The TV Zone

This war was of course the story of Walter Cronkite's career - the war that never seemed to end, while devouring 58,000 American lives (and countless more Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian lives.) It was the steady drumbeat of "Evening News" - a presence virtually every night on the program until the war's end in 1975.

The general sense - usually voiced as veiled criticism - is that Cronkite didn't come out against the war until the rest of the country had. In fact, Cronkite never saw his role to come out "against" anything - but to report what he saw or learned. What he saw and learned on a trip to the country in 1967 was inescapable, and he said as much in this famous commentary, which aired outside the confines of "Evening News."

Was he an early "booster" in private? That's what some critics have said, but there's evidence to the contrary as well. Here's an early interview with JFK, a couple of months before his death. On the jump, historian Douglas Brinkley says Cronkite was against the war long before his '68 declaration.

My question: Could any single anchor, critic, or news organization have changed the course of this tragic history?

Continue reading "Cronkite: Vietnam " »

As mentioned this morning, I wanted to give the few readers who happened by today - the eve of Cronkite's funeral tomorrow - a quick flavor for his style, work, approach and (above all) professionalism. Here's the April 4 1968 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. assassination broadcast, notable for a few things.

First, Cronkite is - as always - straight ahead, matter if fact, and completely unemotional, which pretty much characterized his style the day of JFK's murder.

Second, he reads from a paper, eschewing a TelePrompter for reasons I can't begin to explain. I believe the TelePrompter had been invented by 1968 (and in fact, originated in the 1950s) though may not have been in widespread use. Or perhaps it's possible Cronkite saw the device as a frivolity, or (worse) something that would inject artifice into a broadcast where no artifice was welcome.

He did embrace it, eventually, and I've posted his opening of the 1979 broadcast on the Three Mile Island disaster. In the space of a decade, Cronkite's style had morphed from a just-the-facts to a just-the-facts with a little more oomph and rhythm.

Third, and - oh yes - there's this observation too, from Andrew Tyndall, w ho did a content analysis of Cronkite's broadcasts from '68 (he wrote this up a decade later). Says Andrew, a respected news content analyst: "To a modern sensibility, the television news of Cronkite's time seems ponderous, unidimensional, monotonously male--almost unwatchable. To a modern ear, accustomed to the noisy skepticism of the White House press corps, icons of television journalism, such as Marvin Kalb, sound timid and uncritical."

As you watch the MLK open, it's helpful to realize that perhaps as many as 30 million people were watching. For many of those, this may have been the first they had heard...

Continue reading "Cronkite: MLK " »

Remember "Cronkite Remembers?" It was sort of the TV companion to Cronkite's Knopf bio, and aired on Discovery. Well...TDC is re-airing this Sunday. The details: "...features the esteemed veteran journalist Walter Cronkite as he takes a retrospective look at events in world history, primarily in the 20th century. He gives a personal account of the last seven decades, mixing film, still pictures, videotape, music, artifacts, and anecdotes. Eight episodes are the Early Years, World War 2, The Cold War, Television and Politics, Vietnam and Civil Rights,
Man on the Moon, The Seventies, Summing Up." Starts at 11 a.m.

Walter Cronkite's funeral is tomorrow afternoon, and so I'd like to take a look back at this career in a handful of posts today that I hope might convey to a reader exactly why this passing is so important.

(And don't worry: I'll be posting plenty of other TV stuff too...)

Been a lot written and posted over the last few days, though what I will do here is dig just a little bit deeper and (if and where possible) go back to the United Press days too. But mostly, let's just stick to TV here, and go to some of the landmark events that Cronkite covered.

If you are too young to remember the guy, and he hasn't been on TV as an employed anchorman for nearly 30 years, than I'm hoping you might find some of this of interest. Not to be trite, my friends, but it was a profoundly different time and place. TV news was still nascent, while the major news force in the U.S. remained print, though the eclipse had begun in earnest on Nov. 22, 1963.

