Walter Cronkite, the Most Trusted Man in American Journalism
The conceit of the powerful is not the reporter’s concern. A good journalist has only one job — to tell the truth.”
The length and breadth of journalist Walter Cronkite’s career can be traced in part by the news events that he covered. He wrote about World War II ,Vietnam, Watergate, and the moon landing. At CBS, he built on the legacy of Edward R. Morrow and carried CBS to the pinnacle of prestige and popularity in television news. When he left CBS, the pinnacle eroded away.
His signature nightly sign off phrase, “And that’s the way it is,” and then the date of the broadcast gained him national recognition and he became a daily fixture in homes across America.
Broadcast journalist Walter Leland Cronkite, Jr. was best known as anchorman for the CBS Evening News between 1962 and 1981. A 1972 Oliver Quayle poll named him the most trusted man in America. Another national poll found him more trusted than the president, vice president, Senate and the House of Representatives and all other journalists. In the 1960s and 1970s, years of anger and division in the country, Americans implicitly believed that Walter Cronkite would not deliberately deceive them.
The length and breadth of journalist Walter Cronkite’s career can be traced in part by the news events that he covered. He wrote about World War II, covering battles in Europe and North Africa. The United States Army Air Forces chose Cronkite to be one of the eight journalists in a group called the Writing 69th to fly bombing raids over Germany in a B-17 Flying Fortress. He landed in a glider with the 101st Airborne Division in Operation Market-Garden and covered the Battle of the Bulge.
After World War II, Walter Cronkite covered the Nuremberg trials and worked in Moscow for two years as the main reporter for the United Press. At CBS, he built on the legacy of Edward R. Morrow and carried CBS to the pinnacle of prestige and popularity in television news. When he left CBS, the pinnacle eroded away.
On November 22, 1963, he announced on CBS television that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been assassinated. In 1969, he reported that the United States had landed a man on the moon and over the years of the American space program he earned recognition for his extensive coverage from Project Mercury, the Moon landings to the Space Shuttle. He covered Watergate, the Vietnam War, and the Iran Hostage Crisis.
His signature nightly sign off phrase, “And that’s the way it is,” and then the date of the broadcast gained him national recognition and he became a daily fixture in homes across America.
Historian and journalist David Halberstam said of him, “Walter’s career curve and the curve of network television absolutely dovetailed. And, he held that position for so long under vastly changing circumstances…that it seemed to most people that as they got their first television set, Walter and CBS News had joined their family.”
David Halberstam also noted Walter Cronkite’s ambition. He wrote that “From his earliest days he was one of the hungriest reporters around, wildly competitive, no one was going to beat Walter Cronkite on a story, and as he grew older and more successful, the marvel of it was that he never changed, the wild fires still burned.
Walter Cronkite Followed a Linear Career Path
Walter Leland Cronkite, Jr., was born in St. Joseph, Missouri on November 4, 1916, the son of Walter Leland Cronkite Sr., and the former Helen Lena Fritsche. His parents moved to Houston, Texas, where he was raised in a middle class home – his father, Walter Sr. and his grandfather were dentists and his mother, Helen, a homemaker.
When people asked Walter Cronkite what he wanted to be when he grew up he always had the answer. At age six, he had raced down the street waving a copy ofThe Kansas City Star and shouting the news of the death of President Warren G. Harding. As a boy he peddled magazines door to door and hawked newspapers.
At age 12, he read about a foreign correspondent in Boy’s Life . He decided that journalism would be his career and it was the only career goal he ever had. Walter Cronkite became the first significant news anchor on American television, an achievement that he handled with innate modesty. His unassuming manner and sincerity were two reasons why people liked and trusted him so much.
Walter Cronkite Writes For His School Newspapers
Breaking into journalism with his articles for the Purple Pup at Sidney Lanier Middle School, Cronkite continued his early career by writing for the newspaper and working on the yearbook at San Jacinto High School. As a teenager after his family had moved to Houston, he got a job with The Houston Post as a copy boy and cub reporter. He also had a paper route delivering The Post. He wrote in his autobiography, “As far as I know, there were no other journalists delivering the morning paper with their own compositions inside.”
Graduating from San Jacinto High School in Houston in1933, Walter Cronkite entered the University of Texas at Austin, studying political science, economics, and journalism. During his college career, Cronkite worked on his college newspaper The Daily Texan and at the same time for the Houston Press as its campus correspondent. He earned part time wages as a copy boy and occasional reporter for various newspapers at their Capitol bureaus and forged lifelong ties to Austin. He also made his first radio broadcasts when he delivered mid-afternoon baseball scores for KNOW.
These journalistic and broadcasting endeavors kept Cronkite from regularly attending his classes at the University of Texas, and in 1935 he withdrew from college. He later said that he regretted that decision for the rest of his life.
Walter Cronkite Works for KCMO and Meets Mary Elizabeth Maxwell
In 1936, Walter Cronkite moved back to Kansas City, Missouri, to take a job broadcasting news and sports for radio station KCMO. He broadcast using the name Walter Wilcox because radio stations of the time wanted to brand the names of announcers so the popular ones couldn’t be used outside of the station. He didn’t personally attend the games, but summaries of each play were telegraphed to him and he composed vivid descriptions of the game action. He provided details of what local men in the stands were wearing by calling their wives and he discovered in advance what music the band would be playing so he could describe halftime celebrations.
While working at KCMO, he met an advertising writer Mary Elizabeth “Betsy Maxell”. They read a commercial together with one of Walter Cronkite’s lines saying, “You look like an angel.” They were married in 1940 and stayed together for 64 years until she died in 2005.
Walter Cronkite Covers the Oakies and the New London Texas Gas Explosion
In Kansas City, Cronkite witnessed firsthand some of the significant historical events that he would spend his career reporting. From 1930 to 1936, severe droughts caused devastating dust storms to sweep through the Midwest and forced farmers, called Okies, to migrate to California seeking a new life. Kansas City was the first stop for the California bound Okies and Cronkite broadcast their stories.
