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FORD
07-17-2009, 08:35 PM
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(CBS) Walter Cronkite, who personified television journalism for more than a generation as anchor and managing editor of the "CBS Evening News," has died Friday night in New York. He was 92.

Known for his steady and straightforward delivery, his trim moustache, and his iconic sign-off line -"That’s the way it is" - Cronkite dominated the television news industry during one of the most volatile periods of American history. He broke the news of the Kennedy assassination, reported extensively on Vietnam and Civil Rights and Watergate, and seemed to be the very embodiment of TV journalism.

"Cronkite came to be the sort of personification of his era," veteran PBS Correspondent Robert McNeil once said. "He became kind of the media figure of his time. Very few people in history, except maybe political and military leaders, are the embodiment of their time, and Cronkite seemed to be."

At one time, his audience was so large, and his image so credible, that a 1972 poll determined he was "the most trusted man in America" - surpassing even the president, vice president, members of Congress and all other journalists. In a time of turmoil and mistrust, after Vietnam and Watergate, the title was a rare feat - and the label stuck.

It was a remarkable achievement for a man whose beginnings were anything but remarkable.

Walter Leland Cronkite was born in St. Joseph, Missouri on November 4, 1916, the only child of a dentist father and homemaker mother. When he was still young, his family moved to Texas. One day, he read an article in "Boys Life" magazine about the adventures of reporters working around the world - and young Cronkite was hooked. He began working on his high school newspaper and yearbook and, in 1933, he entered the University of Texas at Austin to study political science, economic and journalism. He never graduated. He took a part time job at the Houston Post, left college to do what he loved: report.

After working as a general assignment reporter for the Post and a sportscaster in Oklahoma City, Cronkite got a job in 1939 working for United Press. He went to Europe to cover World War II as part of the "Writing 69th," a group of reporters who found themselves covering some of the most important developments in the war, including the D-Day invasion, bombing missions over Germany, and later, the Nuremburg war trials. In 1940, he married Mary Elizabeth Maxwell - known as "Betsy" - and for the next six decades she was the dutiful reporter’s wife, enduring sometimes long separations while he covered the world, and raising three children. Cronkite once wrote about her: ''I attribute the longevity of our marriage to Betsy's extraordinary keen sense of humor, which saw us over many bumps (mostly of my making), and her tolerance, even support, for the uncertain schedule and wanderings of a newsman."

While working for the UP, Cronkite was offered a job at CBS by Edward R. Murrow - and he turned it down. He finally accepted a second offer in 1950, and stepped into the new medium of television. In the early '50s, it was a medium many of the "serious" journalists at CBS and elsewhere viewed with skepticism, if not disdain. Radio and print, they contended, were for real reporters; television was for actors or comedians.

At first, it seemed an unlikely fit. Walter Cronkite, with his serious demeanor and unpretentious style - honed by his years of unvarnished reporting at UP - was named host of "You Are There" in which key moments of history were recreated by actors. Cronkite was depicted on camera interviewing "Joan of Arc" or "Sigmund Freud." But somehow, he managed to make it believable.

The young director of the series, Sidney Lumet said he picked Cronkite for the job because "the premise of the series was so silly, so outrageous, that we needed somebody with the most American, homespun, warm ease about him."

During his early years at CBS, Cronkite was also named host of "The Morning Show" on CBS, where he was paired with a partner: a puppet named Charlemagne. But he distinguished himself with his coverage of the 1952 and 1956 political conventions and as narrator of the documentary series "Twentieth Century." In 1961, CBS named him the anchor of the "CBS Evening News" - a 15 minute news summary anchored for several years by Douglas Edwards.

At the time, the broadcast lived in the long shadow cast by NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report, the most popular television newscast in the country. Expectations for the Cronkite newscast were not high. But in 1963, the broadcast was expanded to 30 minutes - and Cronkite won a title for which he had long campaigned, Managing Editor. The added time gave the broadcast more depth and variety, and the title gave Cronkite more influence over the content and coverage.

And it came at a significant time. In September of that year, Cronkite launched the expanded program with an extended interview with President John F. Kennedy. Two months later, it was Cronkite who broke into the soap opera "As The World Turns" to announce that the president had been shot - and later to declare that he had been killed.

