what a luck/ dog Walter Cronkite was. You really could be the Voice of God in an era when all America was called to worship at 7 o'clock every night at a temple called the evening news and there was an oracular ring to every scripted utterance. Cronkite was a construct of national authority. Because TV news had an unchallenged monopoly on America's attention span, he controlled not just the message of the news but also the message of himself as Uncle Walter, the man America could trust. That reassuring probity was all the more treasured because his rise coincided with the country's descent into the swamp of Vietnam, a war with which his reputation for honesty became intricately interwoven.
展开▼