Radio station KCMO fired Walter Cronkite in 1937, after he challenged journalism practices that he considered unethical. In 1939, he went to work with the United Press News Agency, now United Press International, reporting from Houston, Dallas, El Paso and Kansas City.
In 1937, Cronkite left KCMO to work for the United Press Wire Service. He continued reporting historically significant stories when on one of his first assignments for United Press, he was the first reporter on the scene of a massive gas explosion in New London, Texas that killed more than two hundred children and teachers. Later he said, “I did nothing in my studies nor in my life to prepare me for a story of the magnitude of that New London tragedy, nor has any story since that awful day equaled it.”
At the United Press he learned to get his facts straight, write them simply, and get them on the wire quickly, and United Press remained his spiritual and working home for most of his career.
Walter Cronkite, World War II Correspondent
In December 1941, right after Pearl Harbor, United Press International reassigned Cronkite to the New York office, Walter Cronkite signed up to be a war correspondent and the United Press International assigned him to the battleship Texas. Aboard the Texas, Cronkite experienced his first combat actions when the Texas escorted tankers and freighters in the North Atlantic and Nazi warships sunk several freighters in their convoy.
He covered the air war against Germany from England, crash landed a glider in the Netherlands, and participated in the Allied invasion for North Africa in 1942 from the deck of a ship bombarding the Moroccan coast.
After the invasion, Cronkite returned to New York .Since Walter Cronkite was the first reporter to return from the front, Paramount Pictures asked him to do a newsreel reporting the North African campaign for them which gave him his first experience on camera.
Then World War II coverage beckoned him once more. In 1943, Cronkite and five other correspondents flew in an Eighth Air Force B-17 Flying Fortress making the first bombing runs over Germany. Cronkite manned a machine gun until as he wrote in his autobiography, he was “up to my hips in spent .50 caliber shells.”
He boarded another B-17 for the Normandy Invasion, flying fairly low over Omaha Beach, but the thick cloud cover prevented much action. The B-17 returned to London still loaded with bombs. He covered the Battle of the Bulge in 1944.
CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow was following Cronkite’s career and he approved of the hard working, young wire service reporter who went anywhere and did anything for a story, including riding a bomber or a glider into combat. In 1943, he asked Cronkite to join his wartime broadcast team in the Moscow Bureau of CBS. Authors Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson wrote that Murrow couldn’t believe that Cronkite rejected his $125 week job offer and decided to stay with United Press at $92 a week.
In 1950, Cronkite reported for a string of Midwestern radio stations, and then he received a call from Edward R. Murrow. The first time Murrow had asked Cronkite to work for him when they knew each other during World War II, Cronkite had decided to stay with the United Press. This time Cronkite, with a young family to support, accepted a job at CBS to broadcast television news. His television career had begun.
Walter Cronkite Starts His Career at CBS
Edward R. Morrow hired Walter Cronkite to develop the news department of a new CBS station in Washington and within a year he was appearing on public affairs programs like “Man of the Week,” “It’s News to Me,” and “Pick the Winner.” He also covered the important news events of the day.
At the dawn of television news, Cronkite covered the biggest news events of the time while he and his colleagues pioneered television coverage from the ground up. Television with its unknown territory and unexplored potential was growing. It needed a steadiness, a tone, a voice and Cronkite provided all three. Cronkite was creative enough to make up purpose and material for television as he experienced it day by day and established the strict news standards of print journalism.
Television cameras took the public into unexplored people, places, and events. President Harry Truman gave Walter Cronkite a tour of the White House in 1952, and Cronkite also covered the 1952 Democratic and Republican conventions and he set sterling standards of analysis, suspense, and storytelling. Walter Cronkite had such a natural relationship with the television camera that he could go live on the air and talk about what he was covering without using notes or a script. Without repeating himself, he would always add a little more information, filling time between events, and coordinating the coverage of reporters from all parts of the convention floor. By the time the 1956 conventions began, people knew Walter Cronkite as well as the candidates.
Other significant news stories of the time that he covered included a nuclear test at Yucca Flats and the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. Walter Cronkite continued to cover the significant news events of the 20th century, this time on television.
In 1954, CBS asked Walter Cronkite to anchor a short-lived new show called “Morning Show” to challenge the popular morning program “Today”, on NBC. He interviewed guests and discussed the news with a witty and discerning puppet lion, Charlemagne. He considered his interactions with Charlemagne to be one of the highlights of the show. He said in his autobiography, “A puppet can render opinion of people and things that a human commentator would not feel free to utter. I was and I am proud of it.”
Cronkite also had a pragmatic side. Almost immediately, Cronkite displeased the sponsor of the “Morning Show,” the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. The R.J. Reynolds slogan went: “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.” Cronkite made the slogan grammatically correct by declaring, “Winston tastes good as a cigarette should.”
You Are There and The Twentieth Century
Cronkite hosted another experimental show, “You Are There,” from 1953-1957. Every week Walter Cronkite and team of CBS correspondents would “report” an important historical event, including the assassination of Julius Caesar, the capture of Jesse James, the Alamo, and the death of Socrates. CBS correspondents “interviewed Joan of Arc on the way to the stake and Jefferson initiating the Louisiana Purchase. He ended every show with the same closing lines: “What kind of a day was it? A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times. And you were there.”
From 1957-1970, Walter Cronkite hosted The 20th Century, a documentary program using archival footage and personal testimony to recreate historical happenings. This format laid the foundation for similar cable shows in the future.
Despite these projects, Walter Cronkite remained focused on the news. He remained at the pinnacle of history, covering the Korean War, the space race between the Soviets and the United States, and the Eisenhower Administration.
Cronkite enjoyed cordial relations with President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The anchorman and the president got along so well together that the next president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, incorrectly assumed that Cronkite, a political independent, was a Republican.
Walter Cronkite covered the 1960 Nixon Kennedy debates for CBS in 1961, he replaced Edward R. Murrow as CBS senior correspondent. On April 16, 1962, he began anchoring the CBS Evening News, succeeding Douglas Edwards. He would anchor the news for almost 20 years.
