LifeTimeline

Walter Leland Cronkite

    • NOV 04

      Born in Saint Joseph, Missouri

    1916
    • His first broadcasting job

    1935
    • Meets Mary Elizabeth "Betsy" Maxwell

    1936
    • Covers World War II

    1941
    • NOV 20

      Covering the Nuremberg Trials

    1945
    • Cronkite Joins CBS

    1950
    • Cronkite Also Does CBS Radio's Answer Please

    1958
    • Becomes Anchor of the CBS Evening News

    1962
    • NOV

      Tells the Nation About JFK's Assassination

    1963
    • Controversial Report on Vietnam

    1968
    • Announcing Roe v. Wade

    1973
    • AUG 08

      Announcing the resignation of Richard Nixon

    1974
    • Highlighting the Iranian hostage situation

    1980
    • MAR 06

      Cronkite retires

    1981
    • JUL 17

      Died

    2009
  • Born in Saint Joseph, Missouri

    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.
    By Steven Waldman
  • His first broadcasting job

    He became a radio announcer for WKY in Oklahoma City.
    By Steven Waldman
  • Meets Mary Elizabeth "Betsy" Maxwell

    While reporting for KCMO radio in Kansas City, he meets his future wife Betsy Maxwell.
    By Steven Waldman
  • 4

    Covers World War II

    "As a United Press correspondent, Cronkite covered the landings in North Africa and Sicily, the Allied invasion of Normandy and the subsequent battles across France and Germany. He was also a member of the "Writing 69th," a group of intrepid reporters that accompanied Allied bombers on missions over Germany." (PBS)

    "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." (Wikipedia)
    By Steven Waldman
  • Covering the Nuremberg Trials

    Nuremberg
    Germany
    In this radio piece, Cronkite describes what it was like to cover the Nuremberg trials.

    "A hundred thousand captured German documents, many bearing the defendants' own self-incriminating signatures, are screened for evidence. On these, the prosecution resolves to rest its case. Reporters from all over the world cover the trial. Coverage in the German press is, at first, meager. On November 20, 1945, the drama begins." (NPR)
    By Steven Waldman
  • Cronkite Joins CBS

    From Wikipedia: "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 was 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 composed almost exclusively of newsreel footage and interviews. It became a long-running hit (it was renamed The 20th Century in 1967). Cronkite also hosted It's News to Me, a game show based on news events.

    During the presidential elections of 1952 and 1956 Cronkite hosted the CBS news-discussion series Pick the Winner.

    Another of his network assignments was The Morning Show, CBS' short-lived challenge to NBC's Today in 1954.[12] His on-air duties included interviewing guests and chatting with a lion puppet named Charlemane about the news.[22] 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."[23] 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."[21]

    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.[24]
    By Steven Waldman
  • Cronkite Also Does CBS Radio's Answer Please

    Steven Waldman writes: This photo has been running in newspapers and on websites throughout the country along with stories about legendary anchorman Walter Cronkite. The caption says it’s Cronkite and someone named Sandra Nemser broadcasting the CBS radio show Answer Please in 1958.

    The caption doesn’t say who Sandra Nemser is, but I know: that’s my mother. In fact, that photo is one that we had hanging on the living room wall when I was growing up.
    Through all of our childhood, mom, who later became Sandra Waldman, was blasé about her association with Cronkite. “Oh it was very early in his career.”

    But of course as kids, my brother and I thirsted for any bits of information mom could give us about Cronkite during those early radio days. What was he like? “Very professional, very smart, and extremely friendly and nice,” she recalled this weekend. The daily show ran on the CBS radio network at 6 pm (as best she can remember), answering reader questions about the news.

    Though my mom lost touch with Cronkite over the years, they were colleagues at the time of her marriage to my father. Cronkite was the witness at their wedding. This led to some interesting family speculation about one arcane matter of Judaism. As I recall, when orthodox rabbis started exerting more control in Israel some time in the 1970s, they frowned upon marriages that didn’t follow proper Jewish procedures. Orthodox Rabbis were needed, and certainly the key witnesses to the wedding had to be Jewish.
    We thought: what a fun test case we would make! Let’s take my parent’s Jewish wedding certificate to Israel and dare them to declare that it was invalid because the witness wasn’t Jewish — just go ahead and say that the Most Trusted Man in America wasn’t good enough for this marriage!

    When I see this familiar photo, though, my stronger emotions are not about Cronkite but about my mother. We were always intensely proud that she was pioneering journalist at a time when few women were. Before CBS, she worked Associated Press, in Boston and at the United Nations. Though she eventually left that profession, she never stopped teaching me good journalism’s core values.

    Mom, like Cronkite, practiced journalism in an era when commentators didn’t sniff at the notion of “objectivity.” Nowadays, some bloggers and advocacy journalists declare, “there’s no such thing as objectivity” and chide reporters who practice brainless evenhandedness. My sense is that most old timers had no illusions that objectivity was achievable in the purest sense but they believed that they had a moral obligation to aspire toward objectvity and fairness. That was just what mainstream journalism meant, and if you didn’t think it was important to try, you had no business being that kind of journalist.

    Thank you mom, and Walter, for teaching me what great, classic journalism is.

    http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/ste/.../d-my-mother.html
    By Steven Waldman
  • Becomes Anchor of 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.[7] 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." (Wikipedia)
    By Steven Waldman
  • 2

    Tells the Nation About JFK's Assassination

    The first video shows Cronkites announcements. The second video is an interview with him later about what it was like.
    By Steven Waldman
  • 2

    Controversial Report on Vietnam

    Lyndon Johnson reportedly said that "if I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America." It's not clear whether LBJ actually said that but it was clear that Cronkite's editorial on the ineffectiveness of the war effort was significant.
    By Steven Waldman
  • Announcing Roe v. Wade

    By Steven Waldman
  • Announcing the resignation of Richard Nixon

    By Steven Waldman
  • Highlighting the Iranian hostage situation

    Cronkite decided that to make sure Americans didn't forget the hostages in Iran he would end each broadcast with a reminder of what "day of captivity" it was. Some subsequently argued that the practice increased Iran's leverage. This is the broadcast from the day before the release.
    By Steven Waldman
  • Cronkite retires

    His final broadcast -- with his characteristic modesty.
    By Steven Waldman
  • Died

    By Steven Waldman