About the time Oliver Stone's film JFK came out, I was in a group that was listening to Roger Ebert hold court outside a screening of another movie. Ebert was discussing the Stone film however, and stridently voicing an opinion with which I happen to disagree; that there was a conspiracy, as yet uncracked, and that someone other than Lee Harvey Oswald killed John Fitzgerald Kennedy. As if to prove his case with utter finality, Mr. Ebert asked, "Can you name one respected researcher or journalist who believes Oswald alone killed Kennedy?" From back in the crowd, several voices (one of them, mine) yelled, "Walter Cronkite."
There were quite a few other names that could have been hurled, including folks who'd spent years studying the case…but no names that would have had quite the same impact. It caused a brief silence in the conversation, a look from Ebert like he'd just been flattened and then a rapid change to a new topic. No one could argue that Walter Cronkite wasn't a respected journalist.
Whether he should have been or not, I dunno. That "most trusted man in America" bit was an advertising slogan, not something we all voted on. He may well have been the most trusted because everyone heard he was the most trusted. If he was, he at least never seemed undeserving. In times of crisis — and there were too many on his watch — he was a soothing, steady presence on our TV sets: No melodrama, no sensationalism…just the news, delivered in masculine, fatherly calm. It's hard to say if he or anyone could do that in today's more competitive, tabloid-influenced news industry but he deserves credit for doing it then and doing it so well.
And he was also a huge fan of the comic strip, Peanuts. That counts for a lot with me, too.
We're in for weeks, maybe months of obits and practically every one will reference his famous sign-off line, "And that's the way it is." I'd like to append, sadly, "…and will never be again."