Walter Cronkite
Won’t be down to breakfast. 1916-2009. He probably meant more to most of you than he did to me. I only vaguely recall the guy, having been mainly elsewhere during that part of his career when I was alive. He is my news grandad, though, having been part of a group that dubbed itself “The Writing 69th,” also self-mocked as “The Flying Typewriters” and “The Legion of the Doomed,” a World War II combat embedding experiment in which Cronkite, Andy Rooney and others were put through training by the 8th Air Force and placed on B-24s on a bombing mission over Wilhelmshaven in February 1943. Here’s Cronkite, center, and some of the others suiting up.
The project was terminated after one mission, after the bomber in which New York Times correspondent Robert Post was riding was shot down with the loss of all put one crewman, not a particularly surprising result given the high loss rate of flying crews. However, it is noteworthy because in those days, unlike today, correspondents typically did not place themselves in line units, in direct combat.* That’s Post to Cronkite’s right.
Cronkite also, after a trip to Vietnam, became publicly opinionated, which makes him my news grandad in another way as I did more or less the same thing in my own way in reaction to another war. Anyway, I’ll leave the political media bashing and posthumous pop icon idol-worship to others today. Big news and commentary roundup at Memeorandum. Here’s my contribution to the Cronkite sendoff, when I got dragooned into reporting last night. It’s a personal side. In this business you end up doing and being a lot of things you probably never expected. You rub shoulders with great people and great events a lot, and in a handful of cases become great. But at the end of the day you’re just doing a job, and you need to learn how to roll with it. Which is why I enjoyed talking to Emily Rooney last night. Boston Herald:
“He was my father’s best friend,” Rooney said last night.
The host of WGBH’s Greater Boston TV news magazine is the daughter of legendary CBS newsman Andy Rooney. The two iconic reporters had known each other since they covered combat in World War II, and still saw each other on an almost daily basis as recently as a few days ago.
“They loved each other. They had their disagreements the way newsmen do. But they’d be back at it the next day,” said Emily Rooney, who was trying to reach her father last night to comfort him on his old friend’s death.
Emily Rooney grew up with the Cronkites as regular guests in her parents’ home, when they weren’t guests of the Cronkites on Martha’s Vineyard, on their boat or in their New York home. She remembers him as serious – his wife Betsy was the more lighthearted one – and always keenly interested in the news.
“These guys personified the birth of modern journalism, but they didn’t lament the past. They appreciated the here and now of what journalism was about,” said Rooney, who said her father, Cronkite and other friends such as Mike Wallace didn’t sit around pining for the good old days.
Cronkite, who retired at 65 nearly 30 years ago, was always interested in how the business was evolving, Rooney said. While he was noted for having taken a stand on the Vietnam War, he was concerned about the encroachment of political agendas into news coverage and fretted about the wall between advertising and news breaking down.
Last night on Martha’s Vineyard, Pauline Wallace said her father, Mike Wallace, was absorbing the news of his friend’s death and could not come to the phone.
“They were very, very close,” she said. “He respected him tremendously. They were colleagues. He’s very sad to hear about the passing.”
If Americans considered Cronkite to be a member of their families, Rooney said, Cronkite had no problem with that, nor was he shy about his role in 20th century American history as the leading news voice of his time.
“He loved that. He assumed the role. He said it was right. He agreed,” Rooney said. “We would laugh about that.”
* As previously addressed:
… Most of what I’ve seen suggests reporters and photogs generally didn’t directly cover combat on the line in those days, in part because of the conventions and restrictions of the day, and in part no doubt because of the fact that combat was a high-intensity meat grinder, unlike present-day warfare, in which neither Allied nor enemy deaths come close to the carnage of WWI, II or Korea.
Notable exceptions include Robert Capa, “If your photos aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.” He landed in the first wave on Omaha Beach — a choice he immediately regretted, unabashedly recounting his “new kind of fear” and the intense self-preservation instinct that led him to bolt here. (Hard to call a man who covered five wars and was killed in action in Vietnam in 1954 a coward. Capa’s Omaha story reminds me a little of Dexter Filkins’ pucker moment in Falluja, recounted in The Forever War, in which he describes running forward into fire with Marines at one point only because of his greater terror at being left alone). Another notable exception is ”The Writing 69th” …. Ernie Pyle, though often exposed to fire and ultimately killed in action, came ashore in Normandy on D-Day plus One and appears to have generally operated close but to the rear of the front lines.
NeoConScum in comments is already making a liar out of me with his scribbling father-in-law Bill Davidson’s Bulge tale: Cut Off; Behind Enemy Lines in the Battle of the Bulge With Two Small Children, Ernest Hemingway, and Other Assorted Misanthropes. That sounds like a blast. Except the small children part.
In any case, a shift in coverage priorities, journalistic style, technology, seems to have driven the relative numbers up. Citing what appear to be deaths of Allied war correspondents, CPJ cites 68 killed in WWII, 17 in Korea, both high-intensity conflicts, compared to 66 in longer duration, lower-intensity Vietnam and 187 in Iraq, though many of the latter are specifically targeted terrorism victims and/or ethnic violence victims as opposed to direct combat victims. For more direct comparison with the high-intensity wars, CPJ lists 11 journalists and media support workers killed the three-week March-April 2003 invasion. Mainly non-embedded, by both US and Iraqi action, including two killed in the Hotel Palestine by a tank round from the unit I was attached to. Two of the three embedded journalists killed in action were also attached to the 3rd ID’s 2nd Brigade, and died in an Iraqi attack on the brigade’s field command center after the combat elements left on the assault on Baghdad. The Atlantic’s Michael Kelly moved between 2nd and 1st brigades and was with 1st south of Baghdad when he drowned after his vehicle reportedly came under fire and veered into a canal.
(Speaking of war correspondence, journos KIA and opinionated advocacy journalism, here’s the latest on my friends from 4/64 Armor, the Palestine Hotel incident and Spanish prosecution efforts: Spanish Judicial Misconduct Thwarted)
Topics: media
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:23 am Comments (2) on Saturday, July 18, 2009
2 Responses to “Walter Cronkite”
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July 18th, 2009 at 11:59 am
[...] Jules Crittenden explores Cronkite’s role as war correspondent, before he morphed into opinion an journalist. [...]
July 18th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
It’s interesting to me that, as seen in the comments on a short item in my sidebar, that today there’s no forgiveness or forgetting of political slights even in death.
Sorta sad and predictably disturbing.