When the news graduated from fifteen minutes to half an hour, Walter Cronkite introduced his signature closing of the broadcast, “And that’s the way it is.” He later wrote that the idea had been to end each broadcast with an offbeat news item and then he would recite his line with humor, sadness, or irony.
CBS News President Richard S. Salant hated the line from the beginning – after all it gobbled four seconds a night – and the offbeat news items never became part of the broadcast.
“I began to think Dick was right, but I was too stubborn to drop it,” Cronkite wrote.
Walter Cronkite Reports the Events of the Newsworthy 1960s On Friday, November 22, 1963, Walter Cronkite broke into the broadcast of As The World Turns, a television soap opera, to announce that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, Texas. Cronkite covered the assassination with several other anchors, but he remained the dominant, steadying figure. He sat behind the news desk in his shirt sleeves with his horned rimmed glasses on, and continuously updated the story.
He calmly provided additional details as they filtered in, and squelched information that hadn’t been verified until he received a message confirming that President Kennedy was dead. Obviously fighting to control his emotions, Cronkite announced that President Kennedy had died.
By allowing his feelings about the assassination of an American President to show, by displaying humanity over professionalism, Walter Cronkite helped millions of Americans grieve one of America’s most tragic events.
CBS Briefly Replaces Walter Cronkite
Walter Cronkite interviewed Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower at his former Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) headquarters in Normandy, France telecast on June 6, 1964. The program was a CBS News Special Report called “D-Day Plus 20.” By the time he returned to Omaha Beach 20 years after the invasion of Normandy, he had served two terms as President of the United States, and Walter Cronkite had climbed the career ladder from war correspondent to the best known television anchor man in America.
In 1964, CBS briefly interrupted Cronkite’s career with the network, when it tried to replace him. Network officials were determined to conquer the ratings gap between the CBS Evening News and NBC’s Huntley and Brinkley, so they decided to replace Cronkite as anchor of the 1964 presidential nominating conventions with the team of Robert Trout and Roger Mudd.
Walter Cronkite publicly accepted the network decision, but privately he contemplated leaving CBS. Then the public spoke in over 11,000 letters protesting the change and these letters helped convince both Cronkite and the CBS executives that he should stay in his news spot. By 1966, Cronkite had overtaken the Huntley-Brinkley Report in the ratings and he took the lead in 1967. From 1967 until he retired in 1981, Cronkite and the CBS Evening News were at the top of the ratings chart.
Walter Cronkite and Vietnam
At the beginning of the Vietnam War, Walter Cronkite tended to be more of a hawk than a dove. Then, in February 1968, yielding to the urging of his executive producer Ernest Leiser, he agreed to go to Vietnam. He and Leiser traveled to Vietnam to cover the Tet offensive.
When Cronkite returned, he broadcast “Report from Vietnam: Who, What, When, Where, Why?” and closed his CBS Evening News broadcast on February 27, 1968, with Leiser’s report. He also initiated a dramatic departure from what were considered the traditions of objective journalism. He introduced what he called “an analysis that must be speculative, personal, subjective.” He said in part, “Who won and who lost in the great Tet offensive against the cities? I’m not sure. The Vietcong did not win by a knockout, but neither did we. The references of history may make it a draw.”
He expressed his strong belief that the war would end in a stalemate and he advocated a negotiated peace with North Vietnam. He concluded by stating that “but it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.”
Most evenings Cronkite ended his broadcasts with “And that’s the way it is.” He ended the February 27, 1968, broadcast by saying somberly, “This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.”
As he wrote and broadcast it, Cronkite’s statement enhanced the credibility and importance of all of the television network anchors. He stepped away from the objectivity he had worked so hard to cultivate to add his personal commentary to the news, something that had not been done before. When he did this, Cronkite gave unspoken permission for his colleagues to interject personal opinions into the factual reporting of the news. Cronkite clearly labeled his report as personal opinion, but in future decades many news anchors wove their opinions into their reporting without labeling them as such.
In January 2006, reminiscing about his 1968 Vietnam broadcast, Cronkite said that this was his proudest moment. When a reporter asked him if he would gave the same advice about Iraq, without hesitating, Cronkite said, “Yes.”
The Moon Landing and other News Stories
Walter Cronkite was one of the biggest boosters of America’s technological might and the moon landing kept Cronkite in a state of excitement in July 1969. Once again he lost his objectivity and shouted, “Go baby, Go!” he said as Apollo 11 took off.
The third lunar mission of NASA’s Apollo space program was launched from Florida on July 16, 1969 and the Apollo 11 space flight landed the first humans on the moon on July 20, 1969.
Walter Cronkite couldn’t contain himself when Americans finally sent a man to the moon on July 20, 1969. It is considered a major accomplishment in the history of space exploration and a Cold War victory for the United States in the Space Race with the Soviet Union.
The mission crew was Commander Neil Alden Armstrong Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, and Lunar Module Pilot Edwin Eugene “Buzz” Aldrin, Jr. On July 20, 1969, Armstrong and Aldrin landed in the sea of Tranquility and on July 21, 1969, they became the first humans to walk on the moon.”Whew, boy…There he is,” Cronkite chuckled as he watched Neil Armstrong.
The Eagle landing craft of Aldrin and Armstrong spent 21 hours and 31 minutes on the lunar surface while Collins orbited above in the command ship, Columbia. The astronauts returned to earth with 47.5 pounds of moon rocks, landing in the Pacific Ocean on July 24, 1969.
Cronkite ended up performing what his critics described as “Walter to Walter” coverage of the lunar mission. He stayed on the air for 27 of the 30 hours of the Apollo 11 mission.
Walter Cronkite Reports the Events of the Newsworthy 1960s-1980s
From 1962 to 1981, Walter Cronkite visited American homes nightly through his broadcasts. As an anchorman and reporter he had covered wars, natural disasters, nuclear explosions, social upheavals and space flights. He guided viewers through national triumphs and tragedies, from the Vietnam War to Watergate in a time when network news occupied the center of many people’s lives. He became as much of a national institution as the White House and as distinctive as the American flag. He broadcast the news calmly, and ended it with the daily benediction, “And that’s the way it is.” People respected, liked, trusted and listened to him.
