Saturday, July 18, 2009

Walter Cronkite Dead

Another icon from my childhood is gone. Because of the internet and cable TV there is no one like Walter Cronkite today. Whether I was at home or at my grandparents' homes evening meal time was organized around his evening news broadcast. His influence on the events of the day was enormous. I was too young to remember his reporting on the assassination of President Kennedy; I do remember his reporting on the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and MLK, Jr., as well as his series on Watergate and his editorial comment that the Vietnam war was unwinnable. And I remember watching Dan Rather getting slugged at the Democratic Convention in 1968 and Cronkite commenting on it. We also watched his daily coverage of the first moon landing while at school. Uncle Walter will be missed.

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