Some Thoughts on Walter Cronkite

I’m not too sad that Walter Cronkite is dead. He was 92 years old, a “ripe old age” as my mother used to say, and he had led a pretty incredible life: he was a journalist covering World War II, he joined CBS in 1950 during the birth of television news, and he was the news anchorman for two generations, covering stories from the assassination of JFK to the election of Ronald Reagan. Walter Cronkite was a preeminent American in a preeminently American century.

If I do feel some sadness, it’s more for myself and a bygone time from my life. I watched Cronkite on “The CBS Evening News” (yes, I was a slightly odd, and in some ways, slightly precocious child) and I suppose it can be said that the 1970s were a simpler time. They didn’t seem simple then, but in retrospect, well, there were only three television networks to choose from, so that right there made things a little simpler by comparison to today's overload of TV choices, which in some ways don’t offer us a choice at all. What we get now is the same thing multiplied, a lot of noise, shouting, and twittering and crawls to be read while someone speaks about who knows what. So, yeah, I guess I’m a little sad. But life proceeds.

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Television news changed immediately when Cronkite left and was replaced by Dan “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth” Rather. (Can you imagine Walter Cronkite being mugged by two guys asking the same question over and over, "What is the frequency, Kenneth"? I thought not.) I think what no one at CBS realized was that Rather was just a Strange Ranger. Great journalist, but did anyone really want this guy staring into the camera, and into our homes, with that seriously spaced out look he got sometimes?

By the way, I think Dan Rather has Ronald Reagan to blame for the whole mugging thing. If I remember correctly, and quite frankly some of the 1980s are a bit hazy for me, Reagan cut a lot of federal funding to the states for mental health care, whereupon the states simply emptied the nuthouses, setting free many lively characters to roam the streets at will. No funding cuts, no street crazies kicking the crap out of the new CBS news anchor while demanding to know the frequency.

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Does the Mike Wallace Death Watch now begin? I mean, the man is 120 years old, he’s got to die sometime, right? And what about Andy Rooney? Not exactly a spring chicken either.

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And that’s the way it is, until I can think up some more thoughts on old Cronkite.