An inside look at the US from the 1920's to the end of the twentieth century, and great insight into what made Walter Cronkite the most trusted man in the country in the 1960's and 1970's. I thoroughly enjoyed this story and that surprised me, as I thought I would be reading another somewhat boring "look at me" type of book. His time overlaps my time, having grown up in the sixties, so I am sure I have a bias here. It is one of the few books of the thousands that I have read that I would revisit. Excellent writing style, very engaging. ( )

Interesting but often boring.

Cronkite the cocktail-party raconteur is well represented in this memoir, which is long on self-effacing stories about his radio and wire-service days.

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. ( )

Walter Cronkite’s A Reporter’s Life is an excellent biography of one of America’s outstanding journalist. Born in St. Joseph, Missouri in on November 4th, 1916 Cronkite began his journalism career as a campus correspondent at the Houston Post. He later worked as a local radio station reporter in Oklahoma City as a sports broadcaster. Cronkite went on to have a career at the United Press where he was a correspondent for eleven years. The 1940’s World War Ⅱ saw him as a correspondent in Europe, and he became the chief of the Moscow bureau.
In the 1950’s Cronkite joined CBS News in Washington as a correspondent, and in the 1960’s he assumed duties of the “Evening News.” It was while at CBS he broadcast national political conventions, Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, assassination of John F. Kennedy, civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War. After stepping down as anchorman and managing editor he became a special correspondent at CBS. Cronkite later hosted public affairs and cultural programs for PBS and produced documentaries for the Discovery Channel, PBS, and other networks.
Cronkite was critical of the role media was playing in America. He saw this problem caused by the growth of media monopolies, shrinking budgets, having sound bites of politicians, and the lack of what news should be in a democracy. He spelled out the limitations and strengths of TV as a news source, stated politicians had greater beliefs in their images portrayed, but not the content and analysis of the stories. Cronkite saw the decision of the American government not to have correspondents accompany the troops in the Persian Gulf War as a problem if Americans were to know the true meaning behind such conflicts. ( )