You cannot write an appreciation of Walter Cronkite without saying, of course, that he was the most trusted newsman of his generation, and very possibly of any generation. But to say so, and leave it there, is to miss the point.
If memory serves — and my memory goes back that far — Huntley and Brinkley were trusted then, too. And The New York Times and Life magazine. In fact, in 1964 — two years after Cronkite took over the CBS anchor desk — polls indicated 76 percent of Americans trusted the government to do the right thing most of the time.
That was then, in the pre-blogger, pre-talk-radio, pre-Watergate, pre-TV-cameras-live-from-the-bloodied-battlefield days — days never to return.
It wasn’t a more innocent time. There was nothing innocent about that time. It was a simpler time only if that meant there were only three stations on your TV, and to change the channel in that pre-remote era, you had to actually get up out of your chair and turn the dial.
It was a time when the world was going to hell — assassinations, war, riots, Kent State, Birmingham, Watergate — and there seemed to be no one (certainly not LBJ, definitely not Richard Nixon) left to trust.
But there was Uncle Walter, reliably Midwestern, middle-class, avuncular, smart but not flashy, thorough in a wire-service kind of way, a newsman’s newsman in a newspaper-to-radio-to-TV-news-in-its-infancy kind of way, with a voice and a look that seemed authoritative and fair and reliable and, well, trustworthy.
The nation needed someone to believe, and there he was, each night, when watching the nightly news would become for many a family ritual.
If Cronkite helped define the times, the times helped define him as well. In the wonder of our day, you can go to YouTube and see video of Cronkite, in black and white, pulling off his not-made-for-TV black reading glasses, his voice choking, as he announced that John Kennedy was dead — and the world, including the media world, would never quite be the same again.
It was in the days of mourning that followed the assassination that the TV news seemed to never go off, when the medium’s immediacy became indispensable, when the story could no longer be told without it.
The evening news was just then going from 15 minutes to 30 — ABC wouldn’t get there until 1967 — and the anchor became not simply someone who read the news, but someone who brought you the news.
Imagine someone today signing off his show with Cronkite’s trademark “And that’s the way it is.” Who would pretend to have that kind of authority? Imagine what fun the TV critics and the bloggers would have with anyone who tried.
It’s easy to say there will never again be anyone like Cronkite, who retired 28 years ago, long before TV news went cable, before O’Reilly and Olbermann would dominate. The audience is not only fragmented today, but scattered. Let’s just say that Cronkite wasn’t competing with Jon Stewart as a news source.
You can get some sense of Cronkite’s influence, all these years later, as we come to the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, which seems inseparable from Cronkite’s oh-boy call of the event.
But it was the trust that America had in Cronkite that led, in part, to the mistrust we would come to have in government.
It was Cronkite who went to Vietnam in 1968 and returned with the news that the war was not going the way the Johnson administration was saying.
“To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past,” Cronkite told his audience.
This was not kids protesting in the streets.
This was not the word of young reporters in the field fighting with their editors back home to get their reports in the newspaper or on the air.
This was Walter Cronkite, and people listened. If Cronkite was telling the truth — and he always did — the government had to be lying.
After Cronkite’s reports, Lyndon Johnson would tell his aides that if he’d lost Cronkite, he’d lost middle America. Johnson would decide not to run for re-election. Bobby Kennedy would run and be assassinated. At the Democratic convention in Chicago, there would be riots in the streets. Nixon would be elected. Watergate would follow.
It’s not as simple as that, of course. History doesn’t follow a straight line, and Cron kite, in any case, probably gets too much credit. People were ready to listen, and it took Cronkite years to see for himself that Vietnam was going wrong.
But today, no single journalist could have that kind of influence. There are too many checks, if not always much balance.
Still, that’s for the better.
Trust, but verify, as Ronald Reagan used to say. But trust someone, right?
Cronkite is dead at 92. So, then, who?
Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost.com.
