To say 'I grew up watching Walter Cronkite' seems almost an afterthought.
Everyone of my generation grew up watching Walter Cronkite.
Before the 24-hour news cycle, and Twitter and mobile devices, millions of Americans made an appointment with Walter to find out what was happening in the world, every night at dinner time.
Cronkite closed each broadcast, "and that's the way it is," a simple and unassuming epilogue that was, at once, reassuring and unpretentious.
Cronkite earned monikers befitting a superhero: "The most trusted man in America." Or... "The voice of God."
But they were more than mere marketing slogans. They were, for many, accurate descriptions of the Cronkite who brought
so much history into so many living rooms.
By the time he became the anchor of the CBS evening news, Cronkite was already a veteran reporter. He'd worked as an announcer in radio sports dating back to the 1930's. He covered bombing raids over Germany as a reporter for the United Press in World War II.
While Cronkite worked alongside the likes of Edward R. Murrow, CBS News was still a fledging news organization trying to lasso an uncertain technology.
There are those who might argue Walter Cronkite was simply in the right place at the right time.
The dozen years that followed his ascension to the evening news anchor chair were some of the most tumultuous and meaningful years in our nation's history.
Millions marched for civil rights, only to watch their leader become a martyr on a hotel balcony in 1968.
A young president was gunned down in Dallas. His brother would be taken by an assassin's bullet just five years later.
Fifty thousand Americans journeyed halfway around the world to fight and die in a war few understood, and no one knew how to win.
A president would decide that war left him with little chance to run for re-election. And the man who replaced him would resign in disgrace in the worst scandal to ever take hold in the White House.
Man landed on the moon.
And Cronkite had a front-row seat.
I would argue Cronkite was not just in the right place, he was also the right man in the right place.
Stern and straight, he was, most nights, simply an earnest messenger. Yet, there were the rare moments when he showed compassion, emotion and even a carefully considered observation that stepped outside the journalist's box, and endeared him to his viewers.
Cronkite was on the anchor desk on November 22, 1963 when he was handed a flash bulletin confirming what a young correspondent named Dan Rather had been reporting for a couple of hours.
Cronkite paused, removed his glasses, his voice quaking as he confirmed the death of President Kennedy.
He remained calm enough to relay what the Constitution dictated would happen next. But his humanity showed.
Six years later, he would remove his trademark horn-rimmed glasses once again, this time in sheer wonderment, to tell us Neil Armstrong had taken the first footsteps on the moon.
Cronkite knew a journalist's role was not simply to repeat the declarations of others with equal weight, turning a blind eye to the truth which lies somewhere in the middle.
On February 27, 1968, he returned from Vietnam on assignment to cover the Tet offensive, and ended his evening broadcast with a rare editorial. It was a reasoned observation which, nonetheless, was an indictment of the policy of the Johnson administration.
He concluded:
"it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could. This is Walter Cronkite. Good Night"
The most trusted man in America had said, at the height of our efforts there, that the war in Vietnam could not be won.
Upon hearing Cronkite's words, President Johnson reportedly said, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America."
No other journalist will ever wield such power again. The stream of information which comes into our lives today dilutes the messages of those who shout from their perches on cable channels and talk radio and the blogosphere.
We are lucky the fledgling technology of television, which held so much influence and promise in its infancy, was carefully stewarded by a man who approached his work as if he had been crowned a philosopher king.
He served viewers, rather than serving himself. He saw history as it unfolded and told the story as plainly as he knew how. His emotions were real, and his contributions to our discourse were reasoned and free of the influence of politics and special interests.
It should be noted here that Cronkite was alarmed at the evolution of modern media, and he wasn't shy about letting us know it. He thought our newscasts were too fast-paced, racing from one story to the next without giving viewers the benefit of context. He worried we sacrificed accuracy and depth in lieu of speed in a 24-hour internet-driven news cycle.
And in comparison with the trail he blazed in the infancy of television, he was right. But Cronkite, I hope, also took heart in the students in the school which bears his name at ASU. I hope he understood that for all the changes in the medium, there still are, at its core, people who look to him as the first and best example of a master of his craft.
All of us who understand his legacy are better for it. And that's the way it is.
