The New York Times
Editorial | Appreciations
Walter Cronkite
To most of us, most of the time, the news is something that happens to other
people, the disembodied events of the day. It was Walter Cronkite’s job to
embody them for us, to give them presence in our lives.
You may not have known much about how the “CBS Evening News” was assembled in
Cronkite’s day, from 1962 to 1981. But you could not help feeling its
significance, its weight, by hearing it told in that voice — in that
reassuringly unaccented accent, the product of growing up along the 95th
parallel, more or less smack in the heart of the United States.
In retrospect, Walter Cronkite’s authority is something of a mystery. Its
sources are obvious. His reporting during World War II alone would have fueled
half a dozen careers. The mystery is the modesty within his authority. His job
was to appear unfazed, unchanged by the events he described. But from time to
time — reporting President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, reporting from
Vietnam, reporting that first step on the moon — he made it clear that the news
of the day had changed not only us but him.
In those moments he seemed his most authoritative.
How one becomes a proxy for a nation, as Cronkite did, is a matter of luck and
timing and experience. But it’s also a matter of character. Cronkite had
limitless stores of character. And limitless stores of wonder. He never grew
weary of the world or reporting on it. He seemed bemused by the accolades and
almost reverential of the trust that so many millions of Americans placed in
him.
Some deaths end only a life. Some end a generation. Walter Cronkite’s death
ends something larger and more profound. He stood for a world, a century, that
no longer exists. His death is like losing the last veteran of a world-changing
war, one of those men who saw too much but was never embittered by it. Walter
Cronkite’s gift was to talk to us about what he saw, and we are very lucky to
have been able to listen.
VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: July 19, 2009