Walter Cronkite had a clear picture of himself and his role in the news. “I am a news presenter, a news broadcaster, an anchorman, a managing editor – not a commentator or analyst,” he said in an interview with The Christian Science Monitor in 1973. “I feel no compulsion to be a pundit.”
Cronkite Broadcasts His Last CBS Evening News Program
On Friday March 6, 1981, he broadcast the CBS evening news for the last time. He said, “This is my last broadcast as the anchorman of the CBS Evening News. For me it’s a moment for which I long have planned but which nevertheless comes with some sadness…This is but a transition, a passing of the baton. A great broadcaster and gentleman, Doug Edwards, preceded me in this job and another, Dan Rather, will follow. … Furthermore, I am not even going away. I’ll be back from time to time with special news reports and documentaries. … Old anchormen, you see, don’t fade away; they just keep coming back for more. And that’s the way it is, Friday, March 6, 1981. I’ll be away on assignment and Dan Rather will be sitting in here for the next few years. Good night.”
Walter Cronkite always advocated the right and duty of people to know what is happening in the world. He set television news standards when television was new and flexible. He remained loyal to those standards and his large audience remained loyal to him. His legacy of separating reporting the news from editorializing and advocacy remained the standard in television news for decades. His name has come to mean news anchor worldwide. Swedish anchors are known as Kronkiters and in Holland they are called Cronkiters.
Some people criticized Walter Cronkite for not taking more risks in television news coverage, and other felt that these very qualities enhanced his credibility and prestige. Some people criticized him because he liked short, breaking stories that originated from the CBS News Washington bureau instead of the longer coverage that dealt with long range and outside of Washington stories. Some people felt that Cronkite’s news time – about six minutes out of the 22 minutes of the on an evening newscast focused on him- subtracted time from in-depth news coverage.
"Didn't You Used to Be Walter Cronkite?"
In company with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC, Walter Cronkite was one of the first celebrity anchormen. In 1995, a TV Guide poll ranked him number one in seven of eight categories for evaluating television journalists 14 years after he had retired from the CBS Evening News. He said he didn’t understand why Maria Shriver beat him in the eighth category – attractiveness.
Many awards came Walter Cronkite’s way, Emmy Awards, a Peabody, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1981. He continued to accumulate awards. Arizona State University named its journalism school after him.
Yet, Walter Cronkite didn’t seek the limelight. He was honestly puzzled when people came to see him instead of the politicians that he covered and astonished by people repeatedly suggesting that he run for office. He saw himself as an old-fashioned newsman and still wearing his well-worn title from the 1950s, managing editor of the CBS Evening News. His audience felt the same way about him.
He knew that sometime he would have to stop chasing stories, he said in autobiography, but he promised to continue to follow news developments “form a perch yet to be determined.
“I just hope that wherever that is, folks will stop me, as they do today, and ask, “Didn’t you used to be Walter Cronkite?”
The Other Walter Cronkite
Besides his purely political activities, Walter Cronkite made more than 60 documentaries and in 2005 and 2006 contributed to the Huffington Post. He also contributed his voice to be the voice of Benjamin Franklin on the PBS cartoon series, “Liberty’s Kids.” For many years he served as host of the annual Kennedy Center Honors.
Walter Cronkite spent a great deal of time at his summer home in Martha’s Vineyard, sailing “The Betsy,” a sailboat that he had named for his wife. Betsy Cronkite died in 2005 after a battle with cancer.
In 2005, Walter Cronkite took the opportunity to express an honest opinion about a colleague. Dan Rather was leaving the CBS Evening News and Cronkite, uncharacteristically, decided to stop speaking with measured judgment. He criticized Rather as “playing the role of newsman”, rather than being one and said that Rather should have been replaced years earlier.”
When Katie Couric took over the CBS Evening News in September 2006, Walter Cronkite introduced her on the air and sang her praises in interviews. He made another contribution to the “CBS Evening News with Katie Couric.” The network used his voice to open the broadcast since its debut in 2006, a gesture that bridges generations and cements the indelible link of the CBS Evening News to its legendary past.
Still Capable of Covering A Story
Walter Cronkite told the New York Daily News on his 90th birthday, on November 4, 2007, “I would like to think I’m still quite capable of covering a story. “He still was capable of covering stories and forging meaningful relationships. In his last years he “kept company” as he put it with Joanna Simon, a former opera singer and sister of Carly Simon.
Walter Cronkite died in New York City on July 17, 2009, at age 92. His son Walter Leland III, his daughters Nancy Elizabeth and Mary Kathleen and four grandsons survived him.
Katie Couric wrote of Walter Cronkite on July 20, 2009, “No network or cable anchor will ever take his place. But to honor Walter, we can continue to uphold the standards he established when TV was the exciting new technology of the moment. We can all strive for excellence- to be the kind of player he was, even if we’re doing it on a smaller field.” Walter Cronkite’s name is synonymous with television news and journalism and integrity and perseverance. As he said on March 6, 1981, when he concluded his final broadcast as anchorman, “Old anchormen, you see, don’t fade away; they just keep coming back for more. And that’s the way it is.”
References
Cloud, Stanley, and Olson, Lynne. The Murrow Boys: Pioneers on the Front Lines of Broadcast Journalism. Mariner Books, 1997.
Cronkite, Walter. A Reporter’s Life. Knopf, 1996
Cronkite, Walter and Carleton, Don. Conversations with Cronkite. University of Texas at Austin, 2010.
Cronkite, Kathy. On the Edge of the Spotlight: Celebrities’ Children Speak Out About Their Lives. New York: Morrow, 1981.
Halberstam, David. The Powers that Be. University of Illinois Press, 2000.
Rottenberg, Dan. And That’s the Way It Is. American Journalism Review (College Park, Maryland), May 1994.
