Walter Cronkite deserves better. Tributes and eulogies have canonized St. Walter, turning biography to hagiography, a pattern we see all too often with American celebrities. It took only an early death to whitewash Michael Jackson into the world’s greatest humanitarian, whose apostles would have you believe contributed as much to civil rights as Martin Luther King Jr.
But King, as we know, had his character flaws, from marital infidelity to accusations of plagiarism. It is to his credit — and ours — that those sins have not diminished his place within the American communion of secular saints. King stands with other fragile icons, including the Kennedys, Ronald Reagan, Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, as figures whose human and professional weaknesses did not prevent them from making a lasting mark upon American culture.
As someone often asked to deliver eulogies, I’m a firm believer in speaking ill of the dead, and I’m willing to pass on a long list of my own personal flaws to my children for recitation at my funeral. To avoid discussion of these things — or, even worse, not to see them — is to deny the full humanity of the dearly departed. Even Mother Teresa had her Christopher Hitchens.
So I am about to express nine reservations about the career of Walter Cronkite, not as an act of iconoclasm but as a tribute to a man whose journalism deserves our complete attention, not just our nostalgic recollections. He deserves all the honors that have been bestowed upon him in life and now in death. But he deserves something more: a set of tough questions that he himself might have asked of others.
Question 1: If Cronkite so valued the standards of objectivity, why did he abandon them in certain key moments? I’m not talking here about his taking off his glasses and getting choked up in announcing JFK’s death. That was an honest reflex. I’m talking about his influential criticism of the Vietnam War, and, more dramatically, his shilling for the space program. Did you believe in objectivity, Walter, or did you not?
Question 2: Did Cronkite’s affinity for certain issues and events override his reportorial skepticism? Again, in the case of the space program, the answer is embarrassingly yes. My concern is not with his boyish giddiness when the astronauts stepped upon the moon, but with his failure to question whether the expenditure of those national resources was reasonable given so many other challenges facing the nation during the 1960s. No one can predict the future, but Cronkite was NASA’s biggest booster, a frame that may have blocked our collective vision of the future challenges that would stymie the space program.
Question 3: Did Cronkite turn news authority into authoritarianism? It is said of him that he did not really believe in his famous “That’s the way it is” as a news credo; he wanted viewers to use the headline service of television news to drive them to the newspaper. Still there is evidence of a thoroughly Modernist arrogance in his vision of truth that has been in many ways discredited over the last two decades as more and more critics denounce the “myth of objectivity.”
Question 4: As managing editor of CBS News, did Cronkite do enough to bring women and minorities into the business, or did he inherit and essentially preserve a white man’s news world? Cronkite could have and should have done more to bring needed diversity to news staffing and to the news itself.
Question 5: Was Cronkite slow on Vietnam? If he was, he shared his reluctance with many other members of the World War II generation. As a veteran of the so-called “good” war, he was a step or two behind reporters such as David Halberstam who were working hard on the ground and willing to speak truth to power in a much more courageous way.
Question 6: Did Cronkite give up the ship too early? His contemporaries say that CBS pushed him out in favor of Dan Rather. Fair enough. But how did he spend his remaining years? We know he went sailing, a rich man’s sport. He had the time and energy to do the kind of public work that Jimmy Carter has done after his presidency. But Cronkite sailed off into the sunset, which was our loss.
Question 7: Did Cronkite fail to undertake in-depth investigative work? I’m inclined to say yes, based upon the standard set by his colleague Edward R. Murrow. In helping to create television news as a medium, Murrow understood the power of long form journalism in his now-famous investigations into hunger, poverty and the excesses of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. In contrast, Cronkite was a former wire service reporter who seemed more comfortable with episodic coverage of breaking news.
Question 8: Did Cronkite contribute to the culture of anchor celebrity? He is often praised for his modest, Midwestern values. But he appeared on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and seemed to love the access that his celebrity offered him. (He made sure his daughters met The Beatles on the set of “The Ed Sullivan Show.”) Even if these are minor transgressions, he created a journalistic role — the anchor — that has sent thousands to colleges craving not just a news career, but a celebrity news career.
Question 9: Did Cronkite turn up his nose at the younger generation of broadcast journalists? My evidence for this comes from the only time I was in the same room with the famous man, for a speech he delivered to a group of newspaper editors. The speech was solid and funny, a reflection on his career and a tribute to print journalism. But I sensed something dismissive in his remarks about the younger generation of television anchors, a critique of hairspray and easy crime coverage that, however justified, was hurtful to many who looked to him as a role model. By contrast, his old CBS colleague Bob Schieffer has been able to articulate old-school values even as he lends support to a new generation of broadcast journalists.
I wish I could have thought of a Question 10, but the great man has left me one short. That, in itself, must serve as some kind of tribute.
