A Reporter's Life

Rating:
Summary: Walter Cronkite forever!
Review: A REPORTER'S LIFE
by Walter Cronkite

Recommendation by Renee Cox ([e-mail])

Friday, November 22, 1963. We were living in Montreal, a city of cold and snow. I had one small infant, another on the way, and no car. So I took a taxi (a tremendous extravagance) to my mother-in-law's, where the family were meeting for an early dinner. Just before I left the apartment, a friend phoned me with the news that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. When I could finally get a phone line, I ordered a cab, and on the way over, the cabbie and I listened to the news on his radio.

We walked into the house and I told my mother-in-law what had happened. She had just come home from downtown by bus and said: "I wondered why everyone was stopped on the street." We turned on the television, and, to my utter disbelief, I watched Walter Cronkite in Washington confirming the President's death. As he did so, his voice broke with emotion. I decided then and there I loved this man.

After reading "A Reporter's Life," I haven't changed my opinion.

Despite the book's occasional contradictory ruminations and a closing summary that, although worthy and courageous, was so pedantic it almost lost me, I recommend this book highly. It is, in a word, a treat. I enjoyed the first half, dealing with his youth, more than the second, and I thought it was because I am older than many reviewers, but I have since come across opinions of other, younger readers which put forth the same thought.

Perhaps the reason we prefer the first half is to be found in Cronkite's own words: "[High] incomes must remove the anchorpeople from any pretense of association with or even understanding of the average person...just before World War II...nearly all of us newspeople, although perhaps white collar by profession, earned blue collar salaries. We could identify with the common man because we were him."

Yes, and there are understandable reverberations of ego between the lines of his memoirs. But in view of Cronkite's fame and accomplishments, overall he comes across as a genuinely modest and likable man.

The book is worth reading for the anecdotes alone, which are sharp and witty but never mean. The only time Cronkite takes his gloves off to deliver a full knuckle punch is in the last chapter, when he thumps the cost-cutting, "bottom-line" philosophy of current network bosses who have a separate agenda which puts ratings, stockholders, and advertisers far ahead of anything else. Quality, if it exists there at all, is an afterthought.

However, this final section of the book which criticizes the broadcast news industry and mulls over its future, is didactic in tone. If anyone has earned the write to comment on these issues, it is Cronkite. But it is too bad that the last chapter seems to contain more "tell" than "show."

A small quibble. He says his career cannot be looked back on as a success, because he does not feel he can say, upon reflection: "I made a difference."

Wrong, wrong, wrong. He is looking through a glass, darkly. The last line, when he says people stop him today to ask, "Didn't you used to be Walter Cronkite?" sums it up.

Of course, he always was and always will be Walter Cronkite, and this wonderful book should play its part in ensuring that we never forget him. Vive Cronkite!
---
(Based on the paperback edition: New York: Ballantine Books, 1997. Copyright 1996.)


Rating:
Summary: Fascinating look into the stories behind the news
Review: Although an avid reader of biographies, I am usually not a fan of memoirs that incorporate events of history. I usually find them far too dry and uninteresting with their rigid, chronological structure. A REPORTER'S LIFE by Walter Cronkite, however, is a rare exception. Cronkite narrates his own personal history while touching on many of the most significant events and people of the past 50+ years. Cronkite does so in a engaging and page-turning narrative.

As seen through the eyes of perhaps the most respected and trusted reporter of this century, events such as our involvement in war, particularly Vietnam and the division of our country over it, Watergate, the Nuremberg trials, South Africa, Communism, the first steps toward peace between Egypt and Israel, the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement, the assassination of John Kennedy, the NASA space program, and many more are given a more personal, and sometimes different, perspective than the "history" we have come to know or have been led to believe.

The Kennedys, Menachem Begin, Anwar Sadat, Martin Luther King, Jr., George Patton, Jimmy Hoffa, Neil Armstrong, Rosa Parks, Adolf Hitler, and our presidents: from FDR to George Bush, are just a few of the many figures to be found here. Cronkite not only recounts stories about them, but in many cases gives us heretofore unknown and sometimes surprising insights into these colorful and complex personalities.

I found each of his recollections about these important people and events in history both absorbing and entertaining. Having personally reported on all these events, Cronkite is able to make them come much more alive and make them far more interesting than any typical history book's dry recital of facts and dates.

But it is Cronkite's personal history of the development of media journalism, and his own career in it, that makes for the more compelling story. From his beginnings as a newspaper boy, to newspaper reporter, radio announcer, becoming the first news "anchor" for the CBS Evening News, to the sad state journalism is in danger of becoming, as news stations are taken over by corporate conglomerates, more interested in "entertaining" the public in an effort for higher ratings and profits, than in educating and informing said public, we follow both the neophyte journalism student and newly developing industry as they grow up and mature side-by-side through the intervening years.

A REPORTER'S LIFE is a very fine book. It is highly recommended for anyone interested in the life of one of our most distinguished news reporters and human beings, or a brief, but personal look into the history of media journalism.

Rating:
Summary: The Man Who Killed American Soldiers
Review: General Weyand presented this speech at the GEORGE CATLETT MARSHALL MEMORIAL RECEPTION AND DINNER for the Association of the United States Army Convention, held in Washington, DC on October 18, 2000 GEORGE CATLETT MARSHALL MEMORIAL RECEPTION AND DINNER Association of the United States Army Convention
Washington, DC October 18, 2000
"After Tet, General Westmoreland sent Walter Cronkite out to interview me. I was in Command of the Forces in the South around Saigon and below and I was proud of what we'd done. We had done a good job there. So, Walter came down and he spent about an hour and a half interviewing me. And when we got done, he said, "well you've got a fine story. But I'm not going to use any of it because I've been up to Hue. I've seen the thousands of bodies up there in mass graves and I'm determined to do all in my power to bring this war to an end as soon as possible." It didn't seem to matter that those thousands of bodies were of South Vietnamese citizens who had been killed by the Hanoi soldiers and Walter wasn't alone in this because I think many in the media mirrored his view. It was a far different situation for me than when I was in Korea with my Battalion. I had a fellow named John Randolph who was an Associated Press Correspondent. He literally lived with our Battalion and he wrote about the men in a way that was good for them. It raised their morale. He never undercut their effort nor maligned the cause for which they fought. He became like one of them. He was awarded the Silver Star for Valor for helping them retrieve wounded and dead from the field of battle under fire. When I was in Paris at the Peace Talks, it was the most frustrating assignment I think I ever had. Sitting in that conference, week after week listening to the Hanoi negotiators, Le Duc Tho and his friends lecture us. Reading from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Herald Tribune, the Atlanta Constitution, NBC, CBS, you name it. Their message was always the same. "Hey, read your newspapers, listen to your TV. The American people want you out of Vietnam. Now, why don't you just go ahead and get out?" So finally a Peace Agreement was signed that everyone knew would be violated and with no recourse or hope of enforcement on our part.

Walter Cronkite, the 'Reporter's Life' is a fraud, weak in story and rambles on and on about his sailing boat. In his first ever, televised editorial about the evnst of Tet 1968 barely offer a page in his book. He was not balanced or based on any facts whatsoever his fact-finding few days to Vietna during Tet 1968. It was his "personal opinion" telling his audience and or our government what he thought about foreign affairs. Sounds a lot like what is going on today with the media being more entertainment than news? It's like actors today criticizing American soldiers and Marines in Iraq. The massive numbers of dead were South Vietnamese that were murdered by the Viet Cong terrorists meant nothing to these liberal evil do-gooders like Cronkite, John Kerry and Hanoi Fonda. The "Killing Fields of Cambodian" mean nothing to these liberal holier-than-thou, know-it-alls. People who worshiped Mr. Cronkite as a so-called "fatherly figure" jumped on his bandwagon like Jane Fonda and college hippies. Walter had a new following of young minded zombies for peace.

As Richard Rowere wrote in his book, WAIST DEEP IN THE BIG MUDDY, "This is the first war of the century of which it is true that opposition to it is not only widespread but fashionable."

Sleep well Walter and that's the rest of the story he omitted in a 'Reporter's Spoiled Life.'

Rating:
Summary: Good, light read.
Review: I've always regarded Walter Cronkite simply a news-writer/wire service reporter/voice-over narrater/anchorman-presenter. I think he purposely reflects this same idea in his title, A REPORTER'S LIFE -- nothing more, nothing less. His memoir is written similiary in a frank, concise, matter-of-fact style, and is unpretentious (most mercifully). A blue-collar reporter; I was born, went to school here, got a job at the local paper there, went overseas and covered the war, did some radio work, went to TV, retired, and here's what I think of network news today... (That's all). Don't look for any insights or deep introspections. For instance; I was truly interested to know his thoughts, feelings, and dealings with Ed Murrow and The Boys, and how he won CBS news from them. Walt only devoted 2 short paragraphs bascially saying: They were editorialists, and I was more front page news. (That's it?) How about working with Eric Severide? A sentence here, another one there. (Yep, that's it).

The first half of the book is devoted to Walt growing up, working in newspapers, becoming a wire service reporter, and covering the war in Europe. This is some good stuff. Again, nothing intensive, but interesting. The second half of the book is about his television career with CBS. If you grew up watching Walt during this time, well -- there's not many surprises. He repeats how he choked up announcing JFK's death, calling the Vietnam War to be a lost cause, learning of LBJ's death with a phone call live on the air, watching Dan Rather getting slugged (woohoo!) at the Democratic Convention, etc. In the last chapter Walt gives his views on the state of network news and how it can be improved. To me, it was kind of sad. He doesn't fully appreciate or understand that it's dead. Yes, he gives some credit to the alternative news sources and how they're contributing to the demise of network news; but with all the 24 hour cable news channels, satellite TV, 2 channels of CSPAN; and the NY Times, Washington Post, BBC, foreign newspapers, and wire services on the Internet -- why would anyone want to suffer under the 3 network Ted Baxters we have now?

All in all, it is a light, entertaining, and enjoyable read. It's like sitting with a favorite, jovial uncle at the dinner table, while he recounts his life's adventures.

Rating:
Summary: Big disappointment, especially the audiobook - it's NOT him!
Review: Wouldn't you think that the audio-book of Walter Cronkite's biography would be read by Mr. Cronkite himself? His is one of the most recognizable voices of the 20th Century? But no, it's narrated by a nasal, sing-song voice that doesn't remotely resemble the master. And the book itself is a tremendous disappointment. I couldn't agree more with the review by Funkytown. I got this book with high hopes, having grown up listening every night to Mr. Cronkite wrap up the day's events. His nightly broadcast was a family ritual, and my family were CBS devotees for years. I looked forward to as cogent a review of his time on the world stage as he gave us daily in the news. Instead, the book jumps from subject to subject with no coherence other than it appears that one thought seems to trigger the next. It was like Mr. Cronkite was dictating into a tape recorder as he sat on the deck of his sailboat enjoying a stream-of-conscious recollection. The use of chapters in this book is laughable. It's a shame, too, as there are lots of terrific nuggets here. You just have to have the patience to wade through it, making chronological and thematic connections on your own. Don't waste money on it....go to your public library.