In 1987, I was a very wet-behind-the-ears journalist in Tyler, Texas. I was working on a documentary on the 50th anniversary of the disastrous school explosion in New London, Texas. On a March day in 1937, a buildup of natural gas ignited; nearly 300 students and teachers were killed, making it the deadliest day ever at an American school. One of the reporters dispatched to the scene was a young man named Walter Cronkite. It was the first big story of Walter’s life and he was gracious enough to allow me and the producer of the documentary, Jerry Gumbert, to come to New York and interview him in his home about his recollections of that horrible ordeal. As we set up the camera and lights and awaited his arrival, I stared at the Emmy awards which crowded his bookshelves. And when he walked in, it was (keep in mind, I was a young reporter aspiring to follow in the great man’s footsteps) a bit like watching a saint step through the door. Often, heroes let you down. Not Walter. He was kind, reflective, generous, and very understanding of the kind of impact he had had on his young guests. Looking back, it was one of the early underpinnings for the career that I’ve enjoyed for the many years since.
It’s hard to call Walter’s death a tragedy, or even a surprise. He was 92 and had packed enough into his lifetime for a dozen men. But what is sad is the passing of the character and grace that he brought to journalism. For nearly a quarter century, Walter was very much our nation’s conscience. We knew how to react to the death of John F. Kennedy once we saw Walter react on that dreadful day in 1962 (with a quiet tear). When Walter gleefully gasped “Oh, boy,” we knew Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon was indeed beyond special. It’s hard to imagine now in our splintered, Twittered, Facebooked, Tivo’d media world, but there was a time when households all over America screeched to a stop each evening so that Uncle Walter could fill us in on the events of the day. He was the classic, neutral observer, the omniscient narrator (and heavens, I miss the days when that was the critical marching order for any broadcast journalist).
Only once did Walter opt out of his precise and practiced neutrality, and he did so with purpose, great forethought, and clear honesty. To great effect, he told the nation after his tour of Vietnam that the war was lost and that a proud, well-meaning nation needed to understand that. By the time Walter finished that broadcast, the nation was beginning to.
Can you even imagine another figure approaching that kind of presence in American life, in or out of journalism?
God bless you, Walter. And that’s the way it is.
-Devin
Great post, Devin. There will never be another like him, in journalism or elsewhere.