I Miss Walter Cronkite

I miss Walter Cronkite. I miss nightly news that didn’t need to break to be considered important, or be broadcast from a situation room.

Cronkite was not handsome or slick. He was rumpled and accessible and he delivered the news from a simple desk—all content and no flash.

Yes, I sound old and cranky, but I miss the unplanned community of a nation that was tuned in at the same time each evening for the same nightly news. The news could be tragic or wonderful, but it was never combative or self-indulgent.

I miss the heft of the Sunday paper which our family pulled apart section by section to pass around. The business section belonged to Dad. Mom loved the comics. My brothers fought each other for the sports section, and I always went for the front page. 

I miss the New York Times Crossword Puzzle--on paper, with a pencil. In our family, my father controlled the puzzle and called out for help when he was stumped. Dad was really smart, but a terrible speller, so most weeks the puzzle ended up mauled to bits by erasers. Only showoffs do the puzzle with a pen. You know who you are.

Walter Cronkite's trademark ending to the CBS Evening News was simply,

"And that's the way it is."

Cronkite was the real deal. He’d been a courageous journalist during World War II. One of eight reporters chosen as part of the Writing 69th, he was required to undergo a rigorous training course in just one week. The reporters were trained to shoot weapons and parachute behind enemy lines. During one mission, when the gunner was killed, Cronkite had to take over the machine gun and fire at a German fighter plane.

There were nights, even as an anchorman, when he needed that hard won courage. Everyone watched him at his desk twenty years after the war, take off his glasses and hold back tears as he announced the death of President John F. Kennedy. Not a dry eye in the country.

On the day of Kennedy’s funeral, Cronkite concluded the news with the following words, which went straight to my heart at age 10 and again this month, as I grieved the election results:

“It is said that the human mind has a greater capacity for remembering the pleasant than the unpleasant. But today was a day that will live in memory and in grief. Only history can write the importance of this day: Were these dark days the harbingers of even blacker ones to come, or like the black before the dawn shall they lead to some still as yet indiscernible sunrise of understanding among men, that violent words, no matter what their origin or motivation, can lead only to violent deeds?

Tonight there will be few Americans who will go to bed without carrying with them the sense that somehow they have failed. If in the search of our conscience we find a new dedication to the American concepts that brought no political, sectional, religious or racial divisions, then maybe it may yet be possible to say that John Fitzgerald Kennedy did not die in vain. 

That's the way it is, Monday, November 25, 1963. This is Walter Cronkite, good night.