CRONKITE, JR., WALTER L.
Whether reporting on the assassination of President John F.
Kennedy in 1963, or the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam, or
the landing of the first man on the moon in 1969, in national
moments of great despair and extraordinary triumph, Walter
Cronkite (Nov. 4, 1916– ) was the journalist that Americans
most trusted to give them news they needed to know. David
Halberstam observed that Cronkite was “the right man at
the right time” and television was “the right instrument” to
take the nation through the tumultuous second half of the
twentieth century.
Cronkite was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, the only child
of dentist Walter Leland Cronkite and housewife Helen Lena
Fritsche Cronkite. The family moved to Kansas City where
he had a “perfectly ordinary childhood,” he recalled. There
he hawked issues of the Kansas City Star on street corners
and remembered running home to tell the neighborhood the
news that President Warren Harding had died in 1923. He
became fascinated reading about the lives of foreign correspondents in American Boy magazine. When he was ten his
family moved to Houston, and there his interest in reporting
and politics deepened when a local reporter, Fred Birney,
spoke to Cronkite’s class at San Jacinto High School in
Houston. Cronkite became editor on the school newspaper,
the Campus Cub, and won the news writing competition
of the Texas Interscholastic Press Association relying on
Birney’s caution “to use adjectives and adverbs with caution lest they imply editorial opinion.” He also worked as
an unpaid copy boy and cub reporter on civic affairs for the
Houston Post. “Seeing an occasional paragraph in print,”
Cronkite remembered, “was better than gold.” He could not
“imagine anything more exciting than the heavy odor of
printer’s ink and pulp paper and melting lead. The unique
clanking of the linotype machine and the shaking rumble
of the big presses” completed his conversion to a career in
journalism.
Cronkite became a campus correspondent for the Houston Post while a student at the University of Texas in Austin.
He also did a daily five-minute sportscast on KNOW, the
campus radio station, and became a state capital reporter
for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain. But he dropped
out of school after his junior year to work full-time as a
general assignment reporter at fifteen dollars a week for the
Houston Press. His editor Roy Roussel made sure Cronkite
became “a stickler for accuracy.”
In 1936 Cronkite became the news and sports editor at
KCMO, a small 100-watt radio station in Kansas City for
twenty-five dollars a week. Cronkite began dating the station’s continuity writer, “a gorgeous redhead,” named Mary
Elizabeth Simmons Maxwell. Although “overworked and
underpaid” when he returned to print journalism in 1939
at the United Press office in Kansas City office, he saved
enough money “to pay the organist for a single song” when
he married “Betsy” on March 30, 1940. They had three
children and at her death were wed fifteen days short of
sixty-five years.
Cronkite’s wire service experience was perfect preparation for his years at CBS News. “We had a deadline every
minute because there was a paper going to press every minute,” he remembers. “It was a blistering, relentless battle.”
He learned to write “fast, fact by fact.” Because of intense
competition from Associated Press, there was “a powerful
incentive to be first” and “to be right.” After the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor, Cronkite was shipped out with a
naval task force to report the battle for the North Atlantic
and the allied invasion of North Africa. Cronkite was the
first war correspondent to arrive in New York and his firsthand reports on the first sustained allied success of the war
proved a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. A Paramount newsreel featured Cronkite’s eyewitness account.
By the end of 1942, Cronkite was in London, reporting the
cross channel bombing war between the British and Germans. Early in 1943, he was one of eight pool reporters
who boarded B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators
of the U.S. Eighth Air Force at the start of their bombing campaign against Germany. German anti-aircraft fire
and fighter planes engaged the American squadron when it
came in sight of the Dutch coast. Several planes and crews
were lost. “The shelling was so thick,” Cronkite remembers one crew member saying, “you could get out and walk
on it.” Cronkite’s lead was admittedly “purple.” It began
“I’ve just returned from an assignment to hell, a hell at 17,000 feet, a hell of bursting flack and screaming fighter
planes.”
