The Most Trusted Man in America

Walter Cronkite died July 17th at the age of 92. He was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, north of Kansas City, and lived in Kansas City till age 10 when his family moved to Texas. He was a son of Missouri. He also