(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.
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