He never let us down

[Stinky The Clown]

Never



The quote was stolen from someone speaking in the CBS tribute playing now on CBS.

It is so true.

[bdamomma]

1. there will never be another Walter Cronkite.

he told us everything, he is going to be sorely missed.

[spanone]

2. there's so little journalism left in the 'news' industry it would fit in the coffin w/ Mr Cronkite

[shireen]

3. just watched a nice tribute on CBS

it was followed by an episode of Big Brother. The contrast was too jarring for my system.

[Stinky The Clown]

4. I watched the same tribute and felt the same jarring.

[Tangerine LaBamba]

5. What a great show!

I was really enjoying all the looks back - Walter was everywhere, wasn't he? I hadn't realized, but I guess I took him for granted - until the clip of him choking up, talking about JFK, and when he said, in a creaky, tearful voice, "Anchormen aren't supposed to cry," I lost it.

A little bit of all of us a certain time died with Walter Cronkite the other evening............................

[MichiganVote]

10. You may be interested in this piece...

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/07/18/cronkite/index.html

[Tangerine LaBamba]

12. Thank you -

This is it, isn't it? This says it all:

"it's why they'll celebrate Walter Cronkite (like they did with David Halberstam) only by ignoring the fact that his most consequential moments were ones where he did exactly that which they will never do."

I'm awfully glad I'm old enough to remember Murrow and Cronkite, because we'll never see their like again.................

[MichiganVote]

13. Cronkite was wrong about one thing. His standards did stick with some of us.

[Tangerine LaBamba]

14. I hope we make a difference,

albeit on a smaller scale.

When I get a letter from someone who's read a novel of mine, telling me what they were inspired to do because of the story they read, well, that's one life touched. And I'd like to think there's a ripple effect that goes from there.

We just have to remember, and try to pass it on.

But, man, that farewell program on CBS was really touching....................................

[MichiganVote]

15. We have made a difference but of course so have others who oppose the slant on reality that we have.

And its been a very long fight with many stops and starts. I don't blame the youth for their disillusionment with those of us who lived the 60's, 70's and so on. I only wish the "blame" would cease and these youth do what we have failed to do---plan. Try to plan as a generation rather than react. But it is all very difficult I know.

I too found the program touching and I also found it to be something else--namely, one of the first programs in a very long time that I looked forward to watching. One of my thoughts during the program was that they (the elite) keep trying to sweep public dissent all away. Dissent among citizens with our government in today's maudlin media climate is the pregnant teen age girl of the 1950's.

None of these cheap suits today meet my expectations for reality based news broadcasting. Fox news is nothing more than an entire propaganda machine for the well to do, corporations and the like. The rest feast on murders and fear and animal stories. I still believe that Americans are a serious people who do not eat, sleep and breathe comedic commerce night and day. The persona that we have become via the media is that of a fragile clown with a drab demeanor holding a box of lime green New Jello in one hand and an AK47 in the other.

In my opinion the media has missed the single most important story of this decade and that is the increasing reliance that people have begun to place in one another across a variety of sources. DU is one of those areas although for me it is a mere message board. Nevertheless to many people this board and others have become the proverbial back fence. That is a trend that Walter Cronkite would favor.

If I'm not wrong, our clever youth are going to need that in the future. War clouds gather far, far away.....

I am an avid reader, please pm your work. Your writing is always very interesting.

[Tangerine LaBamba]

17. You're more optimistic than I -

I don't see any ability to plan on the part of those coming up, although there are, of course, notable exceptions. They're used to things changing so quickly, maybe they'll do better with extemporaneous actions than trying to plot them out. In any event, I hope they're smart and nimble enough to be able to navigate whatever waits for them.

Honestly, those storm clouds you mention - I see them coming very, very close. The idea of planning becomes, in the words of the immoral John Yoo, "quaint."

Like you, I watched that Cronkite show. I don't watch anything, always having something else going on when the TV is on. Even my favorite show - "House" - gets my ear, but not a whole lot of my gaze. That Cronkite program, though, was different - I saw down and watched it. Didn't do anything else - no books, no laundry, no running to the kitchen to empty the dishwasher. I just saw and watched. I think the last time I did that was when they were searching for JFK, Jr's plane.

