Title: A Reporter’s Life
Author: Walter Cronkite
Publisher: Knopf
Date: 1996
ISBN: 0-394-57879-1
Length: 384 pages plus photo insert
Illustrations: black-and-white photos
Quote: “By the time I was six I already was taking to instant news analysis. The event was the death of President Harding.”
Walter Cronkite saw, remembered, and reported a lot of things. In this book he shares his personal take on many stories he did and did not report on radio or television, including those industries, themselves, and the production of his shows. Lots of mini-stories, many of them funny and heartwarming, some more “exciting.” As a war reporter he was allowed to fly in a fighter plane and taught to use a spare gun: “I don’t think I hit any, but I like to think I scared…those German pilots.”
He came to know many famous people well. In this book he shares a story about a former President’s marital relations just as, he claims, the former First Lady told it to him. (Hint: this was the First Lady whose hopeless voice was almost never allowed to spoil the lovely picture she always made.) Another President used to watch Cronkite’s news broadcasts and call to demand what he considered improvements. Cronkite quarrelled civilly with a sitting Prime Minister, triggered a career crisis by joking that a colleague might “already have” died in his TV show, went to Kennebunkport with the Bushes.
He'd learned early in his career to report the news in a way that seemed neutral and objective while he was biased. In this book Cronkite reveals some personal opinions: he was “conservative” about 1960s pop culture, but when it came to politics, why deny that supporters of global totalitarianism exist? Cronkite admits he was one. He still was one while writing this book.
Whether or not you agree with Cronkite’s opinions, even while airing his opinions he was still expert at finding good, inoffensive stories and telling them tersely. So his memoir is still fun to read. My guess is that, the more of the twentieth century you remember, the more you’ll enjoy reliving it with a TV icon who dominated an important part of pop culture for half of it.
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