Walter Cronkite

He was 92, my God it shouldn’t have been a surprise, it happens to us all, even those who ought to have been beyond mortality, who created and maintained standards that defined Art or Social Contract or Mathematical Truth. Gauss, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Budda, Weill, Einstein, Beckett, they died.

But the death of Walter Cronkite, in our modern currency, is tantamount to the end of the universe, and I say that pretty close to literally.

The significance of his place in human history perhaps won’t be understood by the generation that sucks up its “news” via new media, in little MacBites, in-between homework and Twittering. Try to understand what it was like when Gallileo claimed the Earth rotated around the Sun rather than the other way around. That was Cronkite, in both substance and style. Early 20th century print journalism consisted of the same yellow nonsense that now passes for reporting (except that it actually sold papers); late 20th century and early 21st century broadcast performances aren’t even journalism—they are a peculiar form of entertainment that neither informs nor entertains.

Walter Cronkite, more than anyone other than perhaps Edward Murrow, defined television news at a standard it has not upheld before or since. Even the best of print journalism has never achieved the levels he reached in intensity or scope. He defined Vietnam, space, Watergate… but most important: he defined what journalists do. He determined that objectivity was tantamount, and what that meant was that when he did step in, that rare moment when he interjected his perspective—that beautiful acknowlegement of the legitimacy of informed human interpretation that further trajected American journalism forward in the 1960s and1970s by Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Normal Mailer, and others who noted that human beings bring, for better or worse, their interpretations to the pinnacles of Truth—he moved mountains by what he said. When Cronkite came forward with his beliefs about Vietnam, LBJ famously noted that he had just lost the American public.

Walter Cronkite changed American history. And he did so not through the strategies of American politics or corporate tactics, but by aligning himself with the truth at all times. His death is an enormous loss to us not just of a human being—which in the end is the worst loss that any of us suffer—but of a way of interpreting and reporting the truth that I believe we all will bear, not just now, but as citizens of America.

Nobody really believes what anybody says anymore. With Cronkite’s death, there is scant reason to do so. With Cronkite’s death, we lay to rest not one person, but an entire wayof examing American life—a viewpoint that makes assumptions of a certain sort of grandeur and honor that I am not sure we can claim anymore. I grieve not only the loss of the man, but also the loss of his blessing on us all as Americans in the great, but still perilously young, experiment in democracy that we all are trying to make happen.