Walter Leland Cronkite, Jr. (November 4, 1916 – July 17, 2009) was an American broadcast journalist, best known as anchorman for the CBS Evening News for 19 years (1962–81). During the heyday of CBS News in the 1960s and 1970s, he was often cited as "the most trusted man in America" after being so named in an opinion poll. He reported many events from 1937 to 1981, including bombings in World War II; the Nuremberg trials; combat in the Vietnam War;Watergate; the Iran Hostage Crisis; and the murders of President John F. Kennedy, civil rights pioneer Martin Luther King, Jr., and Beatles musician John Lennon. He was also known for his extensive coverage of the U.S. space program, from Project Mercury to the Moon landings to the Space Shuttle. He was the only non-NASA recipient of a Moon-rock award. Cronkite is well known for his departing catchphrase "And that's the way it is," followed by the date on which the appearance aired.

 

Early life

Cronkite was born in Saint Joseph, Missouri, the son of Helen Lena (née Fritsche, August 1892 – November 1993), and Dr. Walter Leland Cronkite (September 1893 – May 1973), a dentist.He had remote Dutch ancestry on his father's side, the family surname originally being Krankheyt.

 

Cronkite lived in Kansas City, Missouri, until he was ten, when his family moved to Houston, Texas.He attended junior high school at Lanier Junior High School (now Lanier Middle School) and high school at San Jacinto High School, where he edited the high school newspaper.He was a member of the Boy Scouts. He attended college at the University of Texas at Austin (UT), entering in the Fall term of 1933, where he worked on the Daily Texan and became a member of the Nu chapter of the Chi Phi Fraternity.He also was a member of the Houston chapter of DeMolay, a Masonic fraternal organization for boys.[citation needed] While attending UT, Cronkite had his first taste of performance, appearing in a play with fellow students Eli Wallach and Ann Sheridan.

 

Religion

Cronkite's family was Protestant and changed their denomination three times while he was a child.Cronkite joined the Episcopal church as a youth, explaining in a 1994 interview: "I got into a Boy Scout troop that met in an Episcopal church. The church had a wonderful minister who was also the scoutmaster. And I suppose you can say he proselytized me. At any rate, I was much involved with the church, and became Episcopalian – and an acolyte. Later, when I worked for a paper in Houston, I was church editor for a while. The Episcopal House of Bishops met in Houston one year, and I became intrigued by the leaders of the church — fascinated by their discussions and their erudition."

 

Cronkite has also for many years been the recorded voice of the owl at the "Cremation of Care" ritual at Bohemian Grove.

 

Career

He dropped out of college in his junior year, in the Fall term of 1935,after starting a series of newspaper reporting jobs covering news and sports.

 

He entered broadcasting as a radio announcer for WKY in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. In 1936, he met his future wife, Mary Elizabeth Maxwell (known by her nickname "Betsy"), while working as the sports announcer for KCMO (AM) in Kansas City, Missouri.His broadcast name was "Walter Wilcox".He would explain later that radio stations at the time did not want people to use their real names for fear of taking their listeners with them if they left. In Kansas City, he joined the United Press in 1937.He became one of the top American reporters in World War II, covering battles in North Africa and Europe,and in 1943 turned down a job offer from Edward R. Murrow of CBS.Cronkite was one of eight journalists selected by the United States Army Air Forces to fly bombing raids over Germany in a B-17 Flying Fortress part of group called the Writing 69th,and during a mission fired a machine gun at a German fighter.He also landed in a glider with the 101st Airborne in Operation Market-Garden and covered the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, he covered the Nuremberg trials and served as the United Press main reporter in Moscow from 1946 to 1948.

 

Early years at CBS

In 1950, Cronkite joined CBS News in its young and growing television division, again recruited by Murrow. Cronkite began working at WTOP-TV, the CBS affiliate in Washington, D.C.. He originally served as anchor of the network's 15-minute late-Sunday-evening newscast Up To the Minute, which followed What's My Line? at 11:00 pm ET from 1951 through 1962.

 

Although it is widely reported that the term "anchor" was coined to describe Cronkite's role at both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, marking the first nationally televised convention coverage, other news presenters bore the title before him.Cronkite anchored the network's coverage of the 1952 presidential election as well as later conventions. In 1964 he was temporarily replaced by the team of Robert Trout and Roger Mudd; this proved to be a mistake, and Cronkite returned to the anchor chair for future political conventions.

 

From 1953 to 1957, Cronkite hosted the CBS program You Are There, which reenacted historical events, using the format of a news report.His famous last line for these programs was: "What sort of day was it? A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times ... and you were there." In 1971, the show was revived and redesigned to attract an audience of teenagers and young adults on Saturday mornings. He also hosted The Twentieth Century, a documentary series about important historical events of the century comprised almost exclusively of newsreel footage and interviews. It became a long-running hit (it was renamed The 21st Century in 1967). Cronkite also hosted It's News to Me, a game show based on news events.

