Cronkite, Walter

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Walter Cronkite

BORN: November 4, 1916 • St. Joseph, Missouri

American broadcast journalist television anchorperson

Walter Cronkite was one of the most popular and influential television journalists of the second half of the twentieth century. During his long and distinguished career in radio and then television broadcasting, he covered many important historical events, including World War II (1939–45), the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the U.S. space program, the Vietnam War (1954–75), the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (1917–1963; served 1961–63) in 1963, and the Watergate scandal that forced President Richard M. Nixon (1913–1994; served 1969–74) to resign from office in 1974.

"[In my first news anchor job in 1950] we had slides with pictures and some film and some voice on film. But it was a very, very primitive performance compared with what we have today."

Cronkite reported on many of these events as the anchor (main news presenter) of the CBS Evening News. He held this position for nearly two decades, and during that span he became America's most respected and trusted television journalist. When he finally retired from his daily news anchor duties in 1981, television scholars and viewers alike described his departure as the end of an era.

Beginning a career in journalism

Walter Cronkite was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, on November 4, 1916. His father was Walter Leland Cronkite, a dentist, and his mother was Helena (Fritsch) Cronkite. According to Cronkite, both of his parents were nurturing and supportive, and they gave him strong moral values. In his autobiography A Reporter's Life, for example, he recalls an incident in which his family was eating dinner at the home of his father's new business partner. When his father's partner struck a black delivery boy and insulted him with racial slurs, Cronkite's father angrily marched his family out the door, refusing all apologies from his partner. Cronkite later said that the memory of that night stayed with him throughout his years of reporting on the civil rights movement in the South.

The Cronkite family moved from Missouri to Texas when Walter was still a youngster. It was after this move that he became fascinated by newspaper reporting. Cronkite viewed it as an exciting and glamorous profession. "So I took up journalism," he recalled in American Heritage. "I was terribly lucky: I was in a high school that, rare in that period, had a journalism course." Cronkite described the teacher who directed the course as "the inspiration for my career."

After graduating from high school in 1933, Cronkite enrolled in the University of Texas. He studied there for the next two years, while working part-time in the offices of the Houston Post newspaper. He left college in 1935 and spent the next several years working for newspapers and radio stations. His experiences during this time ranged from full-time work as a reporter with the Post to a stint as a radio sportscaster in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

In 1939, Cronkite's journalism career got a big boost when he was offered a position as a World War II correspondent, or field reporter, with United Press (later United Press International), a news organization that provides stories to newspapers all across the United States. One year later, he married Mary Elizabeth "Betsy" Maxwell, with whom he eventually had three children.

Reporting on World War II

World War II began in 1939, when Germany—under the control of dictator Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) and his Nazi Party—invaded neighboring Poland. The following year German forces moved across Western Europe and conquered France. Hitler also forged an alliance with Italy and Japan that came to be known as the Axis Powers. These countries continued fighting in Europe against Great Britain and its allies. In June 1941, Germany attacked the Soviet Union, and six months later Japan attacked the United States. The Soviet Union and the United States joined forces with Great Britain to form the Allied Powers. Fighting continued in Europe, North Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Ocean until 1945, when Germany and Japan were forced to surrender to end the war.

Cronkite reported on the war in Europe for United Press. His work intensified as the war went on—and especially after the United States entered the conflict in 1941. Over the next four years, Cronkite filed stories from war zones all across Europe. He parachuted into hostile regions with airborne divisions, accompanied pilots on bombing missions over Germany, and filed reports from Normandy, France, after the important Allied invasion known as D-Day. This bloody battle on the coast of Normandy, which took place on June 6, 1944, is regarded by many historians as one of the key turning points of World War II. With each of these assignments, Cronkite's excellent work increased his reputation as one of the war's finest reporters.

Cronkite's high-quality reporting during the war even caught the eye of famous CBS Radio journalist Edward R. Murrow (1908–1965; see sidebar in William S. Paley entry). As one of the most famous American reporters of World War II, Murrow was known both for his bravery and for his high journalistic ethics. He offered Cronkite a spot on his top-notch CBS Radio crew covering the war in Europe. Cronkite was honored to receive the offer, but he reluctantly turned it down because he could not imagine getting better assignments than he already had with United Press.

