Cronkite's passing: A death in everyone's family

For anyone who knew him as "Uncle Walter," his loss must feel like a death in the family.

To a younger generation, the very idea of widespread grieving over a TV news anchor may be hard to fathom, as is the concept of a large part of the population being happy to get their news from just one, generally loved figure. They have no reference point for Walter Cronkite, who died Friday at 92, because his kind, rare enough in his heyday, does not exist anymore.

So they just have to take it on faith when we tell them that few TV figures have ever had as much power as Cronkite did at his height - and even fewer have used it as carefully. For nearly two decades, from 1962 to 1981, he was the anchor-chair voice of the "CBS Evening News," and for most of that stretch, he was the predominant news voice in America. But it was a calm voice, warm, dispassionate and apolitical. A voice that informed, and sometimes soothed, but never inflamed.

That's why we called him "uncle," and why a decade after he left the air, polls still named him "the most trusted man in America."

Natural abilities had much to do with his success, but it also helped that he was in the right place at the right time with the right background. Cronkite was a well-regarded print war reporter who moved to TV in 1950, just as CBS was beginning to put its team in place. He quickly rose at the organization — the term "anchorman" was coined for him when he served as the lead reporter at the 1952 convention — and was perfectly placed to grow with the medium just as the medium was growing into a major force.

The '60s and '70s were plush times for the three broadcast networks, which pretty much had TV to themselves. And at CBS at least, the network responded by treating the news division as a well-funded public trust. In turn, Cronkite did everything he could to make sure our trust was justified.

Compared with newscasters today, what's most remarkable about Cronkite is not so much what he did as what he didn't do. He didn't appear on 10 broadcasts a day, chattering about everything from the latest political scandal to the newest big-screen blockbuster. He was a newsman, not a personality, who rarely made the talk show circuit. He kept his opinions to himself — and, generally, himself to himself.