Ahira's Hangar

So, what are your thoughts on Mr. Cronkite?

When I started regularly watching "serious" stuff on TV like the evening news, I caught Cronkite right near the end of his time as CBS anchor, so I didn't come to know him too well - though just enough to feel a vague resentment at "that guy from 60 Minutes with the funny last name" when he took over. I still remember a sketch on the Tonight Show where Johnny Carson as Cronkite "handed" over his chair by hurling it through a giant picture of Dan Rather. As a kid, I thought that was kind of a mean joke...but after I learned how bitter Cronkite was about his forced retirement from the anchor desk, I realized Carson was spot-on.

I remember several years ago, PBS re-aired the famous Cronkite newscast - more or less from start to finish - that covered the assassination of JFK, the subsequent arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald, and then the shooting of Oswald himself by Jack Ruby. It was the first time I had seen the whole thing played out "live" as it were. That was gripping television: I felt like I was right there. The stark, unflattering black-and-white TV image made it that much more compelling.

I wish I had been around for the Moon landing in '69, and seen Cronkite and Arthur C. Clarke as they provided commentary for that great event. Which reminds me, this is the 40th anniversary of the landing! Maybe it's a sad commentary on us that in forty years, notwithstanding the fantastic success of unmanned missions like the Voyager probes, the human space adventure still has not advanced beyond the Moon. But I digress...

It's amazing to think about all that occurred in just the last half of the 20th century, and to think that one individual - Cronkite - would come to be the voice of truth in such weighty matters for so many Americans. I think they got very, very lucky in a man like him.

I remember the coverage of Apollo 11, and the short-lived You Are There series more than the nightly newscasts.
But remember him I do.

I find it interesting he passed during the 40th anniversary of that particular Apollo mission.
Reminds me of Thomas Jefferson passing on Independence Day.

"And that's the way it is..." July 17th, 2009.

He always seemed like one of the few voices of integrity and honesty in a really dirty sleazy business (the news media).

I can't imagine the petty stuff happens behind the scenes. What I find hypocritical is how people in the business have been lamenting the loss of Cronkite, yet they likely would have shoved him aside unceremoniously too if it had meant advancing their own careers.

One of my husband's sister's husbands was a news reporter and now, from what I understand, a weekend anchor, always is smaller market cities. I do not understand how anyone with a soul could stay in that business. All slime, sleeze, plastic hair, and ambition.

I know this will sound very redundant and not very enlightened. However, when Cronkite became one of the first network news anchors, most of the guys that became prominent up at the same time (Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Eric Sevareid, etc.) all came from a print background prior to their new positions on TV. ATT, the local news casts were at the most 15 - 30 minutes long and the network news had just started their 30 minute spots.

I guess Cronkite came at "just the right time" when television and televised news were on the rise. Of those others you mentioned, I only know David Brinkley - and at first only from SCTV. Rick Moranis did a wonderful - and I would say affectionate - parody of Brinkley. Dave Thomas also did a good impersonation of Cronkite.

Anyway, Cronkite had the "it" factor that endeared him to viewers in a way that, apparently, none of the others did.