ANCHOR STEAM

Anyone tempted to romanticize the American people should be reminded that, for nearly twenty years, the “most trusted man in America” was a TV news reader with a mustache and mellifluous baritone named Walter Cronkite. Cronkite believes his status was due neither to the mustache nor the voice but to his “credibility.” He explains: “Without credibility, of course, the press cannot be effective in carrying out one of its most important duties in a democracy — monitoring the performance of government.” There is the anchorman’s creed. It is also a fair sampling of the lumbering prose of A Reporter’s Life, in which the 80-year-old Cronkite reviews his career as prodigal son, war correspondent, devoted husband, print reporter, proud father, sports announcer, informed citizen, TV personality, and national conscience.

Cronkite’s eminence was scarcely confined to viewers. The great and powerful trusted him as well, sought his approval, and invited him to dine. Jimmy Carter awarded him the Medal of Freedom, and Bobby Kennedy once urged Cronkite to succeed him in the Senate. Jackie Onassis related, in strictest confidence, her inaugural-night sexual adventures with President Jack; but Cronkite’s faulty hearing, and Jackie’s breathless voice, prevented the anchorman from gleaning the details. Ronald Reagan invited Cronkite to an intimate private gathering in the White House where the two “had cake and champagne, and we spent possibly two hours there in a hilarious exchange of stories — most of them dirty.” And, for good measure, “Lady Bird Johnson happens to be one of my favorite people.”

Nor is his vanity successfully disguised. Cronkite’s famous 1968 commentary denouncing the Vietnam war is the last word on the subject, and is supposed to have prompted Lyndon Johnson to unburden himself to Bill Moyers: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America” — which sounds more like Moyers than LBJ.

Those who remember Cronkite on the air will recognize him in these pages: He has a curious way of emphasizing syllables that, wedded to a mock-pompous vocabulary, achieves a well-modulated comic effect. Of delivering the Kansas City Star at age seven, he recalls, “There were other entrepreneurial excursions in my early life, although the earliest ones had a certain nepotistic coloring.” Or remembering the sounds from his hometown railroad tracks: “The passenger trains were a transient panorama of human endeavor.” Explaining his lifelong affection for sailing, he rhapsodizes: “I love the challenge of the open sea, the business of confronting Mother Nature and learning to live compatibly with her, avoiding if possible her excesses but always being prepared to weather them.”

Reporters, of course, aren’t literary people. But the truth is that Cronkite ceased being a reporter half a century ago. Like most TV news pioneers, Cronkite was a product of the wire services. Once he graduated from United Press (where he covered the Nuremberg trials and Stalin’s Moscow) to CBS’s Morning Show (where he joined a puppet named Charlemagne the Lion for “a totally ad-lib discussion of the day’s news that was remarkable for its depth”), his powers of analysis diminished. His enthusiasm, for the most part, is reserved for static spectacles — space shots, conventions, the Bicentennial — -or breaking stories that challenge the mechanics of TV. CBS, he recounts with evident pride, beat NBC by one minute in reporting the shooting of John E Kennedy in Dallas. For Cronkite, television is not a rough draft of history, as journalists like to say, but a series of disconnected visual effects, yielding physical, not mental, sensations.

Reading the news aloud, or standing with a microphone in corridors and parking lots, Cronkite seems to have transmitted loads of timely data, and yet emerged ignorant of the intellectual currents of modern politics. In their place are a number of tutorials to posterity. You may not have realized, for example, that Richard Nixon “was the most complicated personality to occupy the Oval Office.” In civil rights, “we have made huge strides in thirty years,” he explains, “but, of course, we have a long way to go.” Gerald Ford, incidentally, “was the only person who served as President without being elected either President or Vice President.”

For that matter, Cronkite’s credibility is a sometime thing. He appears to believe that James Baker was Reagan’s secretary of state and that Nixon was once chairman of the (“infamous”) House Un-American Activities Committee. In one strikingly self-congratulatory passage, recalling his brief tenure as a radio editorialist, he castigates the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1949 for preventing Marian Anderson from singing in Constitution Hall “simply because she was black.” (Miss Anderson was banned in 1939; but a good “hard- hitting opinion piece,” as Cronkite describes his early efforts elsewhere, is timeless.)

There is a poignancy in all this. After Cronkite’s retirement, the celebrities unaccountably begin to drift away, and he falls into a standard TV memoir device: remembering the golden age of broadcast news (when he was on the air) and lamenting the contemporary emphasis on profit. Cronkite ends his memoir with a chapter of pronouncements on the state of modern journalism (not good) and electoral politics (even worse), suffering as they do from a lack of credibility. Democracy is imperiled by low voter turnout, pollution is destroying the forests and seas, the young are increasingly estranged from the old, the right wing persists in seducing the electorate. And Cronkite cannot understand how more information, credibly reported with rigid objectivity, has only made things worse.

Philip Terzian writes a Washington column for the Providence Journal.