This place, DU, does seem to be a real community to some folks, and that makes a whole lot of sense. If there is an isolation, whether it's physical or emotional or political, a lot of people have found a home here. I get a lot of news here, too, but I fondly remember waiting for Cronkite in the evening, and then Huntley and Brinkley - where we lived, their times were staggered, so we were very lucky - and then eating supper and talking about what it all meant.

When I heard, from my roommate at U of Pennsylvania, that JFK had been shot, I didn't believe her. We listened to the radio, knew he was shot, but it was all jumbled. We hunted down a TV set - imagine that - we had to find a TV - and when Walter Cronkite came on and said JFK was dead, that was when I knew it was true. Until then, there had been hope. If Cronkite said it, it was real.

Imagine putting that kind of trust in Brian Williams. Or Katie Couric.

We're dinosaurs, my friend, but we had the best, and for that we have to thankful. The downside is that we know what has been lost, we can measure it....................................

[Stinky The Clown]

18. We, too, knew he had been shot .......

..... and we were let out of school about an hour early. He was, after all, a Catholic president and we were, after all, Catholic high schoolers.

I had to take two buses and transfer downtown. At the transfer point was a teevee store. Like in pictures of the 50s, so it was true in the 60s. The store had a display window filled with playing teevees and a speaker under the eaves, playing to the street.

As we arrived downtown, Walter Cronkite was on all those teveess. He was telling it like it was.

And we were filled with grief.

I can feel it even today.

The rest of that immediate story played out on our teevee at home.

[Tangerine LaBamba]

19. Watching the Cronkite show on CBS tonight,

seeing him still tear up years later, it all came right back to me, too.

The kinescope of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald - I haven't seen that in so long.

I was at the NE Philadelphia home of my aunt and uncle, everyone having split from campus as soon as we found out JFK was dead.

Remember the fear?

So I was with relatives. My parents came down from PA, other relatives from around the city came to Aunt Irene and Uncle Jim's house, and we were all talking about the assassination, of course. The TV - black and white - was turned on, and we were all watching the transfer, saw Ruby shoot Oswald.

It took a few minutes for us to realize what we'd just seen.

Then my big Uncle Jim Cahill - an Irish lad, a lovely, lovely man - said "This thing is getting bizarre."

I'd never heard anyone say that word before. Not out loud. Only in books.

And tonight, when I thought of us all, gathered together in the most primitive of ways -that's what families are for - I realized that I am the only one of that group still living...........................

[MichiganVote]

20. Certainly put the nail in the coffin of the Splish Splash Bobby Darin genre

[MichiganVote]

21. I was still a kid when JFK was shot so there was a lot going on that I don't think I understood.

My own family life was already pretty scary. But the family and school were Catholic so it was as if someone had murdered the Pope. The two things that had the greatest impact on me at the time were the funeral of JFK and the shooting of Oswald which I did watch at the time. Foreboding times made increasingly worse by 1968.

Watching Cronkite grieve the shooting of JFK in today's time is sad to me because there was so much more to come that was disorienting. For the next 15 years all we could do was make things up as they came our way. Perhaps you're right and that is what our youth will have to do. How else does one live in the US anyway?

And no, I have little use for the featherweights in TV broadcasting today.

My two son's in their 20's worry about jobs, the global climate and the lack of any kind of crackdown on the nutjob groups that murder Doctors in their very own church on a Sunday morning no less. They view our society as dangerous. They consider the US government corrupt and although they voted for Obama, they don't trust him either.

[Tangerine LaBamba]

22. Sounds like you raised two great young men -

smart, too.

But, it's awful that they're so young, and they are forced - because they're smart and sane - to have such a jaded view of the world. Yet, what else could they have?

It's a world today that has so much more than we did back then. SO much more.

It has so much more, there's very little of value, and those nuggets need to be panned out, which is something for which we don't always have the time or energy.

Your sons worry about doctors being shot in their very own churches, while my girlfriends and I knew grown women who did dangerous things so that they wouldn't have to have babies they couldn't afford. We heard everything, even though we weren't supposed to, and we were afraid of becoming just like those women.

We haven't made all that much progress in the fear area, have we?

When JFK died, I knew everything was lost, although it took me decades to understand what had happened to me. The month before, in October of 1963, the people who had raised me - my paternal grandparents - had died, thirteen days apart. I'd had to go home for two funerals, the funerals of the people I loved most in the world, and no one talked about it with me. I was eighteen years old, away from home on my own for the first time, Nonna and Grandpop died suddenly, and then the President Of The United States, that beautiful, vibrant young man with the incredible wife and the perfect babies, was dead, shot to death for no reason that we could know.

