November 4, 1916: Walter Cronkite is born.
In 1962, Walter Cronkite became anchorman for the CBS Evening News, marking the start of a nineteen-year career during which he would acquire the title “the most trusted man in America”. When Cronkite travelled in 1968 to Vietnam in order to cover the aftermath of the Tet Offensive, he wrote:
… it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. This summer’s almost certain standoff will either end in real give-and-take negotiations or terrible escalation; and for every means we have to escalate, the enemy can match us… it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.
After “the most trusted man in America” delivered his verdict on the Vietnam War to the public, Johnson famously remarked to an aide: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”
Cronkite became an American icon during his tenure as anchor. To many, his report of President Kennedy’s assassination was as memorable as the event itself, and over the years he also covered the Cuban missile crisis, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lennon, the Watergate scandal, the Iran Hostage Crisis, and the Apollo 11 moon landing, along with most of the other manned spaceflights that occurred between 1962 and 1981, for which he displayed extraordinary enthusiasm. Cronkite retired in 1981, and that same year he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.