Katie Couric Looks Back at Esteemed Newsman's Life and Career

By Katie Couric


(CBS) For half a century, Walter Cronkite told it the way it was, delivering the news straight and unvarnished.

Among the pioneers who built television news from the ground up, he forged a special bond with audiences, reports CBS News anchor Katie Couric.

He was trustworthy, plain spoke and unflappable.

Walter was there. He'd lived the history of the century and reported it. He was born in 1916 in St. Joseph, Mo., and as a young man growing up in Houston and Kansas City, he saw firsthand the dust bowl of the 1930s and the Great Depression.

Special Section: Walter Cronkite: 1916-2009

As a young wire service reporter in WWII, he hit the ground with troops in North Africa and was the first to make it back with the story.

"I'm just back from the biggest assignment that any American reporter could have so far in this war," he said.

He was all of 26 - a natural before the camera and the microphone.

In the early 1950s, television came calling. Walter anchored the news on CBS, first in Washington, then on the network from New York.

As television news began taking wing in the 1950s, so did Walter, covering the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, atom bomb testing in Nevada, and the birth of the American space program.

Walter knew 12 American presidents.

"I met all of America's presidents since Herbert Hoover," Cronkite said." And I've known some of them pretty well. Lyndon Johnson called the "CBS Evening News" while I was actually on the air. And insisted that they put him through to me on the air. My secretary said, 'But he, but he's on the air, Mr. President.' 'I don't give a damned where he is. Put him on the phone.'"

Walter assumed the anchor chair of the "CBS Evening News" in 1962.

He was there with us through America's darkest moments, including the assassination of President John Kennedy.

"And I almost lost it there," Cronkite said.

Cronkite was a fixture at political conventions, including the democrat's chaotic meeting in Chicago in 1968. A party - and a country - at war with itself over Vietnam.

Walter 's skepticism grew while reporting on the Vietnam War. He shared those feelings in a landmark broadcast in which he acknowledged he was stating his opinion that it was time the nation get out.

"And it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then, would be to negotiate," he said. "Not as victims, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could."

"After that report, I recall that LBJ said to many of us that if I've lost Walter Cronkite, then I've lost the war," said Tom Johnson, a former Lyndon Johnson aide.

"And I think it pained him to have to say what he thought about Vietnam, but he also understood how isolating the White House can be and how people can get to the point where they don't hear discordant voices," said former President Bill Clinton. "And he thought he knew what the truth was. And he thought he had an obligation to tell it.

But his abiding passion was space.

"I think that our conquest of space will probably be the most important story of the whole 20th century," Cronkite said.

In 1969, a waiting world held its breath as man first approached the surface of the moon.

His own spirit was unconquerable. After leaving the "Evening News" he toured well into his 80s, making documentaries and having a good time.

He spent those latter years with his true loves - his three children Nancy, Kathy and Walter Jr., and his wife of nearly 65 years, Betsy. It's said they fell asleep every night holding hands.

In 1996, he taped his thoughts on the amazing century he'd seen.

"If there's anything I've learned it is that we Americans do have a way of rising to the challenges that confront us," Cronkite said. "Just when it seems we're most divided, we suddenly show our remarkable solidarity. The 20th century may be leaving us with a host of problems, but I've also noted that it does seem darkest before the dawn. There's reason to hope for the 21st century. And that's the way it will be."