At a time when I really need to be focused on the future, it is all too easy to get bogged down trying to make sense of the craziness that has been the past year. It as been filled with events I couldn't control and persistent efforts to navigate hostile terrain. I find myself longing for logic to prevail and a steadfast guide to lead me through the maze.
Walter Cronkite was the voice of reason and sanity in my life for as far back as I can remember. At least from the time I was able to sit still long enough to listen to anyone. His gentle solemn words were my earliest education. He resonated a sense of safety in a world I knew was in chaos but lacked the resources and maturity to really understand. When everything else was unpredictable, he was constant. He was punctual and always returned without fail.
Prior to Walter taking the CBS anchor seat in 1962, we watched Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC. In fairness The Huntley-Brinkley Report is more likely responsible for piquing my interest in news and world affairs in the late 50s and early 60s, but thinking back it is Walter’s face I see and voice I hear recalling the early Sputnik launches, Castro taking over Cuba, JFK defeating Nixon for the presidency and the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.
Walter walked me through those excruciating two weeks in October, when we all thought the world would surely end during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was Cronkite who tearfully broke the news that John Kennedy had been assassinated less than 12 miles from my 5th grade classroom. It was his words I believed when I hadn’t been able to believe my own eyes.
He narrated the chaotic political landscape from the seemingly endless Vietnam War to the violence at home as race riots intensified. And again removed his horn-rimmed glasses to gather his composure to tell me that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated only to face me two months later with the assassination of Robert Kennedy. We celebrated Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon in 1969, an event that defied articulation, even for Walter. And so it went until his retirement in 1981.
I grew up and moved on to explore a wide range of news sources, but my heart will always belong to him just for being Walter Cronkite. “And that’s the way it is.”
Copyright (c) 2011 Rebecca Hertz
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