Walter Cronkite passes

[Donna Halper]

>Kevin said--
>
>I don't think Walter was showing contempt for what Nixon stood for but
>it was more it would have been nice to tell us you were dropping by.
>Nixon I had met a few times before as he spent a lot of time at WMUR
>because he had to win that primary or he was finished and I believe he
>wound up with over 70 percent of the vote.
>
>What I took away the most from that night was his genuine concern of
>what my generation was feeling and he talked to me like a concerned
>uncle no pun intended. I think he was simply being a reporter trying
>to find out what we saw was wrong that his generation did not.

My own experience was that Walter came from that generation where you 
NEVER identified your own political leanings.  Prior to Vietnam, he 
was (according to people I know who worked with him) what might be 
called a moderate conservative.  He accepted, as was common back 
then, the responses of "official government sources".  But Vietnam 
changed him-- his first trip over, he went with the military and saw 
what the government wanted him to see.  But when some members of what 
would today be called the "alternative" media (like the Village 
Voice, Boston Phoenix/Real Paper, the Nation, those sorts of 
publications) questioned whether he had gotten the entire story, to 
his credit, he revisited it and found, as many of us tried to tell 
him, that the government wasn't  being entirely honest when telling 
the American people we were winning in Vietnam.

 From then on, while you didn't see it on screen, his views became 
more aligned with those who were moderately liberal, and he became 
much more skeptical-- that was his big problem with Nixon's cover-up 
of Watergate.  He respected the office of the president, but he hated 
being lied to.  He has seen the Johnson administration being less 
than honest, and he didn't like it when Nixon did the same thing.  He 
kept all of that out of his newscasts however.  In his generation, 
there was a big separation between news and opinion.  The few times 
he gave an opinion, he identified it as such.  But after he left the 
anchor desk, he became active in causes that promoted freedom of 
speech, freedom of the press (of course) and also separation of 
church and state.