That's The Way He Was

CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite was a legend in his—and our—own time

- Elizabeth Kaye

PUBLIC FIGURES TEND TO fade from view, consigned to distinction and relevance solely in their particular time. We adjust to their absences because we have to, yet there are certain uncommon individuals whose loss seems more regrettable and glaring as years pass. One of them is Walter Cronkite.

Consider what he had: heft, presence; a certain inborn dignity. Also: a penchant for adventure, whether it was reporting bombing raids over Germany while flying in a B-17, or as an amateur race car driver, the latter a beloved hobby he relinquished reluctantly when the powers at CBS deemed it too dangerous. 

What he didn’t have was the aura of the cosmopolitan; there was nothing coastal about him. He was determinedly Midwest. Were you to see him without knowing what he did, you might figure he was a guy who got the best table at the second-best steakhouse in the third-biggest town in his native Missouri. You couldn’t picture him, as you could Edward R. Murrow, smoking and downing 12-year-old scotch at the bar of the 21 Club, though it was Murrow who had risen from the proverbial humble beginnings: a log cabin on a hardscrabble farm in North Carolina. Yet by the early 1950s, when they began appearing on television, Murrow had acquired a sophisticate’s tony air, while Cronkite, a dentist’s son, raised in relative comfort, had eschewed the grand European salons where Murrow and his CBS colleagues—Charles Collingwood and Eric Sevareid—received their considerable burnishing in the wake of World War II.