American journalism has lost one of its elder statesmen. Walter Cronkite was one of the founding fathers of broadcast journalism, pioneering a warm, conversational style for delivering facts with detachment and gravitas. The old-style newsman delivered news to the American viewing public about John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam war, the protests of the 1960s, the Moon landing (40 years ago Monday), Watergate and other major moments of crisis and achievement.

Cronkite died at the age of 92 at his home in New York, on Friday. His son, Chip Cronkite, has indicated he died from “complications of dementia”, according to The New York Times. It is unclear what those complications were, but the news media turned immediately to a retrospective of the life and work of a man whose career reinvented broadcast journalism and shaped the televisual medium.

Before becoming the quintessential television “anchorman”, Walter Cronkite was a field reporter during World War II and reported on the events of the Normandy invasion that began the Allies’ reversal of Nazi expansion and eventually led to the end of the war in Europe. His devotion to reporting on the facts at hand, his attitude of commitment to the facts, in good faith with his audience, delivering the picture most resembling the known truth, whether in broad facts or minor details, won him favor as the “most trusted man in America”.

It is said that in a private meeting, before deciding he would not seek re-election, in response to Cronkite reporting that his experiences in the field in Vietnam suggested the war could only result in “stalemate”, Pres. Johnson said “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America”. That political consensus might be built not by a president or a party, but by a lone voice delivering reliable evidence of the factual make-up of the world, or that consensus shift, is a measure of Cronkite’s contribution to the meaning of a press unencumbered by ideology or interest.

Cronkite was revered by journalists in all media for his forthright commitment to the craft, and a lack of pretension that seems almost universally praised by those who knew him. He was “a news man”, one after another former colleague has repeated, when asked about what impression the great messenger made on them and their careers. He sought the facts, and he wanted there to be something new in every piece of journalism he was part of, a new angle, a new insight to add to the collective psychology, though he wouldn’t have said it that way.

As Douglas Martin writes for the New York Times:

Along with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC, Mr. Cronkite was among the first celebrity anchormen. In 1995, 14 years after he retired from the “CBS Evening News,” a TV Guide poll ranked him No. 1 in seven of eight categories for measuring television journalists. (He professed incomprehension that Maria Shriver beat him out in the eighth category, attractiveness.) He was so widely known that in Sweden anchormen were once called Cronkiters.

A reluctant celebrity, he was nonetheless a star of the first order, rewarded for his labors and his character more than for the fact of his celebrity. He was the quintessential news boss and network anchor man, and to this day, those who worked with him as correspondents say he was a tough and no-nonsense boss, but one who always knew the value and the dignity of the work done in the field. This made him a favorite of correspondents who worked with him.

When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, it was Walter Cronkite who broke the news of his death to the nation and the world. He steadied himself and gave a straight, simple accounting of the time of death, then visibly gave in to emotion, fighting back tears. His basic human instinct to grieve the loss of innocent life framed the trauma of a nation.

The moment has, throughout the 46 years since, been seen as a symbol of national community in grieving for the fallen president, and possibly, as so many thought, for the hopes he had come to embody. Kennedy’s assassination was a moment in which the culture of the nation was crushed in the grip of uncertainty and chaos. Cronkite’s voice somehow reminded viewers this was a community emotion, a national emotion, and gave shape and structure to the loss.

Walter Cronkite covered wars and politics, economics and human interest. The breadth of the material he covered in so matter-of-fact a manner helped make television news the most powerful news distribution system and the standard means of delivery of many key events and historical moments for people across the third most populous nation in the world.

Now two days into the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon, there has been warm remembering of the seasoned anchorman’s giddy reaction to hearing and delivering the news that two men had actually landed on the surface of the Moon. It was this unvarnished humanity that helped give Cronkite’s voice more reach and more resonance, more affect than the medium of television would seem to offer.

As a journalist who had attended to the great moments in history, he was not afraid to intervene to make new futures possible. His work helped to make history in steering Israel and Egypt toward dialogue and later peace. As the Times obituary reports:

In 1977, his separate interviews with President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel were instrumental in Sadat’s visiting Jerusalem. The countries later signed a peace treaty.

“From his earliest days,” Mr. Halberstam wrote, “he was one of the hungriest reporters around, wildly competitive, no one was going to beat Walter Cronkite on a story, and as he grew older and more successful, the marvel of it was that he never changed, the wild fires still burned.”

His commitment to the value of the press as an integral part of the way a free society governs itself and decides its future, distributing information and encouraging debate, was undying. His life in the newspaper business began when he was just a boy, distributing newspapers and magazines door to door. In his teenage years, he got a job with the Houston Post, which he both helped to produce and distributed to neighbors.

His experience there was so engrossing, he would eventually leave the University of Texas two years early and go to work full time as a journalist. His understanding of the role of the reporter and the work of distributing information was far-reaching, and he wasn’t shy about getting himself out there to deliver a story or test new media platforms.

Going back to 1933, when he was just 16, he had an opportunity to travel to the World’s Fair in Chicago. There, he participated in an early test of one of the prototypes for the development of television, something he would later speak of proudly, when comparing his start in TV journalism to that of some of his rival anchors. He liked to say he had been there first.

It was his work, starting in 1939, with the United Press International wire service, that would spur him to prominence, taking him to far off places and giving him the opportunity to learn the tools of the evolving media trade and a background of experience and range that was difficult to outdo. He understood the inherent value of getting a straight set of facts from one side of the globe to the other, in time to make the morning papers, and so television, with its promise of instant information and direct communication, was the logical new frontier.

From the UPI days, colleagues say, he retained a passionate devotion to finding and hashing out and delivering the story, as it was, letting the story tell itself, always listening for the next piece of news, always looking for context and trying to do his audience a valuable service by his work. Cronkite was not about Cronkite; he was about the facts on the ground, the way it was.

He will be missed, but his example stands implacable.

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