Once, if not still, "the most trusted man in America," venerable news anchor, Walter Cronkite has passed. I remember watching the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite every night growing up. When "Uncle Walter" said, "that's the way it is," that's the way it was. He brought the world into our living rooms, creating the first, very early incarnation of pervasive proximity. His influence was massive among average Americans. In response to his editorial on the Vietnam War, then President Lyndon B. Johnson famously said, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America."
It was through Cronkite that many of us heard of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., the death of LBJ, and Neil Armstrong's "one small step for man..." Cronkite was the chronicler of the 1960s, one of the archetypes (along with Edward R. Murrow) of journalistic integrity, and the ideal to whom almost every subsequent news anchor aspired.
"Old anchormen don't fade away. They just keep coming back for more," he chuckled during his final sign-off. Indeed they do.
And that's the way it is, this Friday, July 17, 2009.
You will be missed.
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