 

Another of his network assignments was The Morning Show, CBS' short-lived challenge to NBC's Today in 1954. His on-air duties included interviewing guests and chatting with a lion puppet named Charlemane about the news.He considered this discourse with a puppet as "one of the highlights" of the show. He added, "A puppet can render opinions on people and things that a human commentator would not feel free to utter. I was and I am proud of it." Cronkite also angered the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, the show's sponsor, by grammatically correcting its advertising slogan. Instead of saying "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should" verbatim, he substituted "as" for "like."

 

He was the lead broadcaster of the network's coverage of the 1960 Winter Olympics, the first-ever time such an event was televised in the United States. He replaced Jim McKay, who had suffered a mental breakdown.

 

The CBS Evening News

On April 16, 1962, Cronkite succeeded Douglas Edwards as anchorman of the CBS Evening News (initially Walter Cronkite with the News), a job in which he became an American icon.The program expanded from 15 to 30 minutes on September 2, 1963, making Cronkite the anchor of American network television's first nightly half-hour news program.

 

During the early part of his tenure anchoring the CBS Evening News, Cronkite competed against NBC's anchor team of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, who anchored the Huntley-Brinkley Report. For most of the 1960s, the Huntley-Brinkley Report had more viewers than Cronkite's broadcast. This began to change in the late 1960s, as RCA made a corporate decision not to fund NBC News at the levels CBS funded CBS News. Consequently, CBS News acquired a reputation for greater accuracy and depth in its broadcast journalism. This reputation meshed nicely with Cronkite's wire service experience, and in 1967 the CBS Evening News began to surpass The Huntley-Brinkley Report in viewership during the summer months.

 

In 1969, during the Apollo 11 (with co-host and former astronaut Wally Schirra) and Apollo 13 moon missions, Cronkite received the best ratings and made CBS the most-watched television network for the missions. In 1970, when Huntley retired, the CBS Evening News finally dominated the American TV news viewing audience. Although NBC finally settled on the skilled and well-respected broadcast journalist John Chancellor, Cronkite proved to be more popular and continued to be top-rated until his retirement in 1981.

 

One of Cronkite's trademarks was ending the CBS Evening News with the phrase "...And that's the way it is," followed by the date.Keeping to standards of objective journalism, he omitted this phrase on nights when he ended the newscast with opinion or commentary.Beginning with January 16, 1980, Day 50 of the Iran hostage crisis, Cronkite added the length of the hostages' captivity to the show's closing to remind the audience of the unresolved situation, ending only on Day 444, January 20, 1981.

 

Reporting

As he had promised on his last show as anchor in 1981, Cronkite continued to broadcast occasionally as a special correspondent for CBS, CNN, and NPR into the 21st century; one such occasion was Cronkite anchoring the second space flight by John Glenn in 1998 as he had Glenn's first in 1962. In 1983, he reported on the British General Election for the ITV current affairs series World In Action, interviewing, among many others, the victorious Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.Cronkite hosted the annual Vienna New Year's Concert on PBS from 1985 to 2008, succeeded by Julie Andrews in 2009.For many years, until 2002, he was also the host of the annual Kennedy Center Honors.

 

In 1998, Cronkite hosted the 90-minute documentary, Silicon Valley: A 100 Year Renaissance, produced by the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association. The film documented Silicon Valley's rise from the origin of Stanford University to the current high-technology powerhouse. The documentary was broadcast on PBS throughout the United States and in 26 countries. Prior to 2004, he could also be seen in the opening movie 'Back to Neverland' shown in the Walt Disney World attraction, The Magic of Disney Animation, interviewing Robin Williams as if he is still on the CBS News channel, ending his on-camera time with his famous catchphrase. In the featurette, Cronkite describes the steps taken in the creation of an animated film, while Robin Williams becomes an animated character (and even becomes Walter Cronkite, impersonating his voice). He also was shown inviting Disney guests and tourists to the Disney Classics Theater.

 

On May 21, 1999, Walter Cronkite participated in a panel discussion on Integrity in the Media with Ben Bradlee and Mike McCurry at the Connecticut Forum in Hartford, Connecticut. Cronkite provided a particularly funny anecdote about taking a picture from a house in Houston, Texas where a newsworthy event occurred and being praised for getting a unique photograph, only to find out later that the city desk had provided him with the wrong address.

 

Voice-overs

Cronkite narrated the IMAX film about the Space Shuttle, The Dream is Alive, released in 1985. From May 26, 1986 to August 15, 1994, he was the narrator's voice in the EPCOT Center attraction, Spaceship Earth, at Walt Disney World. He provided the pivotal voice of Captain Neweyes in the 1993 animated film We're Back: A Dinosaur's Story, delivering his trademark line at the end. In 1995, he made an appearance on Broadway, providing the voice of the titular book in the 1995 revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

 

Cronkite was a finalist for NASA's Journalist in Space program, which mirrored the Teacher in Space Project, an opportunity that was suspended after the Challenger disaster in 1986. He recorded voice-overs for the 1995 film Apollo 13, modifying the script he was given to make it more "Cronkitian." In 2002, Cronkite was the voice of Benjamin Franklin in all 40 episodes of the educational television cartoon Liberty's Kids, which included a news segment ending with "And that's the way it is on...." His distinctive voice provided the narration for the television ads of the University of Texas at Austin, his alma mater, with its 'We're Texas' ad campaign.

