And That's The Way It Is

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Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts

Before he even entered the room his unmistakable baritone proclaimed his arrival. Stepping into the sunlight of his harbor-front porch, and framed squarely by the doorway under which he stood like a portrait, the most trusted man in America paused and cracked a joke.

"Well, do you find my costume acceptable for today," said Walter Cronkite, patting down the Martha's Vineyard logo on a crisp, white polo shirt.

He was smaller than I had anticipated, concentrated some by the gravity of the decades bearing down hard as he turns 91 come November. Yet who but some physical giant would seem an appropriate match for the voice, now deeper and more deliberate in age? That quick-quivering voice which, on a Friday afternoon in November of 1963, interrupted As The World Turns and told America of the unthinkable, the assassination of JFK. Then calm and steady, the voice held our collective hands for the longest weekend in the nation's history.

The only other time he broke on the air was a shout of joy and "Go baby, go!" as the dream of his fallen president left the launch pad on the way to the moon. When Apollo reached its destination and Neil Armstrong left human footprints in the lunar dust, Walter Cronkite's voice made the call. His name is synonymous with the job he invented: Swedish anchors are known as Kronkiters and in the Netherlands as Cronkiters.

At his summer home on Martha's Vineyard, Walter Cronkite recounts some war stories with HOFMAG.com editor John Budris.

But for every milestone in his personal career and the nation's history, Walter Cronkite reminded me he was first a workaday reporter with the thinnest of résumés, a kid who dreamed about becoming a war correspondent from a story he read as a Texas teenager in Boys Life magazine. As a youngster he read everything he could about the American Civil War and imagined himself reporting from Gettysburg or Bull Run or Appomattox.

Then leaning forward with glee in the telling, Cronkite said: "And nothing you know, makes a reporter's career like a world at war, if you can get there,"

He got there.

After the Pearl Harbor attack in December of 1941, he hitched up as a war correspondent for United Press, put on a military uniform, and steamed for Europe on the U.S.S. Texas. From England, he covered Germany's air war; from a warship off Morocco he reported on the North African invasion. Back in New York, when Edward R. Murrow saw Cronkite on Paramount newsreels, he liked the on-screen chemistry and offered him a job with CBS radio. Cronkite, however, passed, declining the glitter of radio for the grunt of the wire services.

During the Normandy D-Day invasion he rode a glider into the teeth of the front with the Allied paratroops. "It was very different then, the way it worked. Once you were on the ground, you were pretty much on your own," Cronkite said. "We'd hitch-hike from battle to battle, doing our reporting, filing the stories any way we could." When he recounts riding in U.S. B-17s on bombing missions over Nazi Germany he does so with visible satisfaction, his blue eyes sparkling.

With Cronkite's World War II reporting behind, and the Cold War from Moscow all around, Edward R. Murrow once again tendered a position to him at CBS, this time in the nascent medium of television.

And this time Cronkite accepted. His television reporting carved many benchmarks; two unseated presidents. After his grim editorial about the Tet Offensive, concluding that the war in Vietnam was futile, Lyndon Johnson was said to remark: "If I've lost Walter Cronkite, I've lost the country." Johnson soon declined to run for re-election in 1968.

When the Washington Post's Watergate reporting was a scattered patchwork of dozens of print stories across many months, Cronkite's television special wove the tapestry into a form Americans could understand in 30 minutes. Richard Nixon's resignation soon followed.

In 1981, before he signed off for the last time, and bestowed the CBS mantle to Dan Rather, Cronkite said that "old anchormen, you see, don't fade away, they just keep coming back for more."

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More than a quarter century after he last told us, "And that's the way it is," Walter Cronkite shows no signs of fading. Adding to his satchel full of award-winning specials with PBS, CBS and the Discovery Channel, he's coming back for more with a new book, at work on several documentaries, and continues a nationwide lecture tour. Without the objectivity that marked his news reporting, these town-hall format, free-fall conversations on college campuses are The World According To Walter, and no subject or response is off-limits.

But his favorite days are still spent on his 60-foot sailboat, Wyntje, at whose helm you'll find him when the weather on Martha's Vineyard is fair. "I get out on her every chance I can get. I think I even have her name tattooed on my underwear."

And he smiles as big as his voice.