Walter Leland Cronkite Jr. (November 4, 1916 – July 17, 2009) was an American broadcast journalist who served as anchorman for the CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981. During the 1960s and 1970s, he was often cited as "the most trusted man in America" after being so named in an opinion poll. Cronkite received numerous honors including two Peabody Awards, a George Polk Award, an Emmy Award, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Cronkite reported many events from 1937 to 1981, including bombings in World War II; the Nuremberg trials; combat in the Vietnam War; the Dawson's Field hijackings; Watergate; the Iran hostage crisis; and the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, civil rights pioneer Martin Luther King Jr., and Beatles musician John Lennon. He was also known for his extensive coverage of the American space program, from Project Mercury to the Moon landings to the Space Shuttle. He was the only non-NASA recipient of an Ambassador of Exploration award. Cronkite is known for his departing catchphrase, "And that's the way it is," followed by the date of the broadcast.
Cronkite was born on November 4, 1916, in Saint Joseph, Missouri, the son of Helen Lena (née Fritsche) and Dr. Walter Leland Cronkite, a dentist.
Cronkite lived in Kansas City, Missouri, until he was 10, when his family moved to Houston, Texas. He attended elementary school at Woodrow Wilson Elementary School (now Baker Montessori School), junior high school at Lanier Junior High School (now Lanier Middle School) in Houston, and high school at San Jacinto High School, where he edited the high school newspaper. He was a member of the Boy Scouts. He attended college at the University of Texas at Austin (UT), entering in the fall term of 1933, where he worked on the Daily Texan and became a member of the Nu chapter of the Chi Phi fraternity. He interviewed Gertrude Stein when she visited the university. He also was a member of the Houston chapter of DeMolay, a Masonic fraternal organization for boys.
While attending UT, Cronkite had his first experience in performance, appearing in a play with fellow student Eli Wallach. He dropped out in 1935, not returning for the fall term, to concentrate on journalism.
Cronkite left college in his junior year, in the fall term of 1935, after starting a series of newspaper reporting jobs covering news and sports. He entered broadcasting as a radio announcer for WKY in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. In 1936, he met his future wife, Mary Elizabeth "Betsy" Maxwell, while working as the sports announcer for KCMO (AM) in Kansas City, Missouri. His broadcast name was Walter Wilcox.
He later explained that radio stations at the time did not want people to use their real names for fear of taking their listeners with them if they left. In Kansas City, he joined the United Press International (UP) in 1937.
With his name now established, he received a job offer from Edward R. Murrow at CBS News to join the Murrow Boys team of war correspondents, relieving Bill Downs as the head of the Moscow bureau. CBS offered Cronkite $125 (equivalent to $2,900 in 2025) per week along with "commercial fees" amounting to $25 (equivalent to $580.04 in 2025) for almost every time Cronkite reported on air. Until then, he had been making $57.50 (equivalent to $1,334 in 2025) per week at UP, but he had reservations about broadcasting. He initially accepted the offer. When he informed his boss Harrison Salisbury, UP countered with a raise of $17.50 (equivalent to $406.03 in 2025) per week; Hugh Baillie also offered him an extra $20 (equivalent to $464.03 in 2025) per week to stay. Cronkite ultimately accepted the UP offer, which angered Murrow who held a grudge for years.
Cronkite became one of the top American reporters in World War II, covering battles in North Africa and Europe. He was aboard USS Texas starting in Norfolk, Virginia, through her service off the coast of North Africa as part of Operation Torch, and then back to the US. On the return trip, Cronkite was flown off Texas in one of her Vought OS2U Kingfisher aircraft when Norfolk was within flying distance. He was granted permission to be flown the rest of the distance to Norfolk so that he could outpace a rival correspondent on USS Massachusetts to return to the US and to issue the first uncensored news reports to be published about Operation Torch. Cronkite's experiences aboard Texas launched his career as a war correspondent. Subsequently, he was one of eight journalists selected by the United States Army Air Forces to fly bombing raids over Germany in a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress as part of group called The Writing 69th, and during a mission fired a machine gun at a German fighter. He also landed in a glider with the 101st Airborne Division in Operation Market Garden and covered the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, he covered the Nuremberg trials and served as the United Press main reporter in Moscow from 1946 to 1948.
In 1950, Cronkite joined CBS News in its young and growing television division, again recruited by Murrow. Cronkite began working at WTOP-TV (now WUSA), the CBS affiliate in Washington, D.C. He originally served as anchor of the network's 15-minute late-Sunday-evening newscast Up to the Minute, which followed What's My Line? at 11:00 pm ET from 1951 through 1962.
Although it was widely reported that the term "anchor" was coined to describe Cronkite's role at both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, marking the first nationally televised convention coverage, other news presenters bore the title before him. Cronkite anchored the network's broadcasts of the 1952 presidential conventions, as well as its broadcasts of later conventions. In 1964 he was temporarily replaced by the team of Robert Trout and Roger Mudd; this proved to be a mistake, and Cronkite returned to the anchor chair for future political conventions.
From 1953 to 1957, Cronkite hosted the CBS program You Are There, which reenacted historical events, using the format of a news report. His famous last line for these programs was: "What sort of day was it? A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times ... and you were there." In 1971, the show was revived and redesigned to attract an audience of teenagers and young adults, hosted again by Cronkite on Saturday mornings. In 1957, he began hosting The Twentieth Century (eventually renamed The 20th Century), a documentary series about important historical events of the century composed almost exclusively of newsreel footage and interviews. A long-running hit, the show was again renamed as The 21st Century in 1967 with Cronkite hosting speculative reporting on the future for another three years. Cronkite also hosted It's News to Me, a game show based on news events.
During the presidential elections of 1952 and 1956 Cronkite hosted the CBS news-discussion series Pick the Winner.
Another of his network assignments was The Morning Show, CBS' short-lived challenge to NBC's Today in 1954. His on-air duties included interviewing guests and chatting with a lion puppet named Charlemane about the news. He considered this discourse with a puppet as "one of the highlights" of the show. He added, "A puppet can render opinions on people and things that a human commentator would not feel free to utter. I was and I am proud of it." Cronkite also angered the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, the show's sponsor, by grammatically correcting its advertising slogan. Instead of saying "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should" verbatim, he substituted "as" for "like."
He was the lead broadcaster of the network's coverage of the 1960 Winter Olympics, the first-ever time such an event was televised in the United States. He replaced Jim McKay, who had suffered a mental breakdown.
Anchor of the CBS Evening News
On April 16, 1962, Cronkite succeeded Douglas Edwards as anchorman of CBS's nightly feature newscast, tentatively renamed Walter Cronkite with the News, but later the CBS Evening News on September 2, 1963, when the show was expanded from 15 to 30 minutes, making Cronkite the anchor of American network television's first nightly half-hour news program. Cronkite's tenure as anchor of the CBS Evening News made him an icon in television news.