Cronkite's eloquent style a thing of the past

HOLLYWOOD — For many who grew up in the 1960s and '70s, Walter Cronkite was the voice of unfolding history. On the "CBS Evening News" and on the spot, his eloquent mediation of the great events of an age almost pathologically overflowing with them was essential to the way those events were understood. Even when he was temporarily at a loss for words — his tears at the death of President John F. Kennedy, his inarticulate glee at the moon landing ("Whew, boy!") — he somehow spoke for the nation he spoke to.

Cronkite was not just a newsman; he was — like Edward R. Murrow, who brought him to CBS and television — as close a thing to the idea of a newsman as his age imagined. Except perhaps for Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, his high-powered NBC competition, all TV news anchors, news readers and news reporters, even the most august of them, seemed like variations on his theme, shadows of his Platonic ideal. A decade after his retirement from the anchor's chair, he was still being named the most trusted man in network news.

How to account for this? It was more than intelligence and talent. The news that Cronkite reported was barely distinct from the news his colleague-competitors reported. (And to the extent it was, it was not the source of his regard.) It must have been something more basic to his bearing and manner of being. He was serious but good-humored; he had a common touch without being folksy; he was impartial but not amoral; disinterested but not detached; above the fray but not without a point of view, although he never made himself the story. He later expressed regret at his momentary breakdown reporting the Kennedy assassination as behavior not befitting an anchor, but it was exactly that mix of feeling and restraint that defined him.

And he was paternal. As a child, I conflated him with Captain Kangaroo, another graying man with a mustache who ordered the world in a voice of quiet authority, and with that other grand-paternal Uncle Walter, Disney — men who gave you the feeling that things would be all right, in the near future and the far.