It was a defining moment for Cronkite, and for the country. His presence - in shirtsleeves, slowly removing his glasses to check the time and blink back tears - captured both the sense of shock, and the struggle for composure, that would consume America and the world over the next four days.

Cronkite’s audience began to grow - but not quickly enough for network executives who, in 1964, decided to try an anchor team at the conventions - Robert Trout and Roger Mudd - to rival Chet Huntley and David Brinkley at NBC. Cronkite was not happy about the change, and viewer reaction was swift. Over 11,000 letters poured in protesting the switch. Network executives never tried that again. In 1966, The CBS Evening News began to overtake the Huntley-Brinkley report in the ratings, and in 1967 it took the lead. It remained there until Cronkite’s retirement in 1981.

They were years filled with astonishing change - and indelible history. In 1968, Cronkite returned from visiting Vietnam and declared on television:"It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is a stalemate." President Lyndon Johnson, on hearing that, reportedly said, "If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost America." Not long after, Johnson declared his intention not to run for re-election. That same year saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy - two more shocking moments that bound the country together through the medium of television. Once again, as he had five years earlier, Cronkite was the steadying force during a time of national sorrow.

“It’s a kind of chemistry," former Johnson aide and CBS News commentator Bill Moyers once said. "The camera either sees you as part of the environment or it rejects you as an alien body, and Walter had ‘it,’ whatever ‘it’ was."

One of Cronkite’s enthusiasms was the space race. And in 1969, when America sent a man to the moon, he couldn’t contain himself. "Go baby, go!," he said, as Apollo XI took off. He ended up performing what critics described as"Walter to Walter" coverage of the mission - staying on the air for 27 of the 30 hours that Apollo XI took to complete its mission.

Cronkite even managed to have a surprising influence on world affairs. In 1977, he interviewed Egyptian President Anwar El-Sadat, who told Cronkite that, if invited, he’d go to Jerusalem to meet with Prime Minister Menachem Begin. The move was unprecedented. The next day, Begin invited Sadat to Jerusalem for talks that eventually led to the Camp David accords and the Israeli-Egyptian treaty.

In 1981, Cronkite announced he would retire at the age of 65, to make way for a new anchor in the chair, Dan Rather. A commentator in the New Republic said it was like"George Washington leaving the dollar bill." There were so many requests for interviews, eventually all of them were turned down.

In retirement, Cronkite kept busy with other projects - a short-lived magazine program on CBS called "Walter Cronkite’s Universe," a few documentaries, plus a seat on the CBS board of directors. He spent a considerable amount of time at his summer home in Martha’s Vineyard, sailing the boat he named for his wife, "The Betsy." And he wrote his autobiography, "A Reporter’s Life," published in 1996.

In 2005, Cronkite’s wife Betsy died after a battle with cancer. His two daughters and son survive him.

While Cronkite kept a lower profile in his later years, he did make a significant contribution to the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric: it is his voice that has been used during the opening of the broadcast since its debut in 2006, bridging generations and signifying the newscast’s strong link to its storied past.

As Cronkite said on March 6, 1981, concluding his final broadcast as anchorman: "Old anchormen, you see, don’t fade away, they just keep coming back for more. And that’s the way it is."

FORD
07-17-2009, 08:38 PM
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Seshmeister
07-17-2009, 08:42 PM
Speaking the obvious but I'm still trying to get used to this middle aged shit. I guess that's our demographic now to sit and watch week after week as every one of our cultural references dies.

hideyoursheep
07-17-2009, 08:43 PM
In 1968, Cronkite returned from visiting Vietnam and declared on television:"It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is a stalemate."

And the BCE has had a hard-on for CBS ever since...

Seshmeister
07-17-2009, 08:43 PM
To paraphrase Woody Allen getting old sucks but it's much better than the alternative...

FORD
07-17-2009, 08:45 PM
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FORD
07-17-2009, 08:48 PM
This clip seems timely, given the 40th anniversary of the moon landing.....

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FORD
07-17-2009, 08:52 PM
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GAR
07-17-2009, 08:58 PM
I bought one of his books and as a leveler it worked fantastic on the kitchen table supporting the crooky leg.