Cronkite’s growing reputation brought him to the attention of CBS News and Edward R. Murrow. Murrow offered
Cronkite a job with the network, but Cronkite after some
uncertainty decided to stay at United Press. He reported stories on the Eighth Air Force and reported the D-Day invasion in June 1944 while embedded with Ninth Air Force
engineers on a bluff just behind Omaha Beach, which saw
some of the bloodiest fighting of the war. Cronkite barely
escaped death when, reporting from London, a German V-1
struck a hundred yards from his flat on Buckingham Gate
Road. Dozens were killed in the raid. In September 1944,
Cronkite accompanied the U.S. 101st Airborne in their liberation of the Netherlands. His glider narrowly evaded German fire and nosed into the ground at Eindhoven. Two days
later American forces joined Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and Britain’s 21st Army Group. Cronkite reported
on the German counter-offensive, begun on December 17
in the Ardennes Forest. Sixty thousand men were killed in
the ten-day Battle of the Bulge. When it was over, Cronkite
wrote, Hitler’s army had been smashed and lay “smoldering
in the snow.” Cronkite accompanied Allied forces in the
liberation of Amsterdam.
Cronkite covered the Nuremberg trials of twenty-one
Nazi war criminals for United Press after the war. He
reported the start of the Cold War as U.P.’s Moscow Bureau
Chief. Cronkite returned to Washington in 1948, where he
reported national news for a group of Midwestern radio stations. In July 1950, he accepted Murrow’s offer to report the
Korean War for CBS News. He never got the chance. The
network’s application for a television station in the nation’s
capital was approved by the Federal Communications Commission, and Cronkite was tasked with the responsibility
of setting up its news operation. “I didn’t know anything
about TV,” Cronkite recalled, “but neither did anyone at the
network.”
Cronkite quickly realized that he could “absorb the news
of the day” and go on the air without a script. Within a
year he was reassigned to New York. He began appearing
regularly on the network’s first public affairs programs,
Man of the Week, It’s News to Me, and the popular You
Are There. Cronkite’s reputation was established in 1952
with network coverage of presidential nominating conventions in Chicago. Cronkite “anchored,” the first time the
term was used for a journalist, the gavel to gavel coverage.
Cronkite considered it “a marvelous experiment in news
collection and distribution.”Only 9 percent of all American
homes had televisions when Cronkite came to CBS. By the
time he began anchoring the network’s nightly news show
on April 16, 1962, that number had grown to more than
90 percent. Initially, the CBS News with Walter Cronkite
was a fifteen-minute broadcast that ran second in the ratings behind NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report. Cronkite also
served as the show’s managing news editor and long argued
with CBS management that “the nation was too large and
complicated” for a quarter hour nightly newscast. On September 2, 1963, CBS became the first network to move to a
half hour news format. Cronkite marked the occasion with a
famous interview of John F. Kennedy in which the president
acknowledged the administration’s deepening commitment
to South Vietnam, while noting “in the final analysis” it was
the job of the Saigon government and not the United States
to resist Communist attacks from North Vietnam.
At 12:30 on November 22, 1963, CBS broke into its early
afternoon soap opera with a CBS News Bulletin. Cronkite’s
voice could be heard saying, “In Dallas, Texas, three shots
were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown
Dallas. The first reports say that President Kennedy has
been seriously wounded by this shooting.” This was the first
news the nation had of the assassination attempt. Finally, at
2:38 p.m. the American public watched apprehensively as
Cronkite was handed a wire service report. “President Kennedy died at one p.m. Central Standard Time,” he reported.
Taking off his glasses, he looked up at a studio clock, and
said, “some thirty-eight minutes ago.” Putting his glasses
on again, he briefly shuffled some papers on his desk, fighting to keep his emotions in check. Some observers believe
that this broadcast transformed Cronkite from “America’s
anchorman” to “America’s clergyman” in times of crisis.
Five years later, Cronkite again served as the national
conscience. It came after the TET offensive in January 1968
during which North Vietnamese forces launched bloody
attacks on many of South Vietnam’s most important cities. Cronkite flew to South Vietnam to report on fighting
there. His February 27 prime time special report, detailing growing American casualties in the conflict, included a
closing comment. It was the first time Cronkite had publicly
stepped away from his role as anchor to become a commentator. “We’ve been too often disappointed by the optimism
of American leaders both in Vietnam and Washington to
have faith any longer in their silver linings,” he said. “For it
seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. For every means
we have to escalate, the enemy can match us, and that
applies to invasion of the North, the use of nuclear weapons,
or the mere commitment of 100 or 200 or 300,000 more
American troops to the battle. And with each escalation the
world comes closer to the brink of cosmic disaster.” (February 27, 1968). Cronkite called for a negotiated settlement to
end the conflict and a phased reduction of American forces.
President Lyndon Johnson, watching the telecast from the
White House, reportedly turned to his aide George Christian and said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.” Weeks later, Johnson announced he “would not seek
and would not accept” the nomination of his party to serve
another term as president.
