Walter Cronkite death – dies at age 92

Cronkite, who died Friday at 92, worked for CBS News from 1950 through 1981 and was anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News for 19 years. He had been ill for some time.

Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley, whose biography of Cronkite, And That’s the Way it Is: Walter Cronkite and American Journalism, will be published next spring, said Cronkite’s life and career were part and parcel with the era he documented for TV viewers.

“He was brought up in Harry Truman’s Kansas City and in Texas at a time when petroleum was becoming king,” Brinkley said. “He was a correspondent in the main theaters of World War II and, at CBS, he was involved in the heyday of television in a time remembered for the Kennedy assassination, space missions and Vietnam.

“For a historian, it’s looking at our life and times through the life and times of the most respected journalist that America has ever produced. He was known as the most trusted man in America — Uncle Walter — and that remained true. You’d be hard-pressed to find any human being that didn’t like Walter Cronkite.”

From age 6, when he recalls pontificating on the death of President Warren G. Harding, into his 80s, while dictating his oral memoirs to Don Carleton, director of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas, Cronkite remained the consummate newsman.
“He was such a good journalist because he focused on the news,” Carleton said. “We would be working in Manhattan, and fire trucks would come by on the street below and I would have to talk him out of trying to follow them. He would say, ‘There’s news going on down there.’”

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