NEW YORK — Walter Cronkite was remembered as a great newsman, sailor, friend and father during Thursday’s funeral for the CBS anchor.
“I was often asked, what he’s really like? And I would always answer, ‘He’s just the way you hope he is,’ ” said Mike Ashford, a Cronkite friend of more than 30 years and one of the speakers.
Another speaker, longtime CBS newsman and “60 Minutes” commentator Andy Rooney, recalled meeting Cronkite when they both were in England covering World War II.
“You get to know someone pretty well in a war,” Rooney said.
“I just feel so terrible about Walter’s death that I can hardly say anything,” he admitted, and excused himself.
The remarkably intimate, even homey ceremony was witnessed by a near-capacity crowd at the enormous St. Bartholomew’s Church in midtown Manhattan, where the Cronkite family has worshiped for years.
Broadcast journalists — co-workers, competitors, successors — were on hand, including Connie Chung, Bob Schieffer, Diane Sawyer, Brian Williams, Dan Rather, Barbara Walters, Charles Gibson, Matt Lauer, Tom Brokaw, Morley Safer and Meredith Vieira.
A separate memorial will be held within the next few weeks at New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.
Cronkite is to be cremated and his cremains buried next to his wife, Betsy, in the family plot at a cemetery in Kansas City, Mo.
