THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 26, 1997 TAG: 9701270201
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY MICHAEL ANFT
LENGTH: 87 lines
A REPORTER'S LIFE
WALTER CRONKITE
Knopf. 384 pp. $26.95.
Walter Cronkite will forever be the war correspondent who earned the trust of his own radio-raised generation; the avuncular TV anchorman who engendered the affections of baby boomers who grew up watching him deliver the day's news; and the proud man of principle who sailed off into the sunset of retirement with - rarest of rarities these days - both his integrity and reputation intact. Through four and a half decades of solid, workaholic reporting, he got his share of stories as well.
His ever-accessible yet larger-than-life figure is replicated in A Reporter's Life, the auotbiography he somehow managed not to call And That's the Way it Was. As one would expect, Uncle Walter comes across as a cautious, yet questioning man of moderation and moral authority. Those were the very qualities, after all, that endeared him to disparate generations that were often at loggerheads. Yet, for all the value we might place in those upstanding character traits, there is one problem with reading 384 pages of a life led that way: It can be rather tedious, sometimes boring.
Cronkite's vaunted dispassion, the benchmark for an ``objective'' reporter of his era, leaves much of A Reporter's Life flat and uninspired. There are so many events and encounters with history's movers and shakers - and give Cronkite this much: He covered all of them - that few get the attention needed to bring them fully into focus. There's an annoying penchant for name-dropping. And there's so much professional play-by-play on the inner workings of the business that even journalists are likely to give a yawn or two. At its worst, A Reporter's Life fulfills the notion that autobiography must inherently be self-indulgent, allowing the whims of the subject/author to hold total sway.
But when Cronkite permits himself to speak passionately, A Reporter's Life takes on a life of its own.
From the book's early chapters we can glean a few things. First, young Walter, born 80 years ago in Missouri - raised there and, later, in Houston - liked to work. Predictably enough, some of his earliest memories were of being enchanted by newspapers, selling them and reading them. Less predictable, perhaps, and infinitely more interesting was his strong reaction to Texas' race relations. One formative experience involved the shooting death of a black teen who, like Cronkite, delivered ice cream for a Houston pharmacy. The youth was killed by an uncharged white during a delivery, affecting young Walter's view of the South and the race question in general for a lifetime.
Although wary by nature, Walter liked to be where the action was, racing cars as a teenager (which would become an adult habit as well, until his moderate nature took him out of the driver's seat) and having a strong desire to be informed. Both traits served him well as a very willing correspondent during three wars. Cronkite may have been cautious when it came to giving opinions, something he believed he had to be as a reporter, but not regarding his assignments. It's no wonder his family is rarely mentioned. Whenever a story opportunity presented itself, Walter was there.
Much of Cronkite's early career as a United Press International reporter and radio newsman is related during a 60-plus page chunk of verbiage. It could have been boiled down to a 10th of that, so insubstantial is his account of these allegedly formative years. Even Cronkite's retelling of his World War II stint in Europe, legendary by most accounts, is weighed down by reports of inconveniences and bad weather. The last thing the world wants to hear, after all, is a reporter kvetching.
A Reporter's Life's best moments, ironically enough, surface when Cronkite stops reporting and tells it like it is. His rare propensity for passionate speech reared its head at then-Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger in 1968 when the secretary questioned CBS News' patriotism; yet again that year when Cronkite finished a nightly news show with his first-ever editorial - urging the United States to cut its losses in Vietnam in the wake of the Tet Offensive - and again when he refused to apologize to South African Prime Minister Balthazar Vorster for complaining publicly that South Africa's censorship compared unfavorably with that of the USSR.
His explication of these moments, as well as the book-ending attack on the bottom-line-obsessed, infotainment-crazed inheritors of CBS News' Blackrock heyday, are trenchant and display Cronkite's intellectual acuity and moral goodness.
Otherwise, much of the rest of A Reporter's Life mirrors Cronkite's rendering of a meaty conversation he had with LBJ near the end of the latter's rein. ``It was clearly private time,'' Cronkite writes, ``and it should remain such.'' Which is certainly reportorially ethical, even laudable. But for us poor readers, it is, like much of the rest of this book, a cruel tease, when what we really want is a long look at the man behind the curtain.
And that's just the way it is. MEMO: Michael Anft is a Baltimore-based writer and critic.