Post archive: Legendary TV anchor Walter Cronkite tells it like it is
A look back at the career of The Most Trusted Man in America
Cronkite visited Florida often, spoke at the Kravis Center
Cronkite announcing Neil Armstrong’s landing on the moon on July 20, 1969
Cronkite ended his long stint in the CBS anchor chair

The first journalist I ever “knew” was Walter Cronkite, the man who came into my home every night at 6:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, on the CBS evening news. I was only a pre-teen in the ’60s and early ’70s, but my recollections of that turbulent time (which I didn’t really understand was turbulent at the time) probably come from words and images supplied by Cronkite, the longtime CBS anchorman who died Friday night at age 92.

In this era of instant Internet alerts and 24-hour cable channels, it might be hard for anybody under the age of 40 to believe that you didn’t know what was going on in the world if you didn’t watch the evening news. Sure, you had morning and afternoon newspapers, but you tuned into Walter Cronkite because the 6:30 p.m. newscast was as close to immediacy and real-time information as you could get.

Today, we Google and Twitter and surf the cable. Back then, we gathered in front of a squarish TV which didn’t have a remote or 100 channels and watched Cronkite, who looked like one of your father’s friends down at the plant or a serious but kindly middle manager at an insurance office. He was a little rumpled. He wore glasses. He didn’t look like he was hatched in a doll factory. He looked like one of us.

Cronkite sat beside a typewriter (remember those?) and spoke in a striking, radio-trained voice as he walked us through the most searing decades of modern times: Images of Vietnam and Watergate and campus protests; JFK’s assassination (who hasn’t seen the tape of him choking up as he read the bulletin announcing Kennedy’s death?) and the 1968 double tragedy of the killings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. On a more positive note, I can still remember his undisguised, childlike glee at America putting a man on the moon. “Look at those pictures, wow,” he exclaimed after Apollo 11 landed 40 years ago this month.

Our family was a Walter Cronkite family. Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC were popular, too, but if anything important was happening in the world, we wanted to hear it from Cronkite. Back then, you trusted what news broadcasters told you, and you especially trusted it if Walter Cronkite told you. (I can remember my father screaming at the newscast about all the damn Commies and hippies ruining the country, as though he could somehow communicate his feelings to Walter and Walter would understand.)

Today’s generation might question the importance of Cronkite’s role. All news anchors are now perceived, whether it’s true or not, to be glorified news readers. But you felt like Cronkite, a man who had been in the thick of it as a reporter in World War II, was more than that. He was America’s reporter. A one-man Daily Planet, equal parts impressionable Clark Kent and gruff Perry White and determined Lois Lane. If I thought of it at all back then, I probably assumed that he went out every day and gathered the news by himself.

Other than Archie Bunker calling him a “pinko,” I don’t remember anybody questioning the veracity of a Walter Cronkite newscast the way that modern anchors’ words are parsed for the tiniest inkling of “media bias.” When Cronkite famously gathered all the facts in his 1968 report against the war in Vietnam, it’s said that President Lyndon Johnson knew his reign was over. Hyperbole? Maybe, but Cronkite was as reliable a barometer of the nation’s mood as you could get before the time of overnight polls and instant ratings.

Cronkite left the newscast’s anchor chair at age 64 in 1981, and later felt he walked away too early. But I think he picked the right time. Imagine if he were in his prime today, jostling for ratings supremacy in a fractious, personality-driven news era. I can’t see him bickering with Bill O’Reilly or Twittering (although I bet his blog would be a lot more interesting than Katie Couric’s.)

Not long ago, I was watching an old YouTube clip of Cronkite’s newscast from the night the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. The shooting had happened within hours, there were no satellite feeds and Cronkite was scrambling to pull together the facts. Still, I was struck by how serious it all seemed. No snazzy graphics or showbizzy “The Death Of…” mood music. And even though King’s killing that night was deeply important and saddening news, Cronkite still managed to squeeze a bit of international news onto the latter end of the broadcast. The whole thing felt informative.

And that’s the way it was. But not anymore. The evening news seems more frivolous, less serious. Fewer people bother to tune in. In fact, I found out that Cronkite had died when I read it on a blog’s widget scroll. The times have changed, and the whole business of distributing and receiving news information is radically different. So there will never be another television newsman that we turn to like we turned to Walter Cronkite. And that’s the way it goes.