FORD
07-17-2009, 09:03 PM
Cronkite announces the death of LBJ
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Nickdfresh
07-17-2009, 09:41 PM
The consummate newsman/anchor/reporter who had more integrity in his pinky than all those fuckers on CNN, CSNBC, MSNBC, FOX, Nickelodeon, etc. combined...

To paraphrase another legend, "good night and good luck," newsman...

FORD
07-17-2009, 09:44 PM
Not the most earth shattering historical event compared to assassinations and wars, but something that only happens a few times a century. I remember watching this eclipse through some homemade pinhole camera sort of thing in 7th grade.

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sadaist
07-17-2009, 09:45 PM
Can't even open Yahoo! anymore without a death headlining it.

FORD
07-17-2009, 10:39 PM
<div id="content">

<h1>Walter Cronkite: What I've Learned</h1>

<p class="subhead">The late, greatest anchorman on the Apollo 11 landing, the war in Iraq, the president crying, and more</p>

<p class="subhead">By: Cal Fussman</p>

<img src="/cm/esquire/images/O3/walter-cronkite-wil-lg.jpg" alt="The late, greatest anchorman on the Apollo 11 landing, the war in Iraq, the president crying, and more" />

<p><p><i>Originally published in the April 2006 issue</i></p><p><b>When the <i>Eagle</i> landed on the moon, I was speechless</b> -- overwhelmed, like most of the world. Couldn't say a word. I think all I said was, "Wow! Jeez!" Not exactly immortal. Well, I was nothing if not human.</p><p> Interviewing friends is a tough one. Your duty to the interview must transcend your friendship. Occasionally you'll lose a friend.</p><p> <b> I became friendly with Dwight Eisenhower.</b> He told me a delightful story about General Patton that showed a lot about the character of both men. At one point before D-day, Patton made a statement in England that it was the destiny of America and Britain to rule the world. It wasn't the first time the bellicose Patton had gotten into trouble. He was very egotistical, and he assumed that he knew how to win any war in any place. This time, there were demands in Washington that Patton be sent home. So Eisenhower called for him. Eisenhower told me he thought he had no choice but to fire Patton. When Patton came in, he was wearing that helmet liner of his with big stars on it. He knew what was coming. He stood at attention at Eisenhower's desk. Eisenhower asked him to sit down. Patton said he preferred to stand. Eisenhower told him to at least stand at ease, and he proceeded to tell him all the reasons that he was in trouble. Tears began to well in Patton's eyes. But just as Eisenhower was getting to the point of ordering him back home, he realized that he simply couldn't do it. He needed him too much. So Eisenhower told himself, Dammit, I'll just take the licks if I have to on this one. He got up, walked over to George, and said, "Despite all that, I'm going to give you another chance." Patton let out a sob and threw his head on Eisenhower's shoulder, and the helmet liner came off and clattered across the floor. It was so ridiculous that Eisenhower laughed. When he did, Patton pushed him away and said, "Thank you for that, and I'll stay, you son of a bitch." Then he stamped out. </p><p> <b>Would it be better to have a president who cries easily?</b> Well, that depends on what he cried about. I would not like the thought of a president who could not cry. That would be worse than one who cried over the right things. Which, in this case, would be the things I would cry over.</p><p> When I was young, we didn't have the slightest concept of an energy problem -- particularly since I was living in Houston, the heart of the burgeoning energy business. The only shortage was in my own tank. One night, as I was going out on a date, I said to the filling-station attendant, "I'll have a gallon." You see, I had a quarter, and I was expecting six cents change. Next thing I know, the pump is registering six gallons. I said, "Hey, wait a minute!" The attendant said, "Oh, I thought you said <i>eight </i>gallons!" So I had to leave my watch with him until I could come back the next day and pay him off. The date was successful, though, if I remember correctly.</p><p> <b> Would Oprah make a good president?</b> Well, apparently so. She seems to have an understanding of our problems. A great deal of that probably comes from being African-American and suffering the indignities of that. And she certainly has shown that she has a literate approach to solving problems. So I'd like to think she'd be a good president. Do you know something that I don't?</p><p> When President Johnson heard my report that said we should get out of Vietnam, he snapped off the TV and said, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America." A couple of days after that, Johnson said he was not going to run for reelection. Later on, somebody made the joke that Johnson had gotten it wrong. What he should have said was, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost <i>all</i> of America." To be honest, I was rather amazed that my reporting from Vietnam had such an effect on history.</p><p> <b> Indeed, we are in another Vietnam.</b> Almost play by play. It's a terrible mistake that we're in Iraq, and it's a terrible mistake to insist on staying there.</p><p> Probably the most important single element that I found in my own marriage was a sense of humor. My wife had a delicious sense of humor, and I think I have an adequate one. The funny things Betsy did to me on an almost daily basis could fill up one of those old Sears, Roebuck catalogs. She just wouldn't take things seriously that didn't need to be taken seriously. It was tough for us to get together and try to solve a serious problem because humor would begin to creep in -- which would save the day most of the time.</p><p> I've known Joanna Simon for many years -- she sold Betsy and me our apartment. Joanna and her husband also lived in the building, and Betsy and I saw a lot of them through the years. Joanna's husband died three years ago. Then last year, after Betsy died, we two bereft people allayed our loneliness by sharing social activities with many mutual friends. Now we are testing the possibility of eternal youth. [Joanna is sixty-five.] Anyone who knows us would not be surprised if we get married.</p><p> Is it tough to keep up? Yes, but she's doing a very good job of it.</p><p> <b> I grew my mustache </b>when I was nineteen in order to look older. I never shaved it off even though it overran its usefulness many, many years ago. Once you get started in television, people associate you with your physical appearance -- and that includes the mustache. So I can't shave it off now. If I did, I'd have to answer too much mail. </p></p>

