Uncle Walter, Space Cadet

Someone asked me yesterday why I hadn’t posted anything on the death of Walter Cronkite. Well, I’m not as big a fan as many want me to be, and de mortuis nil nisi bonum, and all that. Yes, I grew up with him like everyone of my generation, but I never trusted him as much I was supposed to after Tet. There was nothing objective in his essential declaration of a lost war after a great American victory. When Johnson famously said “When we’ve lost Cronkite, we’ve lost middle America,” he may have thought or meant that Uncle Walter was somehow a reflection of middle America, but to the degree that his statement was true, it confused cause and effect. If the administration had lost middle America it was because it was too susceptible to influence as a result of a reputation for objectivity that was perhaps overstated.

Middle America’s news sources were far too limited in those days. (It’s worth noting that people who listen to Rush Limbaugh have a lot more choice, at least in theory, than viewers of network news did in the sixties.) As Glenn says, all of the mourning in the media isn’t about the loss of some mythical era of press integrity and objectivity, but of lost power to propagandize the American people with the loss of a single voice to which much of America turned to for their news. I have no nostalgia for a return to those times.

But that having been said, there is no question that he was the biggest supporter of the space program in the media, and he was, for most Americans of the time, the voice of Apollo. There was a sincere, boyish quality to his enthusiam in his reporting. I was listening to some video this morning on a CBS tribute, and he was describing the launch of the first surface mission as special because it was the one that would actually send men to the moon. And then he mused (paraphrasing, not transcript handy), “…send a man to the moon. What words. Golly, just think about it.” And on the landing, “Oh, boy.”

“Golly.” It’s hard to imagine any current news reader saying “golly,” and that kind of little touch is what resulted in the myth that he was an everyman, though he clearly thought like a Washington elite, as his later statements (the most recent of which was when he declared Iraq, like Vietnam, a lost cause) displayed for anyone who chose to notice. Thankfully, his influence had waned considerably in the intervening decades.

He was purely of the Apollo era, and a part of it impossible to separate. His last day on the air, in early March, 1981, was a little over a month before the first Shuttle flight on April 12th, so there was no overlap with the more modern human spaceflight program that followed the first push. And in some ways, in relating and relaying his own enthusiasm for the program to America, he helped create the enduring myth of Apollo as the beginning of a grand age of space exploration, when it in fact was a dead end that few realized at the time. It’s a false perception that continues to haunt our space policy to this day.

7 thoughts on “Uncle Walter, Space Cadet”

  1. Amen Rand

    When it came to Apollo and Gemini coverage, for me it was Jules Bergman all the way and that other fellow, the blond headed guy that I forget his name. Even at 7 years old Walter seemed pompus to me and Jules always straight up and interesting.

  2. Like Dennis Wingo, I also much preferred Jules Bergman and the ABC folks, and I stuck with them all through Gemini and Apollo. Don’t recall my reasons now, but I sort of remember Cronkite just rubbed me the wrong way.

  3. I never quite forgave Cronkite after listening to his reminiscences on NPR about the show “You Are There”. Here is the summary from the NPR website:

    “In the 1950s, Walter Cronkite hosted a CBS-TV program that used real network correspondents to report events from days well before radio or TV in the style of “live” television news. Called You Are There, the program taught history — and had a secret history of its own. All the writers were victims of the McCarthy-era blacklist. They used the tales of Joan of Arc, Galileo and other historical figures to make thinly disguised points about contemporary witch hunts.”

    The fact that Cronkite sided with the Communists in secretly propagandizing the American public in the 1950’s is of a piece with his unilateral declaration of surrender in Vietnam, and with all his leftist gabbing in the year since. “The most trusted man in America”… I will let the irony stand on its own.

    BBB

  4. The McCarthy era witch hunts were evil — and counterproductive as well. American Communists were there own worst enemies.

    Last week an email exchange led me to the Wikipedia article on the Midpeninsula Free University. One key fact reported was what happened to MFU after some Maoists managed a takeover , thinking they were going to use MFU as a recruiting tool. Membership went from 3000 in 1970 to 70 in 1971.

    McCarthy made the Communists look far better than they were. McCarthy et al. also did not understand the appeal the Communists had to some people earlier than the 1960s. If some people are the only people in town who are fighting for minority rights (consider, for example, Alabama in 1946), don’t be surprised if they do take in at least some people who put a high value on such things.

    Oh, yes, I was much amused by finding out that somebody linked to my comments on this website about MFU earlier. MFU, when I knew it, was a good group doing good things for the whole community. It was very sad what happened to them.

  5. The McCarthy era witch hunts were evil

    I prefer to reserve the term “evil” for people and practices that are actually, you know, evil. Like forced starvation of millions of people. Or cutting off the heads of civilians while videotaping it for propaganda.

    And unlike the paradigmatic witch hunts a la Salem 1692, McCarthy’s targets really were “witches”, i.e. Soviet agents who wanted to bring Stalinist Communism to America. I’m not impressed that they compared themselves to Galileo and Joan of Arc.

    McCarthy made the Communists look far better than they were.

    No, the Communists and their friends and “fellow travelers” made themselves look far better than they were. Ask anyone imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain in the McCarthy years what they thought of Tailgunner Joe and you will find out that he is widely admired. I even know a Romanian immigrant who proudly chose the name “McCarthy” when he processed though INS back in the 1960s.

    BBB

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