Walter Leland Cronkite Jr. (1916 - 2009)

Born 4 Nov 1916 in Saint Joseph, Buchanan, Missouri, United States

Ancestors

Husband of Mary Elizabeth (Maxwell) Cronkite — married about 27 Mar 1940 in Jackson, County, Missouri, USA

Died 17 Jul 2009 at age 92 in New York City, New York, United States

Problems/Questions Profile manager: Brent Maxwell [send private message]

Space:New London, Texas, School Explosion

Biography

Walter Cronkite Jr. is Notable.

Walter Cronkite helped launch the CBS Evening News in 1962 and served as its news anchor until his retirement in 1981. The hallmarks of his style were honesty, impartiality and level-headedness, and “And that's the way it is” was his jaunty nightly sign-off. Identified in public opinion polls as the man Americans most trusted, he provided a voice of reason during the Vietnam and Watergate eras. ^[1]

Walter Cronkite, whose warm, personal style helped define the television news and earned him the title of most trusted man in America, died Friday. He was 92.
As the anchor of the CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981, Cronkite was much more than the country s most-watched newscaster. He became a reassuring interpreter of the events that roiled America and the world, from civil rights unrest to the Vietnam War to Watergate to the hostage crisis in Iran.
He also became a national icon. His signoff, That s the way it is, was added to the lexicon of American popular culture. So was Uncle Walter. The name Cronkite showed up in sitcoms and Johnny Carson s monologues.
John Anderson, who mounted a serious presidential bid as an independent in 1980, briefly considered putting him on the ticket as running mate. ( I wouldn t turn it down, promised Cronkite.)
Born in St. Joseph, Walter Leland Cronkite Jr. spent his first 10 years living in Kansas City before his father, a dentist, moved the family to Texas.
In his 1996 biography A Reporter s Life, Cronkite recounted his introduction to the news business at the age of 9. I took the streetcar down to the Kansas City Star every Saturday night and, carrying as many papers as I could, caught the Troost streetcar back to the end of the line and peddled my papers there. His net was only about 10 cents a week, but, he observed, it was a beginning.
Stretching out on the grassy slope beneath Liberty Memorial, looking at the railyards full of activity and downtown Kansas City beyond them, Cronkite recalled how America was on display from that hill -- its history and its promise.
At age 16 he found his calling, thanks to Fred Birney, a journalism instructor who circulated among Houston-area high schools. Birney appointed Cronkite editor of the school newspaper and then, in 1933, secured a job for him as the Houston Post s correspondent at the University of Texas in Austin.
Things could have been a lot different for me without Fred, Cronkite told an interviewer in 2002.
Thus began a steady uphill climb in journalism. While on vacation, he stopped in Kansas City, picked up a copy of the Star and read of an opening at KCMO Radio. He was hired in 1936 as the station s entire news and sports department.
As a new, young journalist in 1937, Walter was sent to the tiny town of New London, Texas to cover the story of the school explosion. It was the kind of tragedy that stays with you, as more than 300 children had been killed. Even though he later covered World War II and the Nuremberg trials, decades later he was quoted as saying, "I did nothing in my studies nor in my life to prepare me for a story of the magnitude of that New London tragedy, nor has any story since that awful day equaled it." He began visiting 12th Street, where the wild night scene helped me grow up in a hurry. On Election Day, two policemen working for Tom Pendergast escorted Cronkite to a polling station and instructed him to vote twice.
He met Betsy Maxwell, who had just been hired from the University of Missouri s journalism school to write advertising copy for the station. She and Walter met on her third day of work and began a lengthy courtship.
Betsy and I went from the studio to lunch and from lunch to dinner. And from KCMO through life together, Cronkite wrote. The couple married in 1940 at Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral. Betsy Cronkite died in 2005, two weeks before the couple s 65th anniversary.
Cronkite toiled in print and radio for nearly two decades. In later interviews he referred warmly to these formative years as a journeyman reporter.
He was hardly a superstar then, but Cronkite did become valuable enough to the United Press, which he joined in 1939 to cover World War II, that he turned down an offer from Edward R. Murrow to join CBS and work in radio, because United Press countered with more money. Cronkite covered Normandy, the siege of London and the North Africa campaign and the Nuremberg trials for United Press.
When he finally did join CBS in 1950, it was on the television side. Over the next 12 years Cronkite wore a variety of hats: reading the local news at the CBS-owned affiliate in Washington, D.C., overseeing the network s coverage of political conventions he was given the title of anchorman, which stuck hosting the CBS morning show with a puppet, anchoring its 1960 Olympics coverage and narrating a historical series, You Are There, that was shown in classrooms for decades afterward.