You'll look at Cronkite and maybe wonder, "eh, what's the big deal? He was doing his job." Yup, he was, but he did it with a rock-solid professional absent any emotional or political baggage. This was - you should also realize - the man most people were looking to for their news.

So let's step back. The first is the well-thumbed look at the JFK coverage. I post this extended version because it negates that old saw that Walter wiped away tears when he reported the news of the death. In fact, he notes the death via unofficial sources at least two or three times in this report. No emotion. Just the facts as he knew them.

On the jump: The first clip is interesting because this is the first instance CBS broke in at 1:40 with news of the shots fired, at about 1:40 p.m. Cronkite's reporting from a radio booth somewhere in the Graybar building because the TV camera needed to warm up. I've also got Eddie Barker's first reports. Eddie was a CBS stringer, and Cronkite cites his reporting...

Continue reading "Walter Cronkite: A Look Back" »

(AP)

Back, gang, to sober news: The death of an old and cherished acquaintance.

Sorry for this late post, but due to circumstances beyond my immediate control - I have been away and the good people at Newsday.com are undertaking a major overhaul that should result in a beautiful and substantially enriched site but requires key adjustments in blogging - I am just now getting to Cronkite's death in this space.

What more to be said about Cronkite that has not been said already? (If you care to read, I've posted my appreciation for the Sunday paper on the jump.) Possibly just a personal aside. I've known Cronkite as a TV beat reporter for a little over twenty years, and first met him at a TV conference in Cannes back in '88 (or was it '87? Cronkite would chide me if I got the date wrong.) We shared a few bottles of wine under a warm Riviera sun, and basking in the glow of a seasonably warm day and Cronkite's perfect recall of years gone by and old stories both famous and obscure, I fancied I had died and gone to some sort of wonderfully unexpected heaven for reporters. This was Walter Cronkite sitting before me - not a TV icon but a figure of human dimension who affected little to no regard for his illustrious past.

We maintained a friendly relationship for years - though never as source-to-reporter (Walter really had no idea what was going on inside CBS after he left, in part because he didn't want to know and in part because the new power structure, controlled by Dan Rather, made sure he was kept out of the loop.)

In fact, Walter was - many believe - the key source for some reporters during the big boardroom brawls of the mid-80s, when Ted Turner tried to take over CBS, then Larry Tisch fooled the board into letting him control the company. (Cronkite was a board member.) Tisch was a disaster, gutted CBS News, and earned the enmity of Walter. That last bit is pure supposition - I never heard Cronkite say a negative word about Tisch, but I'm reasonably certain Tisch came to despise the great Cronkite.

But I digress. I wrote stories about Cronkite. Reviewed his occasional specials. Reviewed his book, too and - if my recollection is correct on this matter - encouraged him to write it. (I wasn't the only one - everyone told Walter to just write the damn book for Knopf but everyone suspected he was having too much fun in retirement to subject himself to the torture or suspected he was afraid he wouldn't come off sufficiently distinguished in the accounting of his own life; whatever the reason, the book was finally written.)

I learned many things about Cronkite over the years.

He loved Manhattans (that's a drink, BTW).

He loved people, especially young people.

He was generous with his stories and his time.

He loved car racing (and did race, to CBS's great chagrin) and boats, and sailing, and CBS, and CBS News, and his cherished colleagues there, and Martha's Vineyard, and his children, and his wife Betsy - who was truly the power behind Cronkite - and New York, and good wine, and good food, and his fame, and science, and NASA, and the country, and Democrats (Republicans less so). He loved to be recognized on the streets, and he was everywhere.

Mostly, he just loved life. I think that was Cronkite's great and not so-well hidden secret - that life is a great and joyous adventure, and best to live it as if it were the most thrilling movie you had ever seen, except for the extremely wonderful fact that you were actually the STAR of it.

Walter - I guess he wouldn't mind if I just called him "Walter" now - was a wonderful human being. I miss him already and always will.

Continue reading "Cronkite " »