TV News Legend Walter Cronkite Dies at 92

From People.com

By Stephen M. Silverman
Originally posted Friday July 17, 2009 08:40 PM EDT

Quote :

Walter Cronkite, for decades the embodiment of TV news, died Friday
night in New York, his family said. The avuncular anchor once dubbed
"the most trusted man in America" was 92 and had been in failing
health.

“My father Walter Cronkite died,” his son Chip said Friday
night. CBS interrupted programming to show an obit of the legendary
anchorman.

Missouri born and Texas raised, the
robust young Cronkite dropped out of college in 1935 to cover news and
sports for various newspapers around the heartland, and, in 1936, met
his future wife, Betsy, while working at the Oklahoma City radio
station WKY. World War II found him actively serving as a correspondent
for United Press International – landing ashore on D-Day, parachuting
with the l0lst Airborne, flying a bombing mission over Germany,
covering the Nuremburg trials and opening UPI's first post-war Moscow
bureau.


Joining CBS in 1950 – initially at the network's Washington
affiliate before he went national – Cronkite became a familiar figure
on what was then considered "the Tiffany network," hosting a number of
CBS programs, including the historical You Are There and the more serious Twentieth Century. His career turning point came in 1952, as the anchor of CBS's coverage of the presidential conventions.


Anchor Man Supreme

The professional role for which
Cronkite will be forever etched in the collective public's memory was
as the warm and wise anchor of the CBS Evening News, starting
in April 1962. Nineteen months later, on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, during
a news bulletin that interrupted regular daytime programming, Cronkite
held back his emotions as best he could and announced to the country
that an assassin's bullet had taken the life of President John F.
Kennedy – then removed his eyeglasses and wiped away an unavoidable
tear.


That moment and Cronkite's coverage of the 1969 moon walk by
NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong are iconic moments in American
television, and yet there were so many more. When, in 1968, Cronkite
said on-air that the Vietnam War could not be won, public opinion so
dramatically shifted against U.S. involvement in the conflict that
President Lyndon Johnson withdrew from running for re-election. "If
I've lost Cronkite," LBJ was quoted as saying, "I've lost America."

In a widely covered news event of his own, Cronkite retired from Evening News
on March 6, 1981, delivering for one final time his signature sign-off:
"And that's the way it is." But that distinguished voice never strayed
far, and in 2006 could be heard introducing the CBS Evening News With Katie Couric.


Loved to Sail

In his personal life, he and Betsy
Cronkite – actually, Mary Elizabeth Maxwell Cronkite – had three
children: daughters Nancy and Kathy, son Walter III, and four
grandsons. Betsy died in 2005. In addition to living in Manhattan, the
Cronkites had a home on Martha's Vineyard, where, in his free time,
Walter loved to sail.

Though it will be behind a desk, and not a mast, that Walter Cronkite will be remembered. As he said on his last Evening News
broadcast, before turning his desk over to Dan Rather, "Old anchormen,
you see, don't fade away – they just keep coming back for more."

damn LUV you look like a genie I know

LOL Ive been watching this alot lately. I had forgotten how pretty Barbara Eden was.

As far as I'm concerned Cronkite was far bigger than Michael....uh Michelle....uh "It" Jackson.

I watched as Walter covered every major story there was with a humble class no other newsman had. There was just something about the guy that made me want to hear what he had to say.

luv2cook wrote:

LOL Ive been watching this alot lately. I had forgotten how pretty Barbara Eden was.

LOL, My hubby too, this explains a lot of his recent behavior.

I hadn't heard about Walter, that's too bad! Lived a long good life though!

Cronkite always came across as truthful and sincere, didn't have an agenda like you feel in the news media today.