COMMENTARY
Pergament: Cronkite and his news role were a perfect marriage
Published: July 21, 2009, 12:30 am
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The best part of attending the semi-annual meetings of critics in Hollywood to preview the upcoming TV season isn’t always interviewing stars like Patrick Dempsey, Charlie Sheen and Courteney Cox Arquette.
The best part often is when TV legends come to reminisce about the pioneering days of our nation’s most powerful medium. Legends like Walter Cronkite.
In January 2006, then 89-year-old Cronkite held a news conference for PBS to promote an “American Masters” program about him. He walked slowly, needed help to get to the podium and had some hearing problems. But his mind was as sharp as ever.
He even joked he would be willing to come back to his own “CBS Evening News” anchor seat. He wanted to make one thing perfectly clear. Retirement at 65 was a big mistake.
“I want to say that probably 24 hours after I told CBS that I was stepping down at my 65th birthday, I was already regretting it,” said Cronkite. “And I regretted it every day since.”
Listening to the tributes after the broadcasting legend’s death Friday, you could understand why he regretted retiring “so young.” Many of the people praising him — including Bob Schieffer, Morley Safer and Barbara Walters — are in their 70s and still on the air.
Watching Sunday night’s poignant CBS special and other weekend tributes, one couldn’t help but feel a little nostalgic for a simpler TV time when Cronkite gave America a shared experience when anchoring the big events from 1962-81. You can debate whether the role made the man or vice versa, but there was no debating that it was a perfect marriage of role and man.
It meant that when Cronkite spoke decades after retirement, people listened. His take in the 2006 interview about the George Clooney movie on Edward R. Murrow, “Good Night, and Good Luck,” seemed directed at the Bush administration.
“It is a particularly important lesson for us,” Cronkite said of the movie, “in what could happen if we let our guard down at a time when there are some of our leaders who would wish to impose rules and laws which are not sympathetic to our democracy, our republic.”
The critics tour isn’t the same powerful forum that Cronkite had when his CBS commentary on the Vietnam War led President Lyndon Johnson to believe he had lost “middle America.”
Cronkite was credited with helping to end the war. He hated an unfortunate byproduct of on-the-scene reporting during Vietnam — that it led to future presidents imposing practices that severely restricted such war reporting for fear it might impact public opinion.
Cronkite’s early retirement meant that many younger people hearing all the praise of his being “the most trusted man in America” only knew him from classic TV footage. For them, it was easier to understand the TV news tributes that followed the death of NBC’s Tim Russert a year ago at the relatively young age of 58.
Here’s some perspective. I’ve been this newspaper’s TV critic for what seems forever — 26 years. I started a year after Cronkite retired.
Many younger viewers missed the Cronkite years and didn’t understand his impact on journalism and journalists like Channel 4’s Jacquie Walker, who told me in 1989 that at her house growing up, “when Walter Cronkite was on, everybody had to stop everything.”
Those were the days when parents controlled the TV set and there usually was only one in the house. My parents were primarily (Chet) Huntley and (David) Brinkley fans, but we often watched Cronkite on the big stories. My father looked like Cronkite, right down to his mustache. But Cronkite seemed like everyone’s father or uncle, which was part of his allure.
The title of “most trusted man in America” was an even more incredible achievement when you consider many college students lived by the revolutionary motto “never trust anyone over 30.”
Besides his commanding presence and voice, another reason Cronkite had so much power during his reign was because there was little news competition. Younger viewers who don’t remember Cronkite also can’t fathom life before 24-hour cable news. CNN was launched on June 1, 1980, a year before Cronkite retired.
Cronkite probably would have been embarrassed by all the attention the death of a 92- year-old man got from cable news. As Safer implied, Cronkite despised 24-hour news because it usually meant that there wasn’t time for much thinking.
Thinking about it, Cronkite was the TV news version of the late Johnny Carson, the latenight host who in a different time could make a standup comic a star by virtue of giving him the spotlight for a few minutes on “The Tonight Show.”
There will never be another Cronkite, just like there never will be another Carson in latenight TV and never another Howard Cosell in sports television. That’s just the way TV is in 2009.
apergament@buffnews.com
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