In 1962, Cronkite was named the anchor of the CBS Evening News, which ran a distant second in the ratings to the Huntley-Brinkley Report on NBC. He turned out to be the right person in the right place just as nightly newscasts were expanding to half an hour and asserting unprecedented influence in millions of living rooms.
Soon he set himself apart from the sardonic, opinionated Huntley-Brinkley Report with a more down-to-earth approach and a simplicity that reflected his journeyman roots.
He was willing to show emotion on the air, from his unbridled enthusiasm for space launches to his tearful reaction to news of the death of President Kennedy, which he announced on live television. Cronkite cut through to the average person, said Craig Allen, associate professor at the Arizona State University journalism school that in 1984 was named for the broadcaster.
CBS Evening News overtook Huntley-Brinkley in 1968. The following year as Cronkite cheered on the country s manned mission to the Moon nearly two out of three homes in the U.S. were tuned to his newscast.
Because he communicated so effectively to the masses, Cronkite could occasionally direct messages to the elites that they ignored at their peril.
Unsettled by the surprise Tet Offensive in 1968, he made a fact-finding trip to Vietnam. Cronkite concluded that the optimistic assessments about the war from the Johnson Administration were at odds with the facts.
He told his CBS audience on Feb. 27, 1968, It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out ... will be to negotiate with the North Vietnamese.
This editorial reportedly caused President Johnson to despair that he had lost Middle America. Five weeks later, Johnson announced he would not seek re-election.
As the Watergate crisis unfolded, Cronkite began to increase the amount of airtime devoted to it. This drew the wrath of the Nixon Administration, which threatened to pull the licenses of TV stations owned by the network.
On the 50th day of the crisis at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1980, Cronkite began closing his newscast by reminding viewers including President Carter how many days the Americans in Iran had been held hostage.
Yet in his biography Cronkite wrote, A career can be called a success if one can look back and say, I made a difference. I don t feel I can do that. In particular, Cronkite felt the values he had learned as a journeyman clarity, modesty, accuracy were rapidly being abandoned under pressure from corporate management and shareholders.
In a 1976 survey by U.S. News and World Report, readers selected Cronkite as the most trusted man in America a moniker that would accompany him the rest of his life. President Carter awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1981.
Later that year he retired from CBS at age 65 and turned his attention to sailing, the space program and a self-appointed role as senior statesman for the kind of old-fashioned journalism he feared was vanishing from the American scene.
Cronkite, who never earned a seven-figure salary, spoke out against the networks for paying their biggest stars huge sums while cutting reporters and slashing resources behind the scenes. He was particularly harsh on CBS, and bemoaned the fact that his advice was ignored by Lawrence Tisch, the financier who took over the network in 1986.
He spoke out on a variety of other issues, such as climate change and the war in Iraq, ending the neutrality he had tried to keep under wraps while reporting the news.
Yet when asked about the sway he thought his opinions held with the public, Cronkite would try to distance himself from the personality cult that had built up around him.
I always have been concerned about the idolatry connected with anchorpeople on television, he told the New York Times in 1989. It bothers me a great deal that people would say, I believe every word you say.
With family on both sides living in Kansas City, he remained closely identified with the area all his life. He and Betsy returned often to visit relatives and friends. In 2000 he agreed to emcee the city s 150th birthday celebration at Arrowhead Stadium.
A first cousin, Kay Barnes, credited him with her decision to run for mayor, and he appeared at fund-raising events during her two campaigns.
At one of them in 2003, Cronkite criticized the Bush administration s plan to invade Iraq.
"We have shown arrogance, almost an egotism, in our conduct of foreign policy so that we have alienated most of our former allies in the world," he said, adding that the Iraq War "is going to get us in very serious trouble."
But his views never seemed to get him into much trouble or diminish his luster. NASA named him an Ambassador of Exploration in 2006, one of scores of accolades heaped on him over four decades.
And inside the CBS news division, Cronkite remained a revered figure, such that when Rather s successor, Katie Couric, took over the Evening News in 2006, Cronkite was asked to record the announcer s opening.
Last November, he unexpectedly failed to appear at the 25th annual Walter Cronkite Awards Luncheon at Arizona State University, leading to speculation that he was ailing. He had been a fixture at the event, which raises money for the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism.

