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A LEGEND LEAVES US  WALTER CRONKITE 1916-2009 |
He was the heart and soul of modern television news
of TheColumnists.com
Walter Cronkite was so much a part of my life in my youth and young adult years that I knew I would be in awe when I finally met him as a newcomer on the television beat in the late 1970s. I cautioned myself in advance not to fawn or use the word "sir" too much when speaking to him. I figured he wouldn't like that sort of behavior.
And, I'm happy to say, I was right. From the start, he treated me like an equal, as if we were a couple of news guys just shooting the bull. He asked me what paper I was from and when I told him The San Jose Mercury News, he smiled and said, "That's great. I hear they're doing some pretty impressive things out there."
Still, Walter Cronkite in the late 1970s was a very imposing figure. Not because he towered over me, which he didn't, but because he already was the grey eminence of network news--the man a survey had proclaimed "The most trusted man in America."
I have no idea when I first saw Cronkite on television, but I'm willing to bet it was around 1953 when we got our first television set and I was just 15 years old. In those days, you watched virtually everything that was on TV because it was such a gas to have entertainment coming into your living room. I don't think I watched much news in those days--there wasn't much of it on anyway--but I did fall in love with a great CBS show called "You Are There," which re-enacted famous events in the history of the world, and watched it every week.
Walter Cronkite was the host of "You Are There" and to this very day I can hear that very special, dramatic and profound voice os his at the close of every episode, saying, "What sort of a day was it? A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times...and you were there!"
Television news people did all kinds of strange things back in those early days of network news. Mike Wallace, who would become one of TV's greatest news stars on CBS' "60 Minutes," used to co-host a daytime talk show with his good-looking wife, whose name was Buff Cobb. Later, he did a hard-hitting one-on-one interview show called "The Mike Wallace Interview," which mostly featured celebrities. Cronkite, if you can possibly imagine it, even used to host the CBS morning show, often working with a puppet.
But by the time I finally met Cronkite, he had become the "anchorman"--that was a new term then--of "The CBS Evening News" and had presided over almost every major news event of the 1960s and 1970s. You've been watching clips of them ever since Cronkite died July 17 at age 92: The assassination of Pres. John F. Kennedy, the first moon landing by Neil Armstrong, the Vietnam war, Watergate and so on.
Just about every TV columnist I knew professed a genuine fondness for Cronkite. I think we actually loved the guy. He was down-to-Earth and never as stuffy as you might think he'd be after spending a lifetime pontificating on the news on national radio and television.
When he decided to step down from the anchor job in 1981 and let Dan Rather replace him, it was a major news story for all of us. I was lucky enough to get an exclusive one-on-one interview with him. My interview ran in my home paper and in a number of other U.S. papers via the Knight Ridder News Syndicate on March 6, 1981, which was Cronkite's last day anchoring the news on CBS.
The one thing I really wanted to know and had never asked him about before was how he reacted to the celebrityhood that comes with being a national TV news personality. I was especially interested because Cronkite had been a print journalist, like me, working as a wire service reporter even during World War II. In print journalism, there was always a feeling you needed to keep yourself out of the story. Being a celebrity was anathema to being a journalist.
Cronkite told me it was a strange phenomenon when he first noticed it happening to him in 1952. He had gone on the road with U.S. Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-Ky.), who was "stumping" the campaign trail through the Southern states, wearing his trademark coonskin cap, seeking the nomination to run for President.
"We were traveling by bus through Florida and Kefauver was stopping at every crossroads town," Cronkite told me. "I'd get off the bus and, if there were 10 or 15 people there, maybe eight of them would cluster around me and not the candidate."
This was a shock to Cronkite because that never happened to reporters in 1952. Kefauver, who made headlines all the time with his crime-fighting committee, was the celebrity, right? Kefauver straightened him out on that point.
"Finally, after that had happened several times," Cronkite told me, "Kefauver said, 'Listen, would you mind getting off the bus last and let me at least start my pitch first?"
