- Share This Post
- submit
- 13
-
Sparkle (0)
The first time I saw Walter Cronkite in person was during the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968. The one with the riots. I was still working in the McCarthy Campaign then. He was anchoring CBS coverage and some kind producer had taken pity on me and let me into the CBS suite at the Hilton. It was pretty tear-gassy outside. I didn't speak to him of course; everyone was working and there was no time for hellos, until later.
Of course he'd been in my life almost as long as I could remember. Like so many families of the 60's we often "had dinner" with Mr. Cronkite. We'd turn the TV around so it faced the dining room and watch the news, (just like Pam Spaulding's family) and argue about it as we ate. I learned later when I worked at TODAY about the importance of an anchor you can "invite into your home." Mr. Cronkite was certainly that. When the obits called him "the most trusted man in America" they weren't kidding. He came to dinner, and later, to my dorm, where I watched him declare his conclusion that the Vietnam War could not be won. The night that happened, Lyndon Johnson told a staffer "If I have lost Walter Cronkite, I have lost Middle America."
He told us who won elections and that President Kennedy was dead and, and Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy, that Neal Armstrong was walking on the surface of the moon. Rachel Sklar has aggregated video of these moments. Go look.
Right after Chicago I went to work for CBS News myself, invited to help on coverage of the Nixon Inauguration. Early in the fall, Walter came to town for something and I was finally introduced. "Oh," he said, " you're the one they put into the budget as Xerox paper." I never found out if that was at all true (it was possible since I was hired suddenly and, I understand now, in a slot that probably had no budget line), but it was funny, and I appreciated it. And it was a great way to start out.
After getting married and bouncing around a bit, we moved to New York and I worked for CBS there, where I often dealt with the "CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, if seldom with the Great Man himself. His producers made decisions and discussed them with him; if he wanted changes, changes were made. Often feature stories were ordered - and we'd be bewildered at their origins since they seemed kind out of left field. The answer, which we learned to expect, was "It's a WW" - a "Walter wants." Not only did he have a long journalistic career including coverage of Normandy and the rest of World War II; he was responsible for CBS News' dominance of the ratings so he usually got what he wanted. It made lots of us mad, but at the same time, I figured he'd earned the right to final thumbs up or down. After all, our newscast was known around the US and elsewhere as "the Cronkite Show." I don't think there's any one program today that has dominated awareness for so long.
He was an anchorman and a big shot but he was also a dad, and when I was working in the New York bureau that became all too clear. I got a call from the local station, WCBS. They had a police officer on the phone reporting that something terrible had happened to a young woman who looked a great deal like one of Cronkite's daughters. I went to Bud Benjamin, the revered News Vice President and told him; he immediately called Walter and asked him to come to his office (Walter's was all glass - no privacy.)
When Cronkite arrived, I was asked to repeat my conversation with the poiice. Probably the hardest thing I ever did - and certainly well beyond the experience I'd had then. Can you imagine, 27 years old and telling the most trusted man in America that his daughter may have died? Walter nodded, looked at our boss and, ever the professional, said "You have someone to do the show tonight?" The answer was, of course, affirmative, and he took off.
