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Review by Roy Neel
It is now a cliche that television has changed the American landscape, defining not only the way we choose and receive entertainment and news, but much of what has become the American way of life. In its best early form, television journalism was practiced by a few trailblazing former print reporters drawn to the new technology and the mass audiences that came with it.
In A Reporter's Life, the man who became known as America's most trusted personality takes a long look back in this pleasant, self-effacing personal history full of understated, yet remarkable anecdotes from a 60-year career that is nearly unparalleled among American journalists.
Before cable, before television itself, there was a time when newsmen and women proudly called themselves reporters, chasing leads, reveling in the hustling, street-level business of finding news and getting it into print before the competition. It was a time well before agents began negotiating contracts for handsome/sexy news celebrities created by focus groups and coddled with limos, multimillion dollar salaries, and breathtaking speaking fees.
As recently as 30 years ago, the business of reporting news for a burgeoning television audience was populated by a different breed led by the likes of Edward R. Murrow, Eric Sevareid, David Brinkley, John Chancellor, and Walter Cronkite. Often starting as copyboys or less, trained as sportswriters or cub reporters while earning peanuts well into mid-careers, these men formed a bridge between the glory days of local newspapers and the beginning of the electronic news era.
It is during this transitional era -- roughly encompassing World War II through the Vietnam War -- that Cronkite emerged as one of journalism's most successful and popular figures. Raised comfortably, but unsheltered, by a solid midwestern family, Cronkite here recalls a childhood bursting with wonder about a world rapidly growing smaller as a result of live radio.
His entire career is a steady stream of adventures: as a young reporter covering a rowdy, often corrupt Texas political scene, simulating baseball and football broadcasts for a Kansas City radio station (Cronkite here speculates that Ronald Reagan actually stole his story of filling long gaps in these electronic re-creations and claimed it as his own); firing at German fighters from the nose gunner's slot while covering the European battle (imagine Wolf Blitzer agreeing to shoulder a grenade launcher to cover GI's advancing against Sadaam Hussein and you get an idea of how reporting wars has changed); covering the Nuremberg trials, breaking the news of John Kennedy's death, and arguably leading Lyndon Johnson to reverse course in Vietnam, reject a reelection bid for the presidency after concluding that "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost the country."
Cronkite's account is at its best when recalling his personal encounters with world leaders and his gleeful early days as an impoverished reporter and broadcaster learning a craft that was new to his profession. He is weakest when he slips into social analysis and political history, with few original insights beyond his own commonsense good judgment and empathy.
Yet Cronkite leads us through his extraordinary life with an understated, aw-shucks style that belies a riveting story. These pages are filled with the kind of stories we all wish we could leave in a journal for our grandchildren, stories that chronicle not only one reporter's life but an entire nation on the move during the last half-century. His crisp, get-the-lead-up-front copy would make his early wire service editors proud, and it serves the reader well, for it is the unadorned recounting of events, not the prose, that makes A Reporter's Life such wonderful reading.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.