The Way it Was
You cannot understand Walter Cronkite today unless you watched him every evening. You cannot imagine his impact and authority. Like the punch line that works only once, you had to be there.
On the night he died, CNN replayed the memorable moments over and over. For 19 years, he was the narrator of the American century who never faltered.
Oh, how we remember! Cronkite interviewing John F. Kennedy at Hyannis Port in 1963. Cronkite covering the riotous Democratic National Convention in 1968. Cronkite reporting the first moon landing in 1969. Cronkite reporting the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974.
Personally, he would have been amused — and appalled — by the blanket coverage of his death last weekend. Even in high summer he wouldn’t have considered his passing at 92 “breaking news,” which is how CNN breathlessly trumpeted it.
He was the master of breaking news, and no more so than on Nov. 22, 1963. There he was, interrupting the broadcast of a soap opera to announce the news of the shooting in Dallas and report Kennedy’s death minutes later. On that day he became the nation’s paterfamilias.
Who can forget it? Those black, heavy, horn-rimmed glasses. The sob in the throat. The tear in the eye. A private moment of grief in front of millions.
“If you could do it over again, would you do it differently?” he was asked decades later, as if he had rehearsed. Cronkite shrugged and said no. That was Cronkite, supremely modest and unaffected.
He had the mustache of a count, the sobriety of a parson and the integrity of a scoutmaster. Avuncular was the shopworn adjective. One night he read a letter from a young viewer who complained that he always had to go to bed whenever Cronkite said “good night.” At the end of the broadcast, an accommodating Uncle Walter signed off without farewell.
The story was never about Walter Cronkite. While there were celebrities in the 1960s, sure, the news was still about the newsmaker. In 2005 Cronkite allowed that his successor at CBS News, Dan Rather, had played “the role of newsman” rather than being one. It was a rare judgment from him.
Hard as it is believe, there was a time the news was served straight up, like vodka drunk neat. There was no Fox News or MSNBC.
Imperfect as it was, television news wasn’t necessarily freighted, tilted, shaded or slanted. A generation ago, the highest accolade was to deliver the news without opinion or bias.
The first-person pronoun was largely forbidden. Instead of “I”, the practice was to use “this correspondent” or “this reporter”. The idea was to maintain a respectful distance.
For millions of Americans and Canadians, too, Walter Cronkite was a nightly ritual.
At 6:30, without fail, we would retreat to the den and tune into the CBS affiliate from Burlington, Vermont. Before cable, the picture was snowy, pulled in by rabbit ears wearing steel wool pads like ear muffs.
Cronkite sat at his desk, amid other desks, next to his typewriter. “Direct from our newsroom in New York — in colour — this is the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite,” the announcer declared. “And Eric Sevareid in Washington … Dan Rather at the White House … Mike Wallace in New York … Terry Drinkwater in Los Angeles … Winston Burdett at the Vatican … Richard C. Hottelet at the United Nations … Morley Safer in London … and a special sports report from Heywood Hale Broun in Nashville, Tennessee.”
It was that broadcast that became the national narrative. It was there, for example, that Americans would learn, every Thursday, of the weekly death toll in Vietnam (in 1968, it could number in the hundreds). It was there that they learned of the ups and downs of the stock market (30 million shares traded in New York). It was there they heard of congressional hearings and government reports — in short, the pith and substance of the news.
Cronkite never took himself too seriously. He said that television news was incomplete, that the entire transcript of his nightly broadcast wouldn’t fill even the front page of the New York Times. He warned that a well-informed person should read newspapers and magazines, as well as watch television.
Perhaps it was his training as a reporter at the United Press. There is still no better journalistic grounding than a spell at a wire service, which insists on clarity, speed, accuracy and productivity.
Twenty-eight years ago, in our bureau of United Press International, we still found the yellowed dispatches of Walter Cronkite. In March 1981, on the night of his last broadcast, we gathered around the black-and-white television to watch the Master. We knew that things would never be the same.
They weren’t, not in television or in newspapers. Walter’s world had passed. That was just the way it was.
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