The conceit of the powerful is not the reporter’s concern. A good journalist has only one job — to tell the truth.”
The length and breadth of journalist Walter Cronkite’s career can be traced in part by the news events that he covered. He wrote about World War II ,Vietnam, Watergate, and the moon landing. At CBS, he built on the legacy of Edward R. Morrow and carried CBS to the pinnacle of prestige and popularity in television news. When he left CBS, the pinnacle eroded away.
His signature nightly sign off phrase, “And that’s the way it is,” and then the date of the broadcast gained him national recognition and he became a daily fixture in homes across America.
Broadcast journalist Walter Leland Cronkite, Jr. was best known as anchorman for the CBS Evening News between 1962 and 1981. A 1972 Oliver Quayle poll named him the most trusted man in America. Another national poll found him more trusted than the president, vice president, Senate and the House of Representatives and all other journalists. In the 1960s and 1970s, years of anger and division in the country, Americans implicitly believed that Walter Cronkite would not deliberately deceive them.
The length and breadth of journalist Walter Cronkite’s career can be traced in part by the news events that he covered. He wrote about World War II, covering battles in Europe and North Africa. The United States Army Air Forces chose Cronkite to be one of the eight journalists in a group called the Writing 69th to fly bombing raids over Germany in a B-17 Flying Fortress. He landed in a glider with the 101st Airborne Division in Operation Market-Garden and covered the Battle of the Bulge.
After World War II, Walter Cronkite covered the Nuremberg trials and worked in Moscow for two years as the main reporter for the United Press. At CBS, he built on the legacy of Edward R. Morrow and carried CBS to the pinnacle of prestige and popularity in television news. When he left CBS, the pinnacle eroded away.
On November 22, 1963, he announced on CBS television that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been assassinated. In 1969, he reported that the United States had landed a man on the moon and over the years of the American space program he earned recognition for his extensive coverage from Project Mercury, the Moon landings to the Space Shuttle. He covered Watergate, the Vietnam War, and the Iran Hostage Crisis.
His signature nightly sign off phrase, “And that’s the way it is,” and then the date of the broadcast gained him national recognition and he became a daily fixture in homes across America.
Historian and journalist David Halberstam said of him, “Walter’s career curve and the curve of network television absolutely dovetailed. And, he held that position for so long under vastly changing circumstances…that it seemed to most people that as they got their first television set, Walter and CBS News had joined their family.”
David Halberstam also noted Walter Cronkite’s ambition. He wrote that “From his earliest days he was one of the hungriest reporters around, wildly competitive, no one was going to beat Walter Cronkite on a story, and as he grew older and more successful, the marvel of it was that he never changed, the wild fires still burned.
Walter Cronkite Followed a Linear Career Path
Walter Leland Cronkite, Jr., was born in St. Joseph, Missouri on November 4, 1916, the son of Walter Leland Cronkite Sr., and the former Helen Lena Fritsche. His parents moved to Houston, Texas, where he was raised in a middle class home – his father, Walter Sr. and his grandfather were dentists and his mother, Helen, a homemaker.
When people asked Walter Cronkite what he wanted to be when he grew up he always had the answer. At age six, he had raced down the street waving a copy ofThe Kansas City Star and shouting the news of the death of President Warren G. Harding. As a boy he peddled magazines door to door and hawked newspapers.
At age 12, he read about a foreign correspondent in Boy’s Life . He decided that journalism would be his career and it was the only career goal he ever had. Walter Cronkite became the first significant news anchor on American television, an achievement that he handled with innate modesty. His unassuming manner and sincerity were two reasons why people liked and trusted him so much.
Walter Cronkite Writes For His School Newspapers
Breaking into journalism with his articles for the Purple Pup at Sidney Lanier Middle School, Cronkite continued his early career by writing for the newspaper and working on the yearbook at San Jacinto High School. As a teenager after his family had moved to Houston, he got a job with The Houston Post as a copy boy and cub reporter. He also had a paper route delivering The Post. He wrote in his autobiography, “As far as I know, there were no other journalists delivering the morning paper with their own compositions inside.”
Graduating from San Jacinto High School in Houston in1933, Walter Cronkite entered the University of Texas at Austin, studying political science, economics, and journalism. During his college career, Cronkite worked on his college newspaper The Daily Texan and at the same time for the Houston Press as its campus correspondent. He earned part time wages as a copy boy and occasional reporter for various newspapers at their Capitol bureaus and forged lifelong ties to Austin. He also made his first radio broadcasts when he delivered mid-afternoon baseball scores for KNOW.
These journalistic and broadcasting endeavors kept Cronkite from regularly attending his classes at the University of Texas, and in 1935 he withdrew from college. He later said that he regretted that decision for the rest of his life.
Walter Cronkite Works for KCMO and Meets Mary Elizabeth Maxwell
In 1936, Walter Cronkite moved back to Kansas City, Missouri, to take a job broadcasting news and sports for radio station KCMO. He broadcast using the name Walter Wilcox because radio stations of the time wanted to brand the names of announcers so the popular ones couldn’t be used outside of the station. He didn’t personally attend the games, but summaries of each play were telegraphed to him and he composed vivid descriptions of the game action. He provided details of what local men in the stands were wearing by calling their wives and he discovered in advance what music the band would be playing so he could describe halftime celebrations.
While working at KCMO, he met an advertising writer Mary Elizabeth “Betsy Maxell”. They read a commercial together with one of Walter Cronkite’s lines saying, “You look like an angel.” They were married in 1940 and stayed together for 64 years until she died in 2005.
Walter Cronkite Covers the Oakies and the New London Texas Gas Explosion
In Kansas City, Cronkite witnessed firsthand some of the significant historical events that he would spend his career reporting. From 1930 to 1936, severe droughts caused devastating dust storms to sweep through the Midwest and forced farmers, called Okies, to migrate to California seeking a new life. Kansas City was the first stop for the California bound Okies and Cronkite broadcast their stories.
