I am in no way qualified to write a proper goodbye to the late Mr. Cronkite–him having retired a half-decade before I was born–but I have the greatest respect for the man, and wish in a lot of ways that I could have been around for it. On the other hand, reviewing videos of his newscasts, what strikes me is the massive impact and bleakness of many of these newscasts and how that contrasts with the emptiness of many more recent newscasts that I can recall. So most of my wistfulness revolves around our shared interest in spaceflight, his reporting obsession and a large source of my own scientific curiosity. I couldn’t say it better than Couric’s memorial commentary, which posited ‘It’s a measure of the man that he preferred the triumph of the space program to the despair in so much of the news,’ and that is certainly the way it was.
In lieu of saying goodbye to one of America’s great legends I never met, I’d like to introduce him to some of those people who haven’t had any exposure to him aside from his few lines dug up from the archives for Apollo 13. Please enjoy these three clips, and some sage editorial words we broadcast about the Vietnam conflict.
JFK Assassination Announcement
To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy’s intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.