Walter Cronkite, who daily read The New York Times to millions of American viewers on the CBS News died today of what I would presume to be a combination of the many ills that will befall most of us if we make it past the average male expiration date of 75.29 years. Walter became famous as he spoon fed the country conventional NY-Beltway liberal wisdom from 1962 until his retirement in 1981. Part of his success was surely due to the fact that at the time your choice of news voices was a grand total of three. He somehow earned the sobriquet "the most trusted man in America." I don't think I ever heard him humbly decline the honor. He cried when he announced the death of President John F. Kennedy. Oh, how they loved Camelot in those days. I'll grant that he did a pretty good job telling us what we were seeing with our own eyes during the first moon walk. (That's not Michael Jackson's moonwalk for you young whippersnappers out there.) And yes, the "newsman" did editorial pieces. He crapped on the Vietnam War and that was the end of that. Lyndon Johnson reportedly said, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America." Right or wrong, not exactly the best way to determine national security policy, in my view. Walt retired before the explosion of cable news and the internet, when finally conservative ideas could get a fairer shake. If Cronkite had come along in 1992 instead of 1962 I suspect he would have been just another Katie Couric with a mustache.
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