Cronkite was likewise astonished by the "most trusted man" thing. He always said he just thought he was doing his job and couldn't explain why the public felt that way, as flattering as it might be.
Well, those of us who watched him regularly certainly had a good idea why the polls went that way. Cronkite on the air was pretty much the guy you met off the news set. A genial, good-natured guy, he really cared about people and when he occasionally veered into personal views on the news, it was invariably regarding some pro-social issue. His distaste for what he saw happening in Vietnam filtered through his broadcasts and many critics, this one included, believe his reports via CBS had a great deal to do with America finally pulling out of that terrible conflict. People believed the guy and they knew he was his own man and not just voicing some body else's policies.
And yet I'm pretty sure Cronkite cringed when people referred to him as a benign "Uncle Walter" sort of character. He told me he was rather frightened by the trend to make news anchors into something bigger than they were in real life.
"I don't like the general deification of any anchor person," he said. "It's a mistake. I've always believed that and now that it's centered on me, it makes it worse, if anything."
Cronkite sincerely believed he achieved that "trusted" status because of his long and rich background covering the news. He told me he never could have lasted in the CBS anchor job if he'd been paid as much attention at the start as he was being paid at this farewell to the job.
Cronkite told me some of the things I really wanted to hear. One was that he had tried radio reporting in the early 1930s, but always went back to print journalism because he didn't think the broadcast medium was "journalistically sound." Eventually, though, his reporting on World War II for the United Press wire service attracted the attention of CBS. The legendary Edward R. Murrow offered him a job covering the war for CBS, but Cronkite turned it down because United Press countered with a $25 raise in his salary.
After the war, Murrow called again and this time Cronkite decided to join CBS where Murrow had developed a fine reputation as a peerless journalist who was running a first class operation. Cronkite began with the network in 1950, working for the local TV station in Washington, D.C. By 1952, he had become a blossoming star of TV news and was picked to anchor the network's coverage of the 1952 presidential political conventions. From then on, it was all upward for him at CBS.
To the end, Cronkite believed it was a negative for any TV news person to become such a celebrity that it got in the way of his or her ability to do the job.
"There's no anonymity," he told me. "You can't just stand around in a crowd or go to a meeting somewhere and listen. People know you're there and they know why you're there. In some news situations, people seeking your autograph and wanting to shake your hand actually prevent you from doing your work."
As he drew further away from his exalted position at CBS, Cronkite seemed to grow somewhat disenchanted with the way television news was developing. On several occasions after his retirement, I'd run into him in a social situation and tap into his latest thinking on the topic. For one thing, he didn't like what had become the traditional route for young news people to come into network news--working first at a local TV station. He felt too many local newscasts cared more about how the on-air people looked than in how well they did their jobs. He thought print newspaper experience would produce better reporters.
Years later, when CBS decided to move anchorwoman Connie Chung into a co-hosting status with Dan Rather to bolster their sagging ratings, I ran into Cronkite at a cable news event and asked him what he thought of the move on his former newscast. He told me he didn't think a woman anchor was a good idea because their voices were too soft and you couldn't really hear them all that well.
"But then I'm getting deaf as a post," he smiled, realizing he was treading on thin ice.
Cronkite somehow managed to keep his private life pretty private over the years. He didn't go in for putting a spotlight on his family affairs. If you saw him off-stage at a private event, it was usually aboard his sailboat, behaving very much like any old salt who happens to love the sea.
I'm sure Cronkite knew his passing would be a time of national mourning, which it has turned out to be. He probably would have been gratified to know his old colleagues had paid tribute to him in a network special that pre-empted "60 Minutes" this past weekend, but if he was looking down from Heaven at all the fuss, I can easily believe he was thinking what he told me when he was about to do his final "CBS Evening New" telecast back in 1981.
"To tell you the truth," he said, "I think it's a case of overkill. It's beginning to get very, very embarassing."
©2009 by Ron Miller. This column first posted June 20, 2009.
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