It took me a lot of years to get back on track after that happened. April 4, 1968 found me sitting at Macchu Pichu in Peru, marveling at the Forbidden City, when I got word of the MLF, Jr. assassination.

June 5, 1968, I landed in Miami, on my way home from South America to tell my family about the young architect with whom I'd fallen in love in Lima, that I would marry him and live there, when I saw on the TVs in the airport that Bobby Kennedy had been shot.

I stood in the terminal for hours, with hundreds of others, watching those TVs, and when he died, I got on a plane, continuing north, where I would meet another man a few weeks later.

Ten months later, to the day, I would marry the wrong man.

Things fall down..................................

[MichiganVote]

23. I can't imagine an 18 year old with your history not losing her way....

Amazing what little turtles who hatch on nondescript beaches can do.

[glowing]

26. Aww, it'll be ok.. We just need to get some of the old white pasty guys out of the way.

They work too slowly. As much as it seems we have a lot of distractions and lots of technological toys, we've also learned impatience. Which means climate change, green jobs, wars that kill our friends and strain relationships, and healthcare will get going. We don't trust the govt, because its not our faces we see. Its grandparent type people asking insane questions of a would be Supreme Court nomination that really explains why its time to move them into retirement.

And don't worry about retirement and things like that.. Do you think we're going to watch our parents put out in the street when they did so much to cart our asses around to soccer and recitals and college and and and. No way!!!

It will also mean voting for them even if they are half your age.

[MichiganVote]

27. Well you're certainly correct that I will beat my kids fannies if they think I'm going on the street

Those damn soccer games were the worst, snow, then sun, then rain and of course, the nutty parents! Lot to put up with but it was fun too.

I don't mind old people.(people who are older than I because I am an ageless goddess you know). What I mind are career politicians who I KNOW are not even thinking straight, let alone thinking constructively. The idea of the 'Strom Thurmonds' staying in office for decades is not democratic IMO. I do know some very sharp older people who are "with it". However they are "with it" precisely because they know their limitations and would not take a job that requires the 24/7 sharp thinking that our lawmakers SHOULD be able to exercise.

So for now we are stuck with a bunch of has been millionaire representatives who preen in front of the camera whenever they can and play the blame game better than a couple in divorce court. How sad that the hard working youth in our country are deprived of better representation.

I like smart people who can be about as smart ass as they want so long as they are also responsible.

[crickets]

25. Thanks for posting that link.

Greenwald is consistently excellent, but this time he really knocks it out of the park. :thumbsup:

[rhett o rick]

6. Maybe the last of the great newsmen. nm

[Tuesday Afternoon]

7. May he rest in peace.

:cry:

[JPZenger]

8. Amazing that CBS kicked him out the door

As described in his biography, when Cronkike agreed to retire as anchor, he understood he was going to be used for important special investigative reports. Instead, CBS wouldn't give him anything to do. What a waste of talent.

[MichiganVote]

11. He stood up to the military about the war. He was kicked out when he wouldn't change.

[Captain Hilts]

9. I wish I could pick up an HDTV signal....Damn. nt

[annabanana]

16. He trusted America, so America trusted him.

He believed that if the People were given the facts, the complete information, that as an aggregate, the American People would do the right thing.

I think he was right.

The saddest thing in this Country is that we are not trusted anymore to come up with good and honest solutions to the problems that hound us.

[PurityOfEssence]

24. Izzy Stone would give you an earful if he were alive...

I remember a clip from a documentary where I.F. Stone ambled up to a cheery Cronkite at a cocktail party. Stone started to take him to task about the Vietnam coverage, and Cronkite masterfully smiled his twinkly smile and deflected him with a friendly greeting, completely ignoring the question, as the others in the room ran interference, blocked the camera and generally shut Stone down.

Establishment. Avuncular mouthpiece. In the final analysis, he probably did more or less all he could, but always playing it safe and erring on the side of power.

Compared to the jackals and mannequins of today, though, he was much more of a journalist. Lest we forget, though, Edward R. Murrow he wasn't.

I don't want to ruin everybody's party, and I have fond memories too, but reality deserves a little airtime, too...