Legendary newsman Walter Cronkite dies

NEW YORK - Walter Cronkite, the premier TV anchorman of the networks' golden age who reported a tumultuous time with reassuring authority and who came to be called "the most trusted man in America," died yesterday. He was 92.

Cronkite's longtime chief of staff, Marlene Adler, said Cronkite died at 7:42 p.m. at his Manhattan home surrounded by family. She said the cause of death was cerebrovascular disease.

Cronkite was the face of the "CBS Evening News" from 1962 to 1981, when stories included the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., racial and antiwar riots, Watergate and the Iranian hostage crisis.

It was Cronkite who read the bulletins coming from Dallas when Kennedy was shot, on Nov. 22, 1963. Cronkite's coverage interrupted a live CBS-TV broadcast of the soap opera "As the World Turns."

Cronkite was the broadcaster to whom the title "anchorman" was first applied, and he came to be 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.)

His 1968 editorial declaring the United States was "mired in stalemate" in Vietnam was seen by some as a turning point in U.S. opinion of the war. He also helped broker the 1977 invitation that took Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem, the breakthrough to Egypt's peace treaty with Israel.

He followed the 1960s space race with open fascination, anchoring marathon broadcasts of major flights from the first suborbital shot to the first moon landing, exclaiming, "Look at those pictures, wow!" as Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon's surface in 1969.

A former wire-service reporter and war correspondent, he valued accuracy, objectivity and understated compassion. He expressed liberal views in more recent writings but said he had always aimed to be fair and professional in his judgments on the air.

When he summed up the news each evening by stating, "And THAT's the way it is," millions agreed.

Cronkite was pronounced the "most trusted man in America" in a 1972 "trust index" survey in which he finished No. 1, about 15 points higher than leading politicians.

When Cronkite took sides, he helped shape the times. After the 1968 Tet Offensive, he visited Vietnam and then advocated negotiations leading to the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

"We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds," he said.

After the broadcast, President Johnson reportedly said, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America." *