Farewell Cronkite, Voice of America

WASHINGTON – A New York Times reader has written that he won’t believe Walter Cronkite is dead until Cronkite himself announces that. A thought that sums up all the things that this journalist was in the American history of the 20th century. From D–Day to the Ronald Reagan election: Cronkite was the serious but indulgent uncle that would explain to his nephews the world as it is, not as they wanted it to be.

There won’t be anyone like “Uncle Walter,” the Missouri dentist’s son – the state that claims to be the most skeptical of America – raised in Texas, land of passions and instincts, who, over the 50 years of his career conquered the award to which every journalist aspires, and every news consumer should be entitled to: absolute credibility. “And that’s the way it is” – the phrase he used to conclude the 30 minutes of the evening news on CBS – would have sounded like an unbearable bluster on someone else’s lips. On his, hidden behind a walrus mustache which looked gray under the spotlight without makeup or shoe polish, it was the truth that millions of Americans accepted. Put simply, Uncle didn’t lie.

According to modern standards, which ask the news anchors to be entertainers, soubrettes or polemicists, Uncle Walter was plain-featured and had a modest academic resume. He didn’t manage to graduate from the University of Texas in Houston and preferred unpaid jobs at the local newspaper to classes. His first paid job was, like Reagan, radio – chronicles of university football matches and fake live baseball. He worked in London tortured by the Luftwaffe, where Ed Murrow (the journalist George Clooney played in “Good night, and Good Luck”), the master and archetype of a generation of correspondents, would speak every night.

From the fuselage of a bomber B17 he followed the landing in Normandy, and when CBS News hired him, his elderly colleagues said he was too “insignificant,” without what would be later called “a great screen presence.” In the ’50s, the decade of the prosperous somnolence of Eisenhower, that door–to–door-encyclopedia-seller face, as his NBC rival Huntley called it, looked like a weakness. A few years later, at 2pm on November 22, 1963, that insignificant face, his profound, sincere voice and his thick black glasses were exactly what America needed when Walter Cronkite, swallowing tears, announced that John F. Kennedy had been shot dead.

It wasn’t a scoop, and he wasn’t the only one to give the news, but if you ask Americans today how they knew that JFK was dead, even those who weren’t tuned in CBS will say that they learned it from Cronkite. It was as if that chronicle, read in a shirt in a studio full of telexes, monitors, sheets of papers everywhere and upset editors had become, in the meantime, the event itself. As if Kennedy hadn’t died under the knives of impotent surgeons, but there, in Walter Cronkite’s studio.

A private, human, direct relationship was born; the dramatic events of the ’60s, then the Watergate years, the wars, the economic crisis, the sequels of political murders, the Indochina catastrophe, would turn it into a family tie with moments of pain, as well as those of triumph, like the moon landing that fired him up with enthusiasm like nobody else. It’s a curious coincidence that he died, at 93, on the 40th anniversary of Armstrong’s “small step.”

As bad as the weather might be, every evening at 7:30 Walter was there to reassure America, without fear or favor, to say that at least the fire of free information was on. In 1973, during the Watergate scandal, opinion polls revealed that he was the only public figure America trusted. People said that Cronkite had lost the war in Vietnam when he came back from a reportage at the front after 1968 and announced, with no emphasis, no rhetoric, that the war couldn’t be won, and President Johnson admitted in private: “If Cronkite has said that we have lost, we have lost.”

There wouldn’t be anyone, journalist or politician, able to interpret, condition and seal the “zeitgeist,” the spirit of the time – and, unfortunately, no one who, like Uncle Walter, could have said to the Bush administration that the adventure in Iraq was not a good idea. In the ’70s the 7:30 CBS News was listened to by one out of every three Americans, of every generation and class. When he retired from active journalism at 64 years of age, almost 20 years ago, nobody could fill his shoes, not even his designated successor, Dan Rather, always labeled too aggressive.

In an age of 24/7 information, that moment of mystical get-together around Uncle Walter’s fireplace in search of truth is inconceivable. Young people under 35 today receive their daily news from late-night comedians or the dust of the web, where everyone can play Cronkite. The “do–it –yourself” information is the antithesis of what he succeeded in doing. To those who, without fail, asked for his secret, he would simply say that he was just wanted to be a journalist. Great program, Uncle Walter.