting is done from CBS news NY headquarters then you have an interesting idea of what “reporting” is. And as for the other respondent, you might be unaware that he never won a Pulitzer and though he has two Peabody awards, he trails even Charles Kuralt who has three.
During a 30 minute newscast and assuming he spoke for the entire 24 minutes (excluding commercial time) at a reasonable 150 wpm he’d say at most 3,600 words — less than two pages of the New York Times. (As a sidebar, note that average reading rates are double that.) Given that, instead, he read a few stories and then control and the picture was transferred to a film, video or live report, his actual contribution was far less.
Let’s face it: he was good at what he did and what he did for the last 30 years of his working life was read words written by somebody else. That doesn’t make him a newsman any more than an actor on ER is a medical professional.
There was an interesting comment made last night on one of the countless tributes to Walter Cronkite. ‘He was so respected he could call anyone to ask a question or check a fact. He had a direct line to the Oval Office.’
It is sad to see how far journalism, especially broadcast journalism has fallen since Walter’s day. Doing research on issues, investigating stories, checking facts — you don’t see much of that from the press today.
A better tribute for Walter would be to embrace his professionalism in the news again.
If there isn’t a journalism school named after him there should be.
In Cronkite’s birth state there is a very good Journalism School at the University of Missouri. However according to Wikipedia, Mr Cronkites family moved to Texas and he attended the University of Texas before dropping out.
Arizona State has the Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
The thing I think is amazing is how much has changed since Cronkite left his post. I grew up in a small town on the great plains in the seventies. We had no cable TV and there was only the local newspaper and the Omaha World Herald from which to choose. If you wanted to read one of the major newspapers your only real option was the public library. As far as TV goes, there was no cable and we could only get PBS, CBS and maybe NBC if the weather was good. You talk about living in an idea and perspective vacuum.
Thank goodness cable TV, then the repeal of the fairness doctrine and then the Internet came along. Now we all have access to countless sources of news and opinion. Granted, none of them may be as nostalgic, civilized and professional as Walt, but having the ability to explore multiple sources of information is a really, really good thing.
While I know it is human nature to opine for the good ole’ days, this is one time period I don’t miss. No offense Walt.
I do not watch a lot of main media news any more but if Mr Cronkite was still doing the news I would.
re: JohnB says:
July 19, 2009 at 11:03 am “Cronkite was a newsreader….”
Oh, how true. He had other faults but De mortuis nil nisi bonum.
However, I would like to make two points.
First. TV news is entertainment. Cronkite was an entertainer of high skill. If one wants to read exactly what goes into TV news some how find and read Susan Ludel’s essay “Who Programs the Programmers.” It was published in the Objectivist in two parts, Vol. 9, No. 3, March 1970, pp. 11 to 16 and Vol. 9, No. 4, April 1970, pp. 8 to 16. How one can find the essay will tax one’s cleverness for sure as the publication was obscure and of limited circulation and now approaching forty years ago. The essay is the distillation of Ludel’s immersion in the milieu of NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report ( The main competition to Cronkite’s news show ) as an observer for an entire week’s production during October, 1969–a true “fly on the wall” memoir of events. Let me quote Ludel’s penultimate paragraph in the 1970 essay:
“Many people are attacking television news today in terms suggesting that the networks are the major villains behind the destruction of objective journalism. In fact, network newsmen have no such power. They are merely echoing the writers of the fashionable publications, who are echoing the professors in the fashionable universities, who are echoing the once unfashionable philosophers who first taught men that reality is whatever one feels it is, that objectivity is impossible, and that reason is not man’s means of knowledge.”
Second. Cronkite was the host of Air Power on CBS, a TV show that ran November 11, 1956 – May 5, 1957 and described the history and future of aviation as a military weapon. I was in high school at the time and was enthralled by the series. I remember one segment showed Cronkite walking on the vast WWII Wheelus Air Base, Libya talking in his authoritative tones. A number of years later ( perhaps the 1970s ) I was reading the Letters-to-the-editor page in Aviation Week & Space Technology and read a letter blasting Cronkite over his not being any kind of expert on Aviation. The writer wrote about how ignorant Cronkite had been about the subject when the segment of Air Power was shot at Wheelus Air Base in the mid 1950s. Exactly what the writer of the letter was exercised about concerning Cronkite escapes me but he felt so strongly about the ignorance or wrong headiness of Cronkite to write the vitriolic letter to Aviation Week.
As an actor, a news reader, he had few peers; as a journalist, he probably was small beer to be generous.
Dan Kurt
Cronkite: the subliminal soundtrack to my mind’s spool of ’60’s history
so long, Walt
Well, the debate over whether if Mr. Cronkite was a journalist or a performer is interesting but I think the best thing one can say about Mr Cronkite is that when he was still working no one knew his political opinions/leanings. We found out once he stopped but unlike today’s “journalists” he didn’t taint the stories with his opinion.
“[U]nlike today’s ‘journalists’ [Cronkite] didn’t taint the stories with his opinion”
I don’t think that I’d agree with that. Following the 1968 Tet Offensive, which was arguably a military disaster for Communist forces, Cronkite said: “[I]t 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.” That’s not reporting; that’s opinion.
Every man is the architect of his own fortune.
Great article, I especially like what you had to say in the last paragraph.
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Well, the debate over whether if Mr. Cronkite was a journalist or a performer is interesting but I think the best thing one can say about Mr Cronkite is that when he was still working no one knew his political opinions/leanings.
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My Uncle is John Ward and I grew up with Uncle Walter (as we called him). Walter was an amazing man but was brilliant because of his producers. John Ward and Dale Minor witnessed history and wrote about without editorial. It can indeed be done. Watch some of those old reports to see the difference.