Walter Cronkite (1916–2009)

Walter Cronkite’s autobiography fascinates on at least two levels: 1. the storied life of a well-traveled and internationally acclaimed television journalist; 2. the prominent figures that played a part in his life due to his position and popularity.

One anecdote involves the discovery of shady dealings. He worked for a newspaper and made the mistake of changing something on a page he didn’t usually work on. The firestorm that followed shocked him, until he learned that the numbers on the show more page were communicating the winning numbers in the Mafia’s Numbers Racket.

Cronkite was a radio announcer and was famous for being able to fill in details when the communications went down during a football game. He could make up plays and then smoothly dovetail his made up events with the actual progress when the communications came back online.

One of Cronkite’s first brushes with celebrity was the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. Due to the limitations of technology at the time, some of the interesting anecdotes involve the ways they had to improvise to get film from the live event to the studio in time to show footage during the evening broadcast. This was especially challenging getting footage from England to New York on the same day.

TV made Cronkite the famous figure that he became. So it is with some irony that he marks the end of democracy with the beginning of TV. Politicians and political conventions suddenly became sanitized and dishonest when cameras were trained on them. The exposure of the democratic process could appear ugly to the untrained eye. It’s like some dishes, they are excellent, but it’s not a good idea to watch the chef create it.

By sanitizing the process itself, the end product became sanitized. The end product is the political reality today. The goal was to look polished for the camera, not to honestly work the process to the best possible outcome. “The conventions were reduced to marketing tools. From that day forward, the image on the tube has been the most important aspect of a political campaign, and politics and television have gone skipping hand in hand down this primrose path” (182–183).

Despite the demise of democracy, Cronkite remained an optimistic personality and a revered leader, or at least an accurate reflection, of mainstream American public values. His many decades of journalistic writing gave him a way with words that shows in the present autobiography. It’s an exciting travelogue through the figures and events of the twentieth century, which he covered so well for the CBS Evening News. show less

An inside look at the US from the 1920's to the end of the twentieth century, and great insight into what made Walter Cronkite the most trusted man in the country in the 1960's and 1970's. I thoroughly enjoyed this story and that surprised me, as I thought I would be reading another somewhat boring "look at me" type of book. His time overlaps my time, having grown up in the sixties, so I am sure I have a bias here. It is one of the few books of the thousands that I have read that I would show more revisit. Excellent writing style, very engaging. show less

I grew up getting a good portion of my news from Walter Cronkite. The chief impression one gets from his on-air style is one of trust: You want to believe that he's telling you what he knows to be true. To the extent that you can believe an autobiography, that impression is borne out here, although he does admit to a couple of peccadilloes in the early days of his radio career that would get any newbie fired nowadays. "Uncle Walter" comes across here as an earnest man who takes journalism show more and its responsibilities seriously. The self-deprecating style here shows an occasional amusement that middle America takes him just as seriously. Of most interest to me was Cronkite's recollections of the major stories that he and his team informed America about, many of which I remember seeing him report. Being in elementary school, I missed his announcement of JFK's death; now I'll have to find it online. Cronkite wasn't above using his influence to shape the news. His negative comments about the course of the Vietnam war helped influence LBJ's decision not to seek re-election. And he was instrumental in getting Anwar Sadat to sit down and talk peace with Menachim Begin. Cronkite was a giant of American electronic journalism who contributed, albeit with regret, to the dominance of TV news over newspaper reporting. And he seems like a genuinely decent man, worthy of the trust that America bestowed upon him every night for years. show less

Walter Cronkite’s life chronicles the rise and fall of news reporting, in my opinion. He started as a delivery and errand boy, then news gatherer and writer, then into radio news and the wire services and finally into TV in its infancy. He loved being a newspaperman and always considered himself that even when he was an anchor. He says he tried to keep the news he presented factual and impartial, whatever his personal opinion. I grew up with his broadcasts and admired his integrity. His show more book covers most of the major stories of his career, but I found his retirement and subsequent overview of the news industry to be a profound look at what is happening. His kind of news philosophy is sadly gone. We must gleen our information from sound bites and photo ops or miniscule newspaper reports from conglomerate news chains interested in the bottom line. Great book from a major representative of a bygone era. show less