ABSTRACT
Walter Cronkite’s fi rst “big story” concerned a gas explosion in a Texas school in 1937, which he covered for the United Press service. Cronkite was the fi rst at the scene of an accident that claimed the death of 400 children in what he called the “most appalling disaster in American history.”1 His second “big story,” during World War II, set up his future career as a television reporter. Paramount had asked him to participate in a newsreel story on “the occupation of North Africa by American troops.” The feature starts with a picture of a text board, reminiscent of the era of silent movies, announcing: “An eye-witness report by Walter Cronkite . . . fi rst American newspaperman back from Africa.”2 The following clip displays Cronkite sitting in front of a typewriter-his own by implication of the dialectic code (see also the glossary in the appendix). He turns to the camera and declares, “I am just back from the biggest assignment that any American reporter can have.” The third “big story” of his early career, according to his own assessment in his (auto)biography, Cronkite Remembers, covered the coronation of the queen of England.3 Having made the transition from newsreel to television journalism, he celebrated the new technical possibilities of the medium because they enabled him to convey reports to his audience more quickly. While transatlantic broadcasting was not yet possible, the taped report of the coronation was carried by plane, received in a “live broadcast” by another CBS reporter standing on the fi eld of Boston’s Logan Airport, and subsequently introduced on national screens as “the fi rst fi lm from Walter Cronkite from London.”4
After he took over the role of anchoring CBS’s Evening News in the early 1960s, Cronkite’s “big stories” not only became too numerous to count, but also prompted the expansion of the show from fi fteen to thirty minutes in 1963. Sitting under a huge board that read “Walter Cronkite” and, below in smaller letters, “with the CBS News,” Cronkite dedicated the fi rst episode of the expanded public affairs show to an interview with John F. Kennedy, conducted in the president’s private residence.5 Between the 1950s and the early 1990s, there is not one president with whom Cronkite would not appear in an intimate setting. In 1963 his “live” announcement of Kennedy’s death in Dallas made media history. Cronkite just happened
