We've all had enough of overblown celebrity eulogies, no doubt--some of them seem to have become industries of their own--but let us now, especially today, 40 years to the day after Neil Armstrong recited the line written for him by Nixon Administration scribes, take a moment to consider Walter Cronkite.
Cronkite, who died at the age of 92 on Friday, was called "the most trusted man in America," among many other things. It's probably hard for people weaned on the 24-hour news cycle to understand how one ordinary-looking man who read the news into a camera with no holograms, interactive charts, news crawl across the bottom of the screen or even any outwardly expressed opinions to have wielded that kind of power, but Cronkite did. He might have been the first to do so on TV, and just as significantly, he might have been the last.
For those of us who grew up just as Walter Cronkite was becoming the most trusted..., it is difficult to imagine a world in which he does not live. He wasn't simply an "anchorman," although that term was coined for him (in Holland, it has been widely reported, TV news anchors are called "Kronkiters"). He wasn't just a man who had the right voice for the half-hour network newscast. We didn't even know how hard he worked on getting the news right, and getting it first.
What we knew was that Walter Cronkite had integrity, and we knew it because nobody ever questioned that.
In the past few days, everyone who ever watched a Cronkite broadcast has managed to express an opinion on what it was that made him a phenomenon. It's like trying to explain Ed Sullivan to a 20-year-old. (No, he couldn't sing or dance or tell jokes; he just SHOWED us the people who could. He was like Regis Philbin with no personality.) Cronkite was so true, so genuine, so professional that it was impossible to question him; he was sacrosanct, he was the very model of decorum and class.
Integrity.
"We report, you decide" wasn't a slogan when Cronkite was behind the anchor desk. It wasn't the opposite of what was true. It was Standard Operating Procedure.
It's funny--I've realized that the person who most reminds me of Walter Cronkite these days is not anyone who has the same job he had, or even anyone who works in the same industry he did. I can't imagine a news channel (which appears to be more and more the op-ed section of the newspaper with no front section at all--will someone tell those people we don't care what they think; we care WHAT HAPPENED?) hiring someone like Cronkite now. He had no sex appeal. He didn't tell people to shut up because he thought what he was saying was more important. He didn't tell people what they should think, even when he famously opined that the Vietnam War was not going to end in an American victory. He told people what he saw and what he knew.
So who in the 21st Century reminds me of Walter Cronkite? The closest I can come is Mariano Rivera, the ageless, flawless closer for the New York Yankees.
For those of you not interested in baseball (and many who are), let me explain: Rivera is the man who comes in to pitch the ninth inning of a game the Yankees are winning by a small margin. He gets the most pressurized outs of a game night after night. There are many who have done so in the past. No one has done so with the style, the precision, and the overwhelming success of Mariano Rivera.
But Rivera doesn't put on a flashy show about his work. He throws the same type of pitch--it's called a "cut fastball"--virtually every time. Batters know what's coming. They know where it's coming. They even know at what speed it will arrive.
They just can't hit it with authority. He's that good, and he's that precise. So far this season, which is more than half over, Mariano Rivera has allowed four walks. Four. In the same amount of time, he has struck out 44 batters.
Don't worry--that's the end of the statistics. The point is that Rivera is universally considered the best there ever was at what he does, and he's been doing it just that well, year in and year out, for 14 years. He continues to do it at the age of 39, which in baseball years is about 106. And when his job is done, and the game is won, whether it's the first game of a three-game series with the Kansas City Royals or the last game of the World Series, he does the same thing.
He smiles, he walks off the mound, and he shakes hands with his teammates. That's it.
No, he doesn't point to heaven (although Rivera is a deeply religious man), he doesn't leap in the air or pump his fists. He is a professional, and no one in baseball has ever had anything negative to say about him, other than that they prefer not to see him enter a game, because that means they'll probably lose.
That's Walter Cronkite to me. He did what he did, he did it as well or better than anyone else, and then he retired. He was embarrassed at all the hoopla that surrounded his departure from the anchor chair at CBS. He didn't write a tell-all book about how he prevailed over all others. He didn't show anybody up. He just did what he did, he did it as well or better than anyone else, and then he retired.
And that's the way it was.
I will miss you, Mr. Cronkite. There will, I'm sad to say, never be anyone like you again.