<p id="findthisarticle"><b>Find this article at: </b><a href="/features/what-ive-learned/ESQ0406WILCRONKITE_170">http://www.esquire.com/features/what-ive-learned/ESQ0406WILCRONKITE_170</a></p>

</div>

sadaist
07-18-2009, 04:05 AM
He was a bit before my time, but I can appreciate his importance in the news industry. The man was an American icon. We could really use an anchor person like this now. I can't think of anyone currently that could even come close.

thome
07-18-2009, 04:29 AM
Yes, we could use someone now, it's just impossibly important and takes a man of true impossible important importanturpitude............ who?? in the world could we get to tell us who is on fire in Philly??


RIP

ZahZoo
07-18-2009, 11:21 AM
"And that's the way it is..."

Outside of the last decade... that man has been the voice of news/history all my life. To this day my memories of Vietnam, JFK, MLK, LBJ, Nixion/wategate, Carter & middle-east peace, Reagan assasination attempt, all the Apollo missions, bi-centenial, 1st space shuttle launches, etc... have his voice as a backing track in my mind.

RIP

FORD
07-18-2009, 07:03 PM
Published on Saturday, July 18, 2009 by Salon.com
Celebrating Cronkite While Ignoring What He Did

by Glenn Greenwald


"The Vietcong did not win by a knockout [in the Tet Offensive], but neither did we. The referees of history may make it a draw. . . . We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. . . .

"For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. . . . To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past"
-- Walter Cronkite, CBS Evening News, February 27, 1968 .


"I think there are a lot of critics who think that [in the run-up to the Iraq War] . . . . if we did not stand up and say this is bogus, and you're a liar, and why are you doing this, that we didn't do our job. I respectfully disagree. It's not our role"
-- David Gregory, MSNBC, May 28, 2008 .



When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam died, media stars everywhere commemorated his death as though he were one of them -- as though they do what he did -- even though he had nothing but bottomless, intense disdain for everything they do. As he put it in a 2005 speech to students at the Columbia School of Journalism: "the better you do your job, often going against conventional mores, the less popular you are likely to be . . . . By and large, the more famous you are, the less of a journalist you are."

In that same speech, Halberstam cited as the "proudest moment" of his career a bitter argument he had in 1963 with U.S. Generals in Vietnam, by which point, as a young reporter, he was already considered an "enemy" of the Kennedy White House for routinely contradicting the White House's claims about the war (the President himself asked his editor to pull Halberstam from reporting on Vietnam). During that conflict, he stood up to a General in a Press Conference in Saigon who was attempting to intimidate him for having actively doubted and aggressively investigated military claims, rather than taking and repeating them at face value:


Picture if you will rather small room, about the size of a classroom, with about 10 or 12 reporters there in the center of the room. And in the back, and outside, some 40 military officers, all of them big time brass. It was clearly an attempt to intimidate us.