 

Cronkite voiced Tim's grandpa in the BrainPOP episode about aging.

 

He held amateur radio operator license KB2GSD and narrated a 2003 American Radio Relay League documentary explaining amateur radio's role in disaster relief. Unusually, Cronkite was a Novice-class licensee—the entry level license—for his entire, and long, tenure in the hobby.

 

On February 15, 2005, he went into the studio at CBS to record narration for WCC Chatham Radio, a documentary about Guglielmo Marconi and his Chatham station, which became the busiest ship-to-shore wireless station in North America from 1914 to 1994. The documentary was directed by Christopher Seufert of Mooncusser Films and premiered at the Chatham Marconi Maritime Center in April 2005. In 2006, Cronkite hosted the World War One Living History Project, a program honoring America's final handful of veterans from the First World War. The program was created by Treehouse Productions and aired on NPR on November 11, 2006. In May 2009, Legacy of War, produced by PBS, was released. Cronkite chronicles, over archive footage, the events following World War II that resulted in America's rise as the dominant world power.

 

Prior to his death, "Uncle Walter" hosted a number of TV specials and was featured in interviews about the times and events that occurred during his career as America's "most trusted" man.In July 2006, the 90-minute documentary Walter Cronkite: Witness to History aired on PBS. The special was narrated by Katie Couric, who assumed the CBS Evening News anchor chair in September 2006. Cronkite provided the voiceover introduction to Couric's CBS Evening News, which began on September 5, 2006. Cronkite's voiceover was notably not used on introducing the broadcast reporting his funeral – no voiceover was used on this occasion.

 

TV and movie appearances

Cronkite made a cameo appearance on a 1974 episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, in which he met with Lou Grant in his office. Ted Baxter, who at first tried to convince Cronkite that he (Baxter) was as good a newsman as Eric Sevareid, pleaded with Cronkite to hire him for the network news, at least to give sport scores, and gave an example: "The North Stars 3, the Kings Oh!" Cronkite turned to Lou and said, "I'm gonna get you for this!" Cronkite later said that he was disappointed that his scene was filmed in one take, since he had hoped to sit down and chat with the cast.

 

In the late 1980s and again in the 1990s, Cronkite appeared on the news-oriented situation comedy Murphy Brown as himself. Both episodes were written by the Emmy-award winning team of Tom Seeley and Norm Gunzenhauser. In 1995, he narrated the World Liberty Concert held in the Netherlands.

 

Cronkite appeared briefly in the 2005 dramatic documentary The American Ruling Class written by Lewis Lapham, Thirteen Days, reporting on the Cuban missile crisis and provided the opening synopsis of the American Space Program leading to the events in Apollo 13 for the Ron Howard film of the same name.

 

Personal life

Cronkite was married for nearly sixty-five years to Mary Elizabeth 'Betsy' Maxwell Cronkite (January 25, 1916 – March 15, 2005),from March 30, 1940 until her death from cancer.They had three children: Nancy Cronkite, Mary Kathleen (Kathy) Cronkite, and Walter Leland (Chip) Cronkite III (who is married to actress Deborah Rush);and four grandchildren: Will Ikard, John Ikard, Peter Cronkite, and Walter Cronkite IV. Peter and Walter are alumni of St. Bernard's School.Peter Cronkite is currently attending Horace Mann School. Walter attends Hamilton College, having graduated from the same school.

 

In late 2005 Cronkite began dating opera singer Joanna Simon, Carly Simon's older sister. Of their relationship Cronkite stated in an interview for the New York Post in January 2006: "We are keeping company, as the old phrase used to be."

 

Cronkite was an avid sailor and a member of the United States Coast Guard Auxiliary, with the honorary rank of commodore.

 

Throughout the 1950s, he was an aspiring sports car racer, even racing in the 1959 12 Hours of Sebring.

 

Cronkite was reported to be a fan of the game Diplomacy, which was John F. Kennedy's and Henry Kissinger's favorite game.

 

Death

In June 2009, Cronkite was reported to be terminally ill.He died on July 17, 2009, at his home in New York City, at the age of 92. He is believed to have died from cerebrovascular disease.Cronkite's funeral took place on July 23, 2009 at St. Bartholomew's Church in midtown Manhattan, New York City.At his funeral, his friends noted his love of music, including, recently, drumming.He was cremated and his remains buried next to his wife, Betsy, in the family plot at a cemetery in Kansas City.