The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
    Barth's picture

    The Meaning of "Cronkite"

    By Barth on Sat, 07/18/2009 - 11:09pm |
    It seems as if I am never where everyone else is. Michael Jackson meant nothing to me. I follow popular music almost as religiously as I do baseball, politics, and a few other things (though, mostly, not religion) but my Motown interests run to other artists. I remember seeing the Jackson 5 on Sullivan, and thought them a throw back to what was once the only acceptable way black people could become famous and in the late 1960s, with the country teetering on the edge of major change, that they repesented comfort to the same people who found Amos & Andy to describe what were once called Negroes. I have more to say on that subject and the month where his death overtook all other news and might do so here one day, but not tonight.

     Since the things that I am required to do allow full posts only once a week, today seemed the day to write about what were the United States, and barely united anymore and again the nightmare that passes for political discourse or the United States Congress. I want to get to that subject before the Congress finds another excuse to walk away from their obligation to insure decent health care for all our citizens, and the claim (so utterly false that its constant repetition is itself making me ill) that actual Americans, rather than just lobbyists and their clients, have been scared by some baseless projections about cost and are no longer interested in government intervention.

    But that, too. will have to wait awhile since someone much more important and significant than Michael Jackson or Anna Nicole Smith (who I never heard of until she died) deserves celebration, mourning and a consideration of his achievements. I need not list them: they are all over the news today, and they will be tommorrow as well. The irony of his death coming days before the fortieth anniversary of the establishment of Tranquility Base on the moon would have been unavoidable. His death, whenever it came, would be close to the anniversary of some event many remember being reported by Walter Cronkite.

    I am not one of them, by the way. I was around during all of those years, but my house was a Huntley-Brinkley house and we, and I, remained "loyal" to NBC News even after Chet said his last "good night" to David in 1970. (I even remember Brinkley, on the first of what was renamed "The NBC Nightly News" doing to the throw to John Chancellor or Frank McGee by saying "Chet" as if he forgot who was up in New York and thinking he did it intentionally, just to be funny).

    So all those events everybody today is remembeing seeing through "Walter's" eyes I saw through Chet, David and the rest of them. The hazed over obituaries are not recalling moments when Walter lost his journalistic cool for a moment, referring to "a lot of thugs" at the Chicago Convention, even while NBC had Chancellor reporting from "somewhere in custody" while Brinkley chuckled that he should let us know when he gets released.
    But these are minor contratemps of a long ago time. The more important thing, and what we lost long ago, was the idea that the news was the thing. The idea that the CBS Evening News would devote as much airtime to a musician who died was unthinkable then, and, while it took them awhile to get to it, the CBS Evening News did not avoid Watergate for fear of offending the powers that be (who were offended and got CBS News to cut down the length of its piece the next night) and its coverage, perhaps more than the courageous reporting of the no longer useful newspaper which broke the story, had much to do with the ultimate end of the Nixon presidency.

    President Johnson's assertion about Cronkite's Vietnam report in 1968 is more a testament to how out of touch the White House was by then, than the catalyst for anything in the same way as the prattlers are prattling today. Cronkite was perhaps ahead of many television commentators (his own "columnist" on those broadcasts, Eric Sevareid was generally incomprehensible to most viewers which was a good thing since his analysis of items in the news generally gave two points of view and settled on neither) but way behind popular opinion.
    By the time he made it Eugene McCarthy's candidacy had already charged New Hampshire and it was clear that 1968 was going to be a pivotal year. What Cronkite said that night may have swayed a voter or two, but it is not even close to one of the seminal events of a rollicking year.

    But what he said represented what journalists did in those days, trying to illuminate instead of titillate or simply excite passions from one side or he other. If that was somewhat boring, and not as intersting as, say, Rachel Maddow telling the crypto-nazi Buchanan off the other night, it was the job of journalists, reporters, the people who bring us the news.

    Yes, on 9/11, I, too, was looking for Walter Cronkite. I heard he was in Europe that day, and that the stoppage in air travel made his return take longer than it might have, but when he did get back, he was on CNN, and only briefly, not on CBS, which had, by then, become way too much infotainment for the likes of an 80 plus year old man. CBS was finally embarrassed enough to bring him on their air, but he had a testy conversation with Dan Rather who asked him essentially what an old guy might think about all of this. If I could have, I would have put him in the anchor chair and told Rather to take a few days off.

    And when the celebrations of the various achievements in space exploration came around, it was NPR, not CBS, that put     Walter on the air to talk about it, not as a guest expert, but in his usual role, as a reporter.

    It was Walter Cronkite, at his advanced age, who managed to say, in 2007


    The invasion of Iraq was illegal from the start. Not only was Congress lied to in order to secure its support for the invasion of Iraq, but the war lacked the support of the United Nations Security Council and thus was an aggressive war initiated on the false pretenses of weapons of mass destruction. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Nor has any assertion of a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda proven to be true. In the end, democracy has not come to Iraq. Its government is still being forced to bend to the will of the US administration.

    What the war has accomplished is the undermining of US credibility throughout the world, the weakening of our military forces, and the erosion of our Bill of Rights

    Most Americans knew that by then, but not the Sunday pontificators, or the Monday through Friday impostors either. We are all "Michael Jackson" now, filled with fluff, able to say, with a straight face, that Jackson was the Mozart of our times.

    Goodnight, Walter.