Walter Cronkite dies at 92

NEW YORK — He led us to Saigon, to Jonestown, to Selma, to Attica.

He took us around the planet and he showed us to the moon.

As anchorman of the "CBS Evening News," Walter Cronkite — who died Friday at age 92 after a period of failing health — not only narrated a tumultuous era in American life, but presided over the instant that television achieved its thunderbolt potential to be the most powerful communication tool in history.

That defining moment unfolded Nov. 22, 1963, after Cronkite was drawn to the urgent, five-bell summons of the United Press International ticker in the CBS newsroom. Three shots had been fired at the motorcade of President John F. Kennedy.

It would take 20 minutes for a camera to be sufficiently warmed up to broadcast his image, so Cronkite interrupted "As the World Turns" and reported the news over a screen slide that said "Bulletin."

An hour later, on the air in his shirt sleeves, Cronkite was handed a sheet of paper. He paused, swallowed, removed his glasses and looked into the camera.

Viewers could already surmise what was coming next, and it came in a grim, quavering voice:

"From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official: President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time."

For the next four days, he led a mourning nation through wrenching grief. For anyone alive in that time, the TV images of the Kennedy funeral procession, the salute of little John-John to his dead father and the jailhouse execution of Lee Harvey Oswald are indelibly stored in memory.

Television's speed, reach and impact had come of age, and Cronkite's Midwestern timbre provided the soundtrack.

Walter Leland Cronkite Jr. was born Nov. 4, 1916, in St. Joseph, Mo., son of a dentist. His family lived in Kansas City and then moved to Houston when he was 10.

By age 13, he had settled on journalism as his career. He wrote community news items for The Houston Post while in high school and dropped out of the University of Texas in Austin during his junior year for a newspaper job.

He went on to a variety of radio news positions in the Midwest, then joined the United Press in Kansas City in 1937. He liked the deadline-every-minute pace of wire service reporting and rose to be one of the top correspondents of World War II.