Radio station KCMO fired Walter Cronkite in 1937, after he challenged journalism practices that he considered unethical. In 1939, he went to work with the United Press News Agency, now United Press International, reporting from Houston, Dallas, El Paso and Kansas City.
In 1937, Cronkite left KCMO to work for the United Press Wire Service. He continued reporting historically significant stories when on one of his first assignments for United Press, he was the first reporter on the scene of a massive gas explosion in New London, Texas that killed more than two hundred children and teachers. Later he said, “I did nothing in my studies nor in my life to prepare me for a story of the magnitude of that New London tragedy, nor has any story since that awful day equaled it.”
At the United Press he learned to get his facts straight, write them simply, and get them on the wire quickly, and United Press remained his spiritual and working home for most of his career.
Walter Cronkite, World War II Correspondent
In December 1941, right after Pearl Harbor, United Press International reassigned Cronkite to the New York office, Walter Cronkite signed up to be a war correspondent and the United Press International assigned him to the battleship Texas. Aboard the Texas, Cronkite experienced his first combat actions when the Texas escorted tankers and freighters in the North Atlantic and Nazi warships sunk several freighters in their convoy.
He covered the air war against Germany from England, crash landed a glider in the Netherlands, and participated in the Allied invasion for North Africa in 1942 from the deck of a ship bombarding the Moroccan coast.
After the invasion, Cronkite returned to New York .Since Walter Cronkite was the first reporter to return from the front, Paramount Pictures asked him to do a newsreel reporting the North African campaign for them which gave him his first experience on camera.
Then World War II coverage beckoned him once more. In 1943, Cronkite and five other correspondents flew in an Eighth Air Force B-17 Flying Fortress making the first bombing runs over Germany. Cronkite manned a machine gun until as he wrote in his autobiography, he was “up to my hips in spent .50 caliber shells.”
He boarded another B-17 for the Normandy Invasion, flying fairly low over Omaha Beach, but the thick cloud cover prevented much action. The B-17 returned to London still loaded with bombs. He covered the Battle of the Bulge in 1944.
CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow was following Cronkite’s career and he approved of the hard working, young wire service reporter who went anywhere and did anything for a story, including riding a bomber or a glider into combat. In 1943, he asked Cronkite to join his wartime broadcast team in the Moscow Bureau of CBS. Authors Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson wrote that Murrow couldn’t believe that Cronkite rejected his $125 week job offer and decided to stay with United Press at $92 a week.
In 1950, Cronkite reported for a string of Midwestern radio stations, and then he received a call from Edward R. Murrow. The first time Murrow had asked Cronkite to work for him when they knew each other during World War II, Cronkite had decided to stay with the United Press. This time Cronkite, with a young family to support, accepted a job at CBS to broadcast television news. His television career had begun.
Walter Cronkite Starts His Career at CBS
Edward R. Morrow hired Walter Cronkite to develop the news department of a new CBS station in Washington and within a year he was appearing on public affairs programs like “Man of the Week,” “It’s News to Me,” and “Pick the Winner.” He also covered the important news events of the day.
At the dawn of television news, Cronkite covered the biggest news events of the time while he and his colleagues pioneered television coverage from the ground up. Television with its unknown territory and unexplored potential was growing. It needed a steadiness, a tone, a voice and Cronkite provided all three. Cronkite was creative enough to make up purpose and material for television as he experienced it day by day and established the strict news standards of print journalism.
Television cameras took the public into unexplored people, places, and events. President Harry Truman gave Walter Cronkite a tour of the White House in 1952, and Cronkite also covered the 1952 Democratic and Republican conventions and he set sterling standards of analysis, suspense, and storytelling. Walter Cronkite had such a natural relationship with the television camera that he could go live on the air and talk about what he was covering without using notes or a script. Without repeating himself, he would always add a little more information, filling time between events, and coordinating the coverage of reporters from all parts of the convention floor. By the time the 1956 conventions began, people knew Walter Cronkite as well as the candidates.
Other significant news stories of the time that he covered included a nuclear test at Yucca Flats and the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. Walter Cronkite continued to cover the significant news events of the 20th century, this time on television.
In 1954, CBS asked Walter Cronkite to anchor a short-lived new show called “Morning Show” to challenge the popular morning program “Today”, on NBC. He interviewed guests and discussed the news with a witty and discerning puppet lion, Charlemagne. He considered his interactions with Charlemagne to be one of the highlights of the show. He said in his autobiography, “A puppet can render opinion of people and things that a human commentator would not feel free to utter. I was and I am proud of it.”
Cronkite also had a pragmatic side. Almost immediately, Cronkite displeased the sponsor of the “Morning Show,” the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. The R.J. Reynolds slogan went: “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.” Cronkite made the slogan grammatically correct by declaring, “Winston tastes good as a cigarette should.”
You Are There and The Twentieth Century
Cronkite hosted another experimental show, “You Are There,” from 1953-1957. Every week Walter Cronkite and team of CBS correspondents would “report” an important historical event, including the assassination of Julius Caesar, the capture of Jesse James, the Alamo, and the death of Socrates. CBS correspondents “interviewed Joan of Arc on the way to the stake and Jefferson initiating the Louisiana Purchase. He ended every show with the same closing lines: “What kind of a day was it? A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times. And you were there.”
From 1957-1970, Walter Cronkite hosted The 20th Century, a documentary program using archival footage and personal testimony to recreate historical happenings. This format laid the foundation for similar cable shows in the future.
Despite these projects, Walter Cronkite remained focused on the news. He remained at the pinnacle of history, covering the Korean War, the space race between the Soviets and the United States, and the Eisenhower Administration.
Cronkite enjoyed cordial relations with President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The anchorman and the president got along so well together that the next president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, incorrectly assumed that Cronkite, a political independent, was a Republican.
Walter Cronkite covered the 1960 Nixon Kennedy debates for CBS in 1961, he replaced Edward R. Murrow as CBS senior correspondent. On April 16, 1962, he began anchoring the CBS Evening News, succeeding Douglas Edwards. He would anchor the news for almost 20 years.