After Germany and Japan surrendered in 1945, Cronkite worked as the chief correspondent for United Press at the Nuremberg war trials. These famous trials were held to judge captured Nazi officials who had been accused of various war crimes. In 1946, United Press sent Cronkite to the Soviet Union to open the agency's first-ever bureau in Moscow. Cronkite served as chief correspondent for United Press in the Soviet Union for the next two years. In this position, he filed many important stories during the early years of the Cold War (1945–91), a period of intense military and political rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Joining CBS

In 1950 Cronkite joined CBS, tripling his annual salary in the process. At that time, radio broadcasting was still the primary way in which CBS and other media networks reached American audiences. But Cronkite spent his first months with CBS serving as the anchor of the local television newscast for a CBS station in Washington, D.C. TV news was not technically advanced in those early days. "It was a studio presentation done with whatever newsreel they could purchase," Cronkite recalled in American Heritage. "We had slides with pictures and some film and some voice on film. But it was a very, very primitive performance compared with what we have today."

Cronkite excelled as a broadcast journalist from the outset, and within a matter of months CBS executives were looking for ways for him to have more time on television. His first major role on national television for CBS came in 1952, when he served as an anchorman for the network's coverage of the Democratic and Republican political parties' presidential nominating conventions. In 1953, he was named host of a historical re-creation series called You Are There, and he remained in this position for the next four years. In 1957, he began a ten-year period as narrator of the CBS documentary (fact-based film) series Twentieth Century.

By the late 1950s, television news broadcasting was beginning to come of age. As television technology became more sophisticated and television sets became less expensive to purchase, CBS and other media networks increasingly saw that television would dominate news in the future. With this expectation in mind, network executives began moving money, staff, and other resources away from their radio holdings and into their television operations. One of the journalists who benefited from this shift toward television was Walter Cronkite.

Becoming a famous anchorman

On April 16, 1962, Cronkite succeeded Douglas Edwards (1917–1990) as the new lead anchor for CBS's evening news program. A few months later, the show expanded from fifteen to thirty minutes. In November 1963, Cronkite became the first American anchorman to tell a stunned national audience about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Cronkite himself was so disturbed by the tragic event that he was unable to keep his emotions totally in check while covering the story.

Cronkite took over the CBS Evening News at a time when the program's ratings were far lower than the nightly news program on NBC hosted by Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. Despite Cronkite's best efforts, the show's ratings did not improve much during his first two years as lead anchor. In 1964, in fact, CBS decided to try out other anchors for the network's coverage of that year's presidential conventions. But Cronkite's absence sparked an unexpected outpouring of protests from viewers. CBS executives quickly returned Cronkite to the anchor desk, and the network's faith in him proved well deserved. By 1967, the CBS Evening News was the most popular nightly news program in the United States. With Cronkite as the face of the broadcast, it held this position for the next fifteen years.

The rise of Cronkite and the CBS Evening News has been attributed to the program's emphasis on factual news stories about important events and people, as well as Cronkite's unique blend of professionalism and personal appeal. He projected a screen image that was simultaneously reassuring and knowledgeable and attracted Americans of all political, religious, and racial backgrounds. He was widely considered to be one of the most trusted figures in America. Cronkite "became better known than most Hollywood stars," wrote Edward Bliss Jr. in Now the News. "Besides a zest for life—sailing, dancing, auto racing until his wife, Betsy, made him give it up—he had a respect for news that showed on camera. Viewers sensed the seasoning that came from experience. There was authority in what he said."

At the height of Cronkite's popularity, an estimated 19 million viewers tuned in to his broadcasts on a nightly basis. Cronkite, though, never stopped viewing himself as a working journalist. He retained the title of managing editor of the CBS Evening News throughout his years as anchor. Even after his farewell line at the end of each broadcast—"And that's the way it is"—became one of the best-known phrases in American television history, Cronkite continued to describe himself as an ordinary journalist whose main goal was to provide his audience with reliable, unbiased news.