He held amateur radio operator license KB2GSD and narrated a 2003 American Radio Relay League documentary explaining amateur radio's role in disaster relief. the video tells Amateur Radio's public service story to non-hams, focusing on ham radio's part in helping various agencies respond to wildfires in the Western US during 2002, ham radio in space and the role Amateur Radio plays in emergency communications. "Dozens of radio amateurs helped the police and fire departments and other emergency services maintain communications in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, DC," narrator Cronkite intoned in reference to ham radio's response on September 11, 2001. Unusually, Cronkite was a Novice-class licensee—the entry level license—for his entire, and long, tenure in the hobby^[3]

Sources

1. ↑ https://www.biography.com/media-figure/walter-cronkite
2. ↑ BARNHART, AARON. "Broadcast icon Walter Cronkite dies." Kansas City Star, The (MO), sec. News, 17 July 2009. NewsBank: Access World News – Historical and Current, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/news/document-view?p=WORLDNEWS&docref=news/12C858B8A81AA9A0. Accessed 14 Mar. 2020.
3. ↑ Wikipedia contributors, "Walter Cronkite," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Walter_Cronkite&oldid=708017147 (accessed March 7, 2016).

• 1920 United States Federal Census (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:M8HP-3FS : accessed 14 March 2020), Walter L Cronkite in household of Ernest Howell, Kansas City Ward 13, Jackson, Missouri, United States; citing ED 218, sheet 2A, line 19, family 25, NARA microfilm publication T625 (Washington D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1992), roll 929; FHL microfilm 1,820,929. Ancestry Record 6061 #57712858

• 1930 United States Federal Census (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:H149-H3Z : accessed 14 March 2020), Walter L Cronkite in household of Walter L Cronkite, Houston, Harris, Texas, United States; citing enumeration district (ED) ED 112, sheet 29A, line 33, family 353, NARA microfilm publication T626 (Washington D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 2002), roll 2349; FHL microfilm 2,342,083. Ancestry Record 6224 #63438499

• 1940 United States Federal Census (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:K74S-J7G : 7 December 2019), Walter Cronkite, Ward 6, Kansas City, Kaw Township, Jackson, Missouri, United States; citing enumeration district (ED) 116-113, sheet 8B, line 64, family 259, Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, NARA digital publication T627. Records of the Bureau of the Census, 1790 - 2007, RG 29. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 2012, roll 2170. Ancestry Record 2442 #90296384

• Jackson County Marriage Records (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:WGT3-MW3Z : 1 October 2019), Walter Leland Cronkite, Jr, 22 Mar 1940; citing Marriage, Jackson, Missouri, United States, Missouri State Archives, Jefferson City; FHL microfilm 007118701. Ancestry Record 8700 #900240613

• U.S. WWII Draft Cards Young Men, 1940-1947 (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QLFM-V9X3 : 3 March 2020), Walter Leland Cronkite, 16 Oct 1940; records extracted by FamilySearch, images digitized by Ancestry; citing Draft Registration, Kansas City, , Missouri, United States, NARA NAID 5833895 "Draft Registration Cards for Missouri, 10/16/1940 – 3/31/1947", National Archives at St. Louis, Missouri, FHL microfilm .

• New York State, Passenger and Crew Lists, 1917-1967 Ancestry Record 1277 #7074101

• Alaska, Passenger and Crew Manifests, 1906-1963 Ancestry Record 9118 #30232

• U.S., Obituary Collection, 1930-Current Ancestry Record 7545 #21603320

• Newspapers.com Obituary Index Ancestry Record 61843 #652489172

• Find A Grave (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/39563159 : accessed 14 March 2020), memorial page for Walter Cronkite (4 Nov 1916–17 Jul 2009), Find A Grave Memorial no. 39563159, citing Mount Moriah Cemetery, Kansas City, Jackson County, Missouri, USA ; Maintained by Find A Grave . Find A Grave: Memorial #39563159

• https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/today-a-generation-died-6390526

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_London_School_explosion

• http://nlsd.net/Recollections05.htm