When the news graduated from fifteen minutes to half an hour, Walter Cronkite introduced his signature closing of the broadcast, “And that’s the way it is.” He later wrote that the idea had been to end each broadcast with an offbeat news item and then he would recite his line with humor, sadness, or irony.
CBS News President Richard S. Salant hated the line from the beginning – after all it gobbled four seconds a night – and the offbeat news items never became part of the broadcast.
“I began to think Dick was right, but I was too stubborn to drop it,” Cronkite wrote.
Walter Cronkite Reports the Events of the Newsworthy 1960s On Friday, November 22, 1963, Walter Cronkite broke into the broadcast of As The World Turns, a television soap opera, to announce that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, Texas. Cronkite covered the assassination with several other anchors, but he remained the dominant, steadying figure. He sat behind the news desk in his shirt sleeves with his horned rimmed glasses on, and continuously updated the story.
He calmly provided additional details as they filtered in, and squelched information that hadn’t been verified until he received a message confirming that President Kennedy was dead. Obviously fighting to control his emotions, Cronkite announced that President Kennedy had died.
By allowing his feelings about the assassination of an American President to show, by displaying humanity over professionalism, Walter Cronkite helped millions of Americans grieve one of America’s most tragic events.
CBS Briefly Replaces Walter Cronkite
Walter Cronkite interviewed Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower at his former Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) headquarters in Normandy, France telecast on June 6, 1964. The program was a CBS News Special Report called “D-Day Plus 20.” By the time he returned to Omaha Beach 20 years after the invasion of Normandy, he had served two terms as President of the United States, and Walter Cronkite had climbed the career ladder from war correspondent to the best known television anchor man in America.
In 1964, CBS briefly interrupted Cronkite’s career with the network, when it tried to replace him. Network officials were determined to conquer the ratings gap between the CBS Evening News and NBC’s Huntley and Brinkley, so they decided to replace Cronkite as anchor of the 1964 presidential nominating conventions with the team of Robert Trout and Roger Mudd.
Walter Cronkite publicly accepted the network decision, but privately he contemplated leaving CBS. Then the public spoke in over 11,000 letters protesting the change and these letters helped convince both Cronkite and the CBS executives that he should stay in his news spot. By 1966, Cronkite had overtaken the Huntley-Brinkley Report in the ratings and he took the lead in 1967. From 1967 until he retired in 1981, Cronkite and the CBS Evening News were at the top of the ratings chart.
Walter Cronkite and Vietnam
At the beginning of the Vietnam War, Walter Cronkite tended to be more of a hawk than a dove. Then, in February 1968, yielding to the urging of his executive producer Ernest Leiser, he agreed to go to Vietnam. He and Leiser traveled to Vietnam to cover the Tet offensive.
When Cronkite returned, he broadcast “Report from Vietnam: Who, What, When, Where, Why?” and closed his CBS Evening News broadcast on February 27, 1968, with Leiser’s report. He also initiated a dramatic departure from what were considered the traditions of objective journalism. He introduced what he called “an analysis that must be speculative, personal, subjective.” He said in part, “Who won and who lost in the great Tet offensive against the cities? I’m not sure. The Vietcong did not win by a knockout, but neither did we. The references of history may make it a draw.”
He expressed his strong belief that the war would end in a stalemate and he advocated a negotiated peace with North Vietnam. He concluded by stating that “but it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.”
Most evenings Cronkite ended his broadcasts with “And that’s the way it is.” He ended the February 27, 1968, broadcast by saying somberly, “This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.”
As he wrote and broadcast it, Cronkite’s statement enhanced the credibility and importance of all of the television network anchors. He stepped away from the objectivity he had worked so hard to cultivate to add his personal commentary to the news, something that had not been done before. When he did this, Cronkite gave unspoken permission for his colleagues to interject personal opinions into the factual reporting of the news. Cronkite clearly labeled his report as personal opinion, but in future decades many news anchors wove their opinions into their reporting without labeling them as such.
In January 2006, reminiscing about his 1968 Vietnam broadcast, Cronkite said that this was his proudest moment. When a reporter asked him if he would gave the same advice about Iraq, without hesitating, Cronkite said, “Yes.”
The Moon Landing and other News Stories
Walter Cronkite was one of the biggest boosters of America’s technological might and the moon landing kept Cronkite in a state of excitement in July 1969. Once again he lost his objectivity and shouted, “Go baby, Go!” he said as Apollo 11 took off.
The third lunar mission of NASA’s Apollo space program was launched from Florida on July 16, 1969 and the Apollo 11 space flight landed the first humans on the moon on July 20, 1969.
Walter Cronkite couldn’t contain himself when Americans finally sent a man to the moon on July 20, 1969. It is considered a major accomplishment in the history of space exploration and a Cold War victory for the United States in the Space Race with the Soviet Union.
The mission crew was Commander Neil Alden Armstrong Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, and Lunar Module Pilot Edwin Eugene “Buzz” Aldrin, Jr. On July 20, 1969, Armstrong and Aldrin landed in the sea of Tranquility and on July 21, 1969, they became the first humans to walk on the moon.”Whew, boy…There he is,” Cronkite chuckled as he watched Neil Armstrong.
The Eagle landing craft of Aldrin and Armstrong spent 21 hours and 31 minutes on the lunar surface while Collins orbited above in the command ship, Columbia. The astronauts returned to earth with 47.5 pounds of moon rocks, landing in the Pacific Ocean on July 24, 1969.
Cronkite ended up performing what his critics described as “Walter to Walter” coverage of the lunar mission. He stayed on the air for 27 of the 30 hours of the Apollo 11 mission.
Walter Cronkite Reports the Events of the Newsworthy 1960s-1980s
From 1962 to 1981, Walter Cronkite visited American homes nightly through his broadcasts. As an anchorman and reporter he had covered wars, natural disasters, nuclear explosions, social upheavals and space flights. He guided viewers through national triumphs and tragedies, from the Vietnam War to Watergate in a time when network news occupied the center of many people’s lives. He became as much of a national institution as the White House and as distinctive as the American flag. He broadcast the news calmly, and ended it with the daily benediction, “And that’s the way it is.” People respected, liked, trusted and listened to him.
