Cronkite 0

Frankly, I find the adulation tiresome.

He was a good newsman and a decent fellow, with a voice made for broadcasting, but I don’t recall ever seeing him walk on water.

Unlike the professional “news anchors” of today, he actually knew something about how to report news, not just about how to be a television actor reading other persons’ copy. After he retired, he did a lot of good stuff, including one of the best training films on public speaking ever made. But he wasn’t the only decent fellow in broadcast news.

I grew up in a Huntley-Brinkley family. I don’t remember this sort of adulation when either Chet Huntley or David Brinkley passed away, and both of them were as competent as Cronkite.

I think a lot of it has to do with symbolism: the passing of the first generation of symbols of when television was becoming the dominant source of news, the time before news organizations became “profit centers” (profit was a result of a job well done, not an overriding goal to which the concept of “job well done” was sacrificed).

Even so, almost the whole news establishment of the time–as well as almost the whole political establishment. as well as the populace–was taken in by the propaganda supporting the Viet Namese war.

In looking back at Cronkite’s celebrated realization that that war was a lost cause, one should remember that many persons had known and been saying for a long time that the United States never should have been there in the first place; they were reviled as “unAmerican (whatever that is),” “Commies,” “radicals,” and the ever popular “ComSymp.”

Their having been right all along does not keep them from being reviled as unAmerican even till this day.

Cronkite was late to our party.

Somewhere in a jewelry box somewhere, I still have my peace symbol.