Walter Cronkite: Veteran newsman dies

Nation & World News

Walter Cronkite obituary.

The face of CBS News for more than two decades, Walter Cronkite died at age 92 on Friday. He was named "the most trusted man in America" in a 1972 "trust index" survey, and he ended each broadcast with the reassuring signoff, "And that's the way it is."

CBS vice president Linda Mason says Cronkite died at 7:42 p.m. after a long illness with his family by his side. He was the face of CBS News from 1962 to 1981, when stories ranged from the Kennedy assassination to Watergate and the Iranian hostage crisis.

It was Cronkite who read the bulletins coming from Dallas when Kennedy was shot Nov. 22, 1963, interrupting a live CBS-TV broadcast of the soap opera "As the World Turns." Here, Cronkite appears with Dan Rather appear at a news conference announcing that Rather will succeed Cronkite as CBS News Managing Editor and news anchorman, in New York, Feb. 15, 1980.

CBS Evening News celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1998, with a five-part series featuring the broadcast's primary anchors up to that point, including (from left) Douglas Edwards, Cronkite and Dan Rather.

Cronkite, here at his New York apartment in 1999, became something of a national institution, with an unflappable delivery, a distinctively avuncular voice and a daily benediction: "And that's the way it is." He was Uncle Walter to many: respected, liked and listened to. He was among the first celebrity anchormen.

Cronkite was the broadcaster to whom the title "anchorman" was first applied, and he came so identified in that role that eventually his own name became the term for the job in other languages (Swedish anchors are known as Kronkiters; in Holland, they are Cronkiters).

Then-President Clinton waves as he sails with wife Hillary and daughter Chelsea aboard a sailboat skippered by Cronkite near Edgartown, Mass., on Aug. 25, 1998. The outing was the first public appearance by the first family since arriving in Martha's Vineyard for vacation August 18.

Cronkite interviewed President John F. Kennedy in September 1963. Nearly three months later, Cronkite was tell Americans that JFK had been assassinated in Dallas.

For 24 years, Cronkite served as onsite host for New Year's Day telecasts by the Vienna Philharmonic until ill health forced him to bow out earlier this year.

Walter Cronkite, holding microphone, and his crew use a jeep as a camera dolly during an interview with a Marine officer during the battle of Hue City, Vietnam, in 1968.

Cronkite testifies before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee on Capitol Hill on Oct. 8, 1991. The hearing looked into rules for the media covering the war in the Persian Gulf.

Cronkite, a veteran space reporter, arrives at Kennedy Space Center Oct. 28, 1998, to cover the launch of space shuttle Discovery for CNN.

He left the "Evening News" anchor desk in 1981, but after that kept a busy schedule both in journalistic and other activities.

At KCMO, Cronkite met an advertising writer named Mary Elizabeth "Betsy" Maxwell. The two read a commercial together. One of Cronkite's lines was, "You look like an angel." They were married for 64 years until her death in 2005. Here they are in 1981.

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The face of CBS News for more than two decades, Walter Cronkite died at age 92 on Friday. He was named "the most trusted man in America" in a 1972 "trust index" survey, and he ended each broadcast with the reassuring signoff, "And that's the way it is."

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