Walter Cronkite had a clear picture of himself and his role in the news. “I am a news presenter, a news broadcaster, an anchorman, a managing editor – not a commentator or analyst,” he said in an interview with The Christian Science Monitor in 1973. “I feel no compulsion to be a pundit.”
Cronkite Broadcasts His Last CBS Evening News Program
On Friday March 6, 1981, he broadcast the CBS evening news for the last time. He said, “This is my last broadcast as the anchorman of the CBS Evening News. For me it’s a moment for which I long have planned but which nevertheless comes with some sadness…This is but a transition, a passing of the baton. A great broadcaster and gentleman, Doug Edwards, preceded me in this job and another, Dan Rather, will follow. … Furthermore, I am not even going away. I’ll be back from time to time with special news reports and documentaries. … Old anchormen, you see, don’t fade away; they just keep coming back for more. And that’s the way it is, Friday, March 6, 1981. I’ll be away on assignment and Dan Rather will be sitting in here for the next few years. Good night.”
Walter Cronkite always advocated the right and duty of people to know what is happening in the world. He set television news standards when television was new and flexible. He remained loyal to those standards and his large audience remained loyal to him. His legacy of separating reporting the news from editorializing and advocacy remained the standard in television news for decades. His name has come to mean news anchor worldwide. Swedish anchors are known as Kronkiters and in Holland they are called Cronkiters.
Some people criticized Walter Cronkite for not taking more risks in television news coverage, and other felt that these very qualities enhanced his credibility and prestige. Some people criticized him because he liked short, breaking stories that originated from the CBS News Washington bureau instead of the longer coverage that dealt with long range and outside of Washington stories. Some people felt that Cronkite’s news time – about six minutes out of the 22 minutes of the on an evening newscast focused on him- subtracted time from in-depth news coverage.
"Didn't You Used to Be Walter Cronkite?"
In company with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC, Walter Cronkite was one of the first celebrity anchormen. In 1995, a TV Guide poll ranked him number one in seven of eight categories for evaluating television journalists 14 years after he had retired from the CBS Evening News. He said he didn’t understand why Maria Shriver beat him in the eighth category – attractiveness.
Many awards came Walter Cronkite’s way, Emmy Awards, a Peabody, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1981. He continued to accumulate awards. Arizona State University named its journalism school after him.
Yet, Walter Cronkite didn’t seek the limelight. He was honestly puzzled when people came to see him instead of the politicians that he covered and astonished by people repeatedly suggesting that he run for office. He saw himself as an old-fashioned newsman and still wearing his well-worn title from the 1950s, managing editor of the CBS Evening News. His audience felt the same way about him.
He knew that sometime he would have to stop chasing stories, he said in autobiography, but he promised to continue to follow news developments “form a perch yet to be determined.
“I just hope that wherever that is, folks will stop me, as they do today, and ask, “Didn’t you used to be Walter Cronkite?”
The Other Walter Cronkite
Besides his purely political activities, Walter Cronkite made more than 60 documentaries and in 2005 and 2006 contributed to the Huffington Post. He also contributed his voice to be the voice of Benjamin Franklin on the PBS cartoon series, “Liberty’s Kids.” For many years he served as host of the annual Kennedy Center Honors.
Walter Cronkite spent a great deal of time at his summer home in Martha’s Vineyard, sailing “The Betsy,” a sailboat that he had named for his wife. Betsy Cronkite died in 2005 after a battle with cancer.
In 2005, Walter Cronkite took the opportunity to express an honest opinion about a colleague. Dan Rather was leaving the CBS Evening News and Cronkite, uncharacteristically, decided to stop speaking with measured judgment. He criticized Rather as “playing the role of newsman”, rather than being one and said that Rather should have been replaced years earlier.”
When Katie Couric took over the CBS Evening News in September 2006, Walter Cronkite introduced her on the air and sang her praises in interviews. He made another contribution to the “CBS Evening News with Katie Couric.” The network used his voice to open the broadcast since its debut in 2006, a gesture that bridges generations and cements the indelible link of the CBS Evening News to its legendary past.
Still Capable of Covering A Story
Walter Cronkite told the New York Daily News on his 90th birthday, on November 4, 2007, “I would like to think I’m still quite capable of covering a story. “He still was capable of covering stories and forging meaningful relationships. In his last years he “kept company” as he put it with Joanna Simon, a former opera singer and sister of Carly Simon.
Walter Cronkite died in New York City on July 17, 2009, at age 92. His son Walter Leland III, his daughters Nancy Elizabeth and Mary Kathleen and four grandsons survived him.
Katie Couric wrote of Walter Cronkite on July 20, 2009, “No network or cable anchor will ever take his place. But to honor Walter, we can continue to uphold the standards he established when TV was the exciting new technology of the moment. We can all strive for excellence- to be the kind of player he was, even if we’re doing it on a smaller field.” Walter Cronkite’s name is synonymous with television news and journalism and integrity and perseverance. As he said on March 6, 1981, when he concluded his final broadcast as anchorman, “Old anchormen, you see, don’t fade away; they just keep coming back for more. And that’s the way it is.”
References
Cloud, Stanley, and Olson, Lynne. The Murrow Boys: Pioneers on the Front Lines of Broadcast Journalism. Mariner Books, 1997.
Cronkite, Walter. A Reporter’s Life. Knopf, 1996
Cronkite, Walter and Carleton, Don. Conversations with Cronkite. University of Texas at Austin, 2010.
Cronkite, Kathy. On the Edge of the Spotlight: Celebrities’ Children Speak Out About Their Lives. New York: Morrow, 1981.
Halberstam, David. The Powers that Be. University of Illinois Press, 2000.
Rottenberg, Dan. And That’s the Way It Is. American Journalism Review (College Park, Maryland), May 1994.