Cronkite’s signature story was the American space
program. The space race began on October 4, 1957, when
the Soviet Union sent Sputnik, an artificial satellite into
space. “If the Sputnik isn’t a threat to our own immediate
security, it is to our sense of security,” Cronkite reported.
In April 1961, the Soviets sent cosmonaut Yuri Gargarin
into space. On May 5, 1961, Cronkite stood beside a CBS
trailer at Cape Canaveral, Florida to report America’s first
manned space flight. Alan Shepard’s fifteen-minute suborbital flight aboard Mercury’s Redstone rocket was “high
drama,” Cronkite told viewers, “A failure would have been
a major Cold War defeat.” The success assured the nation
“we have a place in space.” On May 25, 1961, President
Kennedy committed the nation “to landing a man on the
moon and returning him safely to the earth” by the end of
the decade. On February 10, 1962, John Glenn became the
first American astronaut to orbit the earth. Cronkite became
a cheerleader for the live space launches and was unapologetic in his enthusiasm. An estimated worldwide audience
of three hundred million watched coverage of the July 16,
1969, launch of Apollo 11. Its moon landing four days later,
and Neil Armstrong’s words,“Tranquility Base here. The
Eagle has landed,” left Cronkite speechless. “Whew, boy,”
he exclaimed, taking off his glasses, smiling broadly, while
shaking his head and wiping away the tears.
Cronkite’s nightly news program had made him “the
most trusted man in America,” according to annual polling in the 1970s. He put that popularity to one final test in
the century’s greatest political scandal. Five men had been
arrested on June 17, 1972, for breaking into Democratic
National Headquarters in Washington, D.C.’s Watergate
Hotel. Although White House press secretary Ron Ziegler
called the story “a third rate burglary,” it was later reported
by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in the Washington
Post that the Committee to Re-elect President Richard Nixon
had been implicated in the incident. For months, the Post
was largely alone in aggressively pursuing ties between the
Watergate episode and growing evidence the White House
may have been involved in covering up its complicity in the
crime. Cronkite assigned a four-member team of reporters
to investigate. On the eve of the national election in 1972,
he hosted a CBS news special “The Watergate Affair” that
claimed “a high level campaign of political sabotage and
espionage without parallel in American history.” After winning re-election, Nixon’s top aides warned CBS executives
the network would “pay” for its opposition to the president.
Instead, the CBS story helped legitimize press attention to
the controversy. The Post’s managing editor Ben Bradlee
believed, “When the great white father decided this was
a story, it was magic. It gave us a big boost.” By January
1973, several members of the Watergate conspiracy were
convicted for their crime. Congressional investigations and
impeachment hearings followed. Nixon was forced to resign
the presidency on August 9, 1974.
Cronkite’s retirement from the nightly news on March 6,
1981, at the age of sixty-five, prompted many calls for him
to reconsider. He felt he had been “fighting deadlines since
I was 16-years-old” and assured viewers “I’ll be back from
time to time with special news reports and documentaries.”
Cronkite’s summer series, Universe, ended after thirteen
weeks. CBS seemed eager to promote Cronkite’s replacement, Dan Rather, and may well have felt Cronkite’s continuing presence overshadowed their new star. Although he
was made a CBS board member, Cronkite was disappointed
by his reduced role at the network. Eventually, he helped
organize a production company that developed award-winning documentaries on cable television. His first love, however, remained reporting the news. He particularly deplored
what he saw as the increasing tabloid tendency of broadcast
journalists in the 1980s and 1990s. “We need to emphasize
breaking news developed within a 24-hour news cycle,” he
told Larry King in 1996. “This is what directly affects our
futures and our lives. What doesn’t affect us directly, but is
only interesting, is fluff.” Viewers were turning away from
network news, he observed in 2004, because too much time
was spent airing a reporter’s “personal opinion” about “stories that have little significance” in the hope of “getting a
bigger rating.”
Further Reading
Boyer, Peter J. Who Killed CBS? The Undoing of America’s Number One News Network. New York: Random House, 1988.
Cronkite, Walter. A Reporter Remembers. New York: Simon &
Schuster Audio-book, 2000.
——. A Reporter’s Life, New York: Random House, 1996.
James, Doug. Walter Cronkite: His Life and Times. Brentwood,
TN: JM Press, 1991.
Murray, Michael D. The Political Performers: CBS Broadcasts in
the Public Interest. New York: Praeger, 1994.
Westman, Paul. Walter Cronkite: The Most Trusted Man in America. Minneapolis: Dillon Press, 1980.
Bruce J. Evensen