The Voice Of America

If Walter Cronkite died in a forest, would anyone hear it? This is the irony of the passing of the man who was the news. He isn't here to report on his own demise. For so many years, his was the voice that told us when to be happy and when to be sad. If Edward R. Murrow was John the Baptist, then Walter Cronkite was certainly the voice of God.
It is an interesting quirk of my life that when I was very young, I used to confuse Walter Cronkite and Captain Kangaroo. They were both on CBS, and I made what I thought was the logical assumption that Walter had a day job running the Treasure House. I based my theory on the discovery I made that Captain Dooley, the kindly old salt who showed cartoons on Channel Two in the mornings was in reality the same guy as Blinky the Clown, who showed cartoons on Channel Two in the afternoons. Walter and the Captain just had a network gig. This association just made it easier to trust every word I heard on the evening news.
I know there were choices, even back then, but as long as there was a Space Race, my family tuned into Walter Cronkite and Wally Schirra from countdown to splashdown. Ben Bradlee remembers this about Cronkite and Watergate: "The fact that Cronkite did Watergate at all (let alone at that length) gave the story a kind of blessing, which is exactly what we needed—and exactly what The Washington Post lacked." And somehow, he didn't make Nixon's infamous "enemies list."
And maybe that's because even Tricky Dick couldn't argue with The Voice of Reason. My memory of JFK's assassination are vague at best, but the footage of Cronkite at his desk, slowly taking off his glasses and telling us all the news we didn't want to hear is etched on my mind. I was old enough to remember his reports on and from Vietnam. They were a major factor in the public's opinion of that war. When he retired, and in his wake came wave after wave of talking heads creating a world of info-tainment, we still looked for a sign from Walter about how we should think and feel. He told us what to expect in the aftermath of September 11. He told us that the war in Iraq was a "disaster." Lyndon Johnson knew: "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost America." Well, now we've all lost Cronkite.