Praising the space program and criticizing the Vietnam War

Occasionally, though, Cronkite set aside his objectivity to let viewers know his personal feelings about some issues. The Vietnam War was perhaps the best-known example of this. The United States became involved in this conflict during the Cold War, as part of its efforts to halt the spread of communism around the world. The U.S. government sent military troops to Southeast Asia in 1965 to help its ally, South Vietnam, avoid being taken over by its Communist neighbor, North Vietnam. But the Communists enjoyed a great deal of support among the Vietnamese people. In fact, South Vietnamese Communists known as the Viet Cong joined forces with the North Vietnamese Army to fight against the American and South Vietnamese troops. Even though the United States had superior weapons and equipment, the war turned into a bloody stalemate, with neither side able to achieve victory.

During the early years of the conflict, Cronkite was privately supportive of the decision to go to war. As the war dragged on, however, Cronkite began to have doubts about the optimistic forecasts of American politicians and generals. After the 1968 Tet Offensive—a massive attack by Communist forces against cities and defensive positions held by U.S. troops and their South Vietnamese allies—CBS sent Cronkite to Vietnam to get a firsthand look at the situation. When he returned, Cronkite shared his opinions about the war in an on-air editorial. Speaking before a national audience, Cronkite contradicted positive government reports and expressed his view that the U.S.-led war effort had not made much progress. He said that the government should withdraw American troops and negotiate an end to the conflict. Cronkite's strongly worded editorial forced millions of viewers to rethink their support for U.S. involvement. It also helped convince President Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–73; served 1963–68), who had taken office following Kennedy's assassination, not to run for re-election.

Cronkite was also famous for his enthusiastic support of the American space program of the 1960s. Some observers even believe that his passion for space exploration boosted the American people's support for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) more than any of the agency's public relations efforts. Millions of people tuned in to watch U.S. astronauts make the first manned space flight, the initial orbit of the Earth, and the first moon landing over the course of the decade. When Neil Armstrong (1930–) became the first human being to set foot on the Moon in 1969, the event drew an audience of 130 million people in the United States and 600 million around the world—or about one-fourth of the global population at that time. Cronkite was on the air for twenty-seven of the thirty hours of CBS's live coverage of this event. "I think it was just an incredible achievement of American technology and adventure and a nation's dedication to what appeared to be an impossible task," he later told American Heritage. "To do all of that in a decade is an exceptional performance, and the astronauts themselves were an exceptional body of men."

Life after the CBS Evening News

On March 6, 1981, Cronkite delivered his last report from behind the anchor desk of the CBS Evening News. Dan Rather took over the anchor job, while Cronkite became a special correspondent for CBS News. A few months later, Cronkite received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian (non-military) award presented by U.S. government. This was the greatest of numerous honors Cronkite received during his career, including several Emmy Awards, two Peabody Awards for journalistic excellence, and two DuPont-Columbia University Awards in broadcast journalism. In 1985, he became the second newsman, after Edward R. Murrow, to be inducted into the Television Hall of Fame.

Cronkite delivered occasional special reports on events from around the world for CBS during the mid-1980s. But during this time, relations between the semi-retired Cronkite and his longtime employer became strained. Cronkite harshly criticized CBS for making cuts to its news division's budget and changing its focus to less important stories. CBS responded by giving the legendary newsman fewer projects to work on. These developments deeply disappointed Cronkite. "I felt I had been driven from the temple where for nineteen years, along with other believers, I had worshipped the great god News on a daily basis," he wrote in A Reporter's Life.

In the 1990s, Cronkite and CBS had little contact, though he remained officially under contract to the network as a special correspondent. Cronkite produced and narrated a series of critically acclaimed documentaries for PBS, the Discovery Channel, and other networks. In 1996 he published his long-awaited autobiography, A Reporter's Life. In 1998 CNN asked Cronkite to serve as co-anchor for its coverage of astronaut John Glenn's return to space (Glenn had been one of the astronauts Cronkite covered back in the 1960s). Cronkite's wife, Betsy, died of cancer in 2005 at their home in New York City. As of 2006, Cronkite continued to live in Manhattan, keeping busy with public speaking engagements and writing on a wide variety of subjects, from politics to sailing.