Another Icon -- The Man Who Understood Us -- Is Gone

Walter Cronkite was the news for our generation. He was the only evening news anchor who got us. When the streets of Chicago exploded in 1968 with Richard Daley's police revving for a fight, it was Walter Cronkite who cried to see the children of America beaten by those uniformed thugs outside the Democratic National Convention. At a time when we trusted no one over the age of thirty, even we trusted Walter Cronkite.

From 1961-1981, according to the New York Times, Walter Cronkite was how we learned about the course of the world. My father used to quiz me at night, over dinner, which we didn't eat until 7:30, about current events. My sources, like most kids before computers, were the Times and Uncle Walter.

That Walter Cronkite died of dementia breaks my heart. This man seemed to have understood the changing world. He narrated sympathetically as the first layers of the bonds of slavery were cast off in southern cities and towns as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, first, then Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, marched men and women, black and some white later on, through fire hoses and taunts of angry white folks. He told us that President Kennedy had been shot, then Dr. King, then Bobby Kennedy. He rejoiced at the miracle of landing on the moon.

An old friend Franklin just this week sent me the dvd of Walter Cronkite's broadcast that July day forty years ago when Neil Armstrong flubbed his lines, but the world watched him walk onto the surface of the moon. My roommate and I ran across the corridor of our apartment house to our neighbor, Brad, a quiet man from Milwaukee who tolerated our antics. He had a television and we didn't. We shouted when then President Nixon ruined the excitement as he spoke with the astronauts on a split screen. Brad was annoyed, but let us stay anyway. The only channel to watch was CBS, the only man to listen to was Uncle Walter.

Today in honor of Walter Cronkite, our family will watch the dvd, and I will remember when we could trust the integrity of the nightly news, before it became entertainment.

According to the Times, here is how much America trusted Cronkite:

In 1968, he visited Vietnam and returned to do a rare special program on the war. He called the conflict a stalemate and advocated a negotiated peace. President Lyndon B. Johnson watched the broadcast, Mr. Cronkite wrote in his 1996 memoir, “A Reporter’s Life,” quoting a description of the scene by Bill Moyers, then a Johnson aide.

“The president flipped off the set,” Mr. Moyers recalled, “and said, ‘If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.’ ”

Salon.com has video highlights of Cronkite's most memorable broadcasts: the assassination of JFK and that of MLK, the lunar landing, and his last broadcast.

My daughter rushed in last night with the news. "How come everyone is dying?" she asked. The icons of my generation have come of that age.