July 19, 2009
Walter Cronkite: And that's the way it is
Walter Cronkite signed off for the last time this weekend, after 92 seasons on the air -- and more than a quarter century since vacating the anchor's chair over at CBS News, meaning most Americans under the age of 35 have little-to-no memory of why he's considered famous, or his passing noteworthy.
Marketed by the publicists at CBS as "The most trusted man in America," I preferred Huntley and Brinkley over at NBC; Cronkite's prematurely avuncular demeanor (he seemed on the far side of 60 even when still in his 40s) never connected with my prematurely cynical synapses.
Cronkite made his bones reporting from the front lines during World War II, a stint that included the too-patriotic-for-today's-journos moment when he grabbed the machine gun in the nose of an American B-17 and opened fire on attacking German fighters.
Remembered for his momentary show of emotion when announcing the death of President Kennedy, as well as covering the moon landings, Cronkite will forever be most famous -- or notorious -- for his on-air editorializing after the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive. Considered a terrible defeat for Ho Chi Minh's forces by both the Americans and the North Vietnamese (the attacks decimated the ranks of the Viet Cong), Cronkite nonetheless took to the airwaves and declared it an American defeat, helping advance the notion that Vietnam was an unwinnable quagmire, the facts be damned.
In later years, Cronkite became something of a crank, engaging in more open partisan sniping against Republicans and dread conservatives.
He lived a long and successful life, earning much fame and fortune along the way. It takes nothing away from him to note that Hollywood screenwriter Burt Prelutsky was right when he said this (quoted in a piece by Ed Driscoll) about the odd degree of respect accorded to the men who sat and read the news, "newsreaders" as the Brits say:
You can go back to Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, John Chancellor and Walter Cronkite. We treated them all with a deference that was totally out of proportion to the work they did. Essentially, the job description requires that they read the captions to the news footage we’re watching and to introduce the on-site reporters. Do you really think that constitutes the mental equivalent of heavy lifting?
For doing what your uncle Sid could do — and with a lot more pazazz — they’re paid enormous amounts of money. On top of all the dough, they are constantly the honorees at testimonial dinners, but that’s fine, so long as I don’t have to attend.
But the trouble is, they’re regarded as important people by way too many of us, and that’s not good. Why? Because it makes us all look like a bunch of saps — what H.L. Mencken called the boobus americanus and what P.T. Barnum simply labeled suckers.
Because these anchors get to spend their entire careers talking about important events and important people, they naturally come to regard themselves as important. Self-delusion is a form of insanity and we should not encourage it by fawning over them.
When they finally sign off for the last time, you notice that the testimonials inevitably mention how many political conventions they covered, how many space missions, how many inaugurations, assassinations, uprisings and wars, as if they had had a hand in any of these earth-shaking events. It wasn’t their hands that were involved, it was their behinds, as they sat year after year at those desks, declaiming in those store-bought voices what we were seeing with our own eyes — all thanks to the journalistic peons who actually went places and did things and took risks so that we could sit home and watch it
Now, I’m not saying we should kill the messengers. I’m just suggesting it’s time we stopped canonizing them.
My condolences to his friends and family.
Posted by Mike Lief at July 19, 2009 04:46 PM
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