General Stilwell tried to take the intimidation a step further. He began by saying that Neil and I had bothered General Harkins and Ambassador Lodge and other VIPs, and we were not to do it again. Period.

And I stood up, my heart beating wildly -- and told him that we were not his corporals or privates, that we worked for The New York Times and UP and AP and Newsweek, not for the Department of Defense.

I said that we knew that 30 American helicopters and perhaps 150 American soldiers had gone into battle, and the American people had a right to know what happened. I went on to say that we would continue to press to go on missions and call Ambassador Lodge and General Harkins, but he could, if he chose, write to our editors telling them that we were being too aggressive, and were pushing much too hard to go into battle. That was certainly his right.

Can anyone imagine any big media stars -- who swoon in reverence both to political power and especially military authority -- defying military instructions that way, let alone being proud of it? Halberstam certainly couldn't imagine any of them doing it, which is why, in 1999, he wrote :


Obviously, it should be a brilliant moment in American journalism, a time of a genuine flowering of a journalistic culture . . .

But the reverse is true. Those to whom the most is given, the executives of our three networks, have steadily moved away from their greatest responsibilities, which is using their news departments to tell the American people complicated truths, not only about their own country, but about the world around us. . . .

Somewhere in there, gradually, but systematically, there has been an abdication of responsibility within the profession, most particularly in the networks. . . . So, if we look at the media today, we ought to be aware not just of what we are getting, but what we are not getting; the difference between what is authentic and what is inauthentic in contemporary American life and in the world, with a warning that in this celebrity culture, the forces of the inauthentic are becoming more powerful all the time.

All of that was ignored when he died, with establishment media figures exploiting his death to suggest that his greatness reflected well on what they do, as though what he did was the same thing as what they do (much the same way that Martin Luther King's vehement criticisms of the United States generally and its imperialism and aggression specifically have been entirely whitewashed from his hagiography).

So, too, with the death of Walter Cronkite. Tellingly, his most celebrated and significant moment -- Greg Mitchell says "this broadcast would help save many thousands of lives, U.S. and Vietnamese, perhaps even a million" -- was when he stood up and announced that Americans shouldn't trust the statements being made about the war by the U.S. Government and military, and that the specific claims they were making were almost certainly false. In other words, Cronkite's best moment was when he did exactly that which the modern journalist today insists they must not ever do -- directly contradict claims from government and military officials and suggest that such claims should not be believed. These days, our leading media outlets won't even use words that are disapproved of by the Government.

Despite that, media stars will spend ample time flamboyantly commemorating Cronkite's death as though he reflects well on what they do (though probably not nearly as much time as they spent dwelling on the death of Tim Russert, whose sycophantic servitude to Beltway power and "accommodating head waiter"-like, mindless stenography did indeed represent quite accurately what today's media stars actually do). In fact, within Cronkite's most important moments one finds the essence of journalism that today's modern media stars not only fail to exhibit, but explicitly disclaim as their responsibility.

UPDATE: A reader reminds me that -- very shortly after Tim Russert's June, 2008 death -- long-time Harper's editor Lewis Lapham attended a party to mark the release of a new book on Hunter Thompson, and Lapham said a few words. According to New York Magazine's Jada Yuan, this is what happened:


Lewis Lapham isn’t happy with political journalism today. “There was a time in America when the press and the government were on opposite sides of the field,” he said at a premiere party for Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson on June 25. “The press was supposed to speak on behalf of the people. The new tradition is that the press speaks on behalf of the government.” An example? “Tim Russert was a spokesman for power, wealth, and privilege,” Lapham said. “That’s why 1,000 people came to his memorial service. Because essentially he was a shill for the government. It didn’t matter whether it was Democratic or Republican. It was for the status quo.” What about Russert’s rep for catching pols in lies? “That was bullshit,” he said. “Thompson and Russert were two opposite poles.”

Writing in Harper's a few weeks later, Lapham -- in the essay about Russert (entitled "An Elegy for a Rubber Stamp") where he said Russert's "on-air persona was that of an attentive and accommodating headwaiter, as helpless as Charlie Rose in his infatuation with A-list celebrity" -- echoed Halberstam by writing:


Long ago in the days before journalists became celebrities, their enterprise was reviled and poorly paid, and it was understood by working newspapermen that the presence of more than two people at their funeral could be taken as a sign that they had disgraced the profession.

That Lapham essay is full of piercing invective ("On Monday I thought I’d heard the end of the sales promotion. Tim presumably had ascended to the great studio camera in the sky to ask Thomas Jefferson if he intended to run for president in 1804"), and -- from a person who spent his entire adult life in journalism -- it contains the essential truth about modern establishment journalism in America:


On television the voices of dissent can’t be counted upon to match the studio drapes or serve as tasteful lead-ins to the advertisements for Pantene Pro-V and the U.S. Marine Corps. What we now know as the “news media” serve at the pleasure of the corporate sponsor, their purpose not to tell truth to the powerful but to transmit lies to the powerless. Like Russert, who served his apprenticeship as an aide-de-camp to the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, most of the prominent figures in the Washington press corps (among them George Stephanopoulos, Bob Woodward, and Karl Rove) began their careers as bagmen in the employ of a dissembling politician or a corrupt legislature. Regarding themselves as de facto members of government, enabling and codependent, their point of view is that of the country’s landlords, their practice equivalent to what is known among Wall Street stock-market touts as “securitizing the junk.” When requesting explanations from secretaries of defense or congressional committee chairmen, they do so with the understanding that any explanation will do. Explain to us, my captain, why the United States must go to war in Iraq, and we will relay the message to the American people in words of one or two syllables. Instruct us, Mr. Chairman, in the reasons why K-Street lobbyists produce the paper that Congress passes into law, and we will show that the reasons are healthy, wealthy, and wise. Do not be frightened by our pretending to be suspicious or scornful. Together with the television camera that sees but doesn’t think, we’re here to watch, to fall in with your whims and approve your injustices. Give us this day our daily bread, and we will hide your vices in the rosebushes of salacious gossip and clothe your crimes in the aura of inspirational anecdote.

That's why they so intensely celebrated Tim Russert: because he was the epitome of what they do, and it's why they'll celebrate Walter Cronkite (like they did with David Halberstam) only by ignoring the fact that his most consequential moments were ones where he did exactly that which they will never do.

UPDATE II: In the hours and hours of preening, ponderous, self-serving media tributes to Walter Cronkite, here is a clip you won't see (http://www.newseum.org/news/news.aspx?item=nh_CRON090714_2), in which Cronkite -- when asked what is his biggest regret -- says:


What do I regret? Well, I regret that in our attempt to establish some standards, we didn't make them stick. We couldn't find a way to pass them on to another generation.

It's impossible even to imagine the likes of Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw and friends interrupting their pompously baritone, melodramatic, self-glorifying exploitation of Cronkite's death to spend a second pondering what he meant by that.


© 2009 Salon.com

Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book "How Would a Patriot Act?," a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, "A Tragic Legacy", examines the Bush legacy.

Article printed from Common Dreams | News & Views (http://www.CommonDreams.org)
URL to article: Celebrating Cronkite While Ignoring What He Did | CommonDreams.org (http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/07/18-4)

fryingdutchman
07-21-2009, 05:44 AM
One of the true class acts of the journalism world.

He was also the original narrator of one of my favorite EPCOT attractions, "Spaceship Earth."

His voice just carried that authoritative tone, and it was easy to believe just about anything he said.

Rest In Peace, Walter.

fryingdutchman
07-21-2009, 05:46 AM
He was a bit before my time, but I can appreciate his importance in the news industry. The man was an American icon. We could really use an anchor person like this now. I can't think of anyone currently that could even come close.

I think at one point Dan Rather was on that track, but he turned into a basket case and a joke in the latter half of his career.

It all started with those four famous words...

"What's the frequency, Kenneth?"

fryingdutchman
07-21-2009, 05:47 AM
Speaking the obvious but I'm still trying to get used to this middle aged shit. I guess that's our demographic now to sit and watch week after week as every one of our cultural references dies.

Thanks for that sobering thought, Sesh.

Just a ray of goddamn sunshine, aren't you?

Asshole. :biggrin: