Book Review
Title: A Reporter’s Life
Author: Walter Cronkite
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf>
Date: December 16, 1996
ISBN: 0-394-57879-1
Walter Cronkite’s autobiography fascinates on at least two levels: 1. the storied life of a well-traveled and internationally acclaimed television journalist; 2. the prominent figures that played a part in his life due to his position and popularity.
One anecdote involves the discovery of shady dealings. He worked for a newspaper and made the mistake of changing something on a page he didn’t usually work on. The firestorm that followed shocked him, until he learned that the numbers on the page were communicating the winning numbers in the Mafia’s Numbers Racket.
Cronkite was a radio announcer and was famous for being able to fill in details when the communications went down during a football game. He could make up plays and then smoothly dovetail his made up events with the actual progress when the communications came back online.
One of Cronkite’s first brushes with celebrity was the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. Due to the limitations of technology at the time, some of the interesting anecdotes involve the ways they had to improvise to get film from the live event to the studio in time to show footage during the evening broadcast. This was especially challenging getting footage from England to New York on the same day.
TV made Cronkite the famous figure that he became. So it is with some irony that he marks the end of democracy with the beginning of TV. Politicians and political conventions suddenly became sanitized and dishonest when cameras were trained on them. The exposure of the democratic process could appear ugly to the untrained eye. It’s like some dishes, they are excellent, but it’s not a good idea to watch the chef create it.
By sanitizing the process itself, the end product became sanitized. The end product is the political reality today. The goal was to look polished for the camera, not to honestly work the process to the best possible outcome. “The conventions were reduced to marketing tools. From that day forward, the image on the tube has been the most important aspect of a political campaign, and politics and television have gone skipping hand in hand down this primrose path” (182–183).
Despite the demise of democracy, Cronkite remained an optimistic personality and a revered leader, or at least an accurate reflection, of mainstream American public values. His many decades of journalistic writing gave him a way with words that shows in the present autobiography. It’s an exciting travelogue through the figures and events of the twentieth century, which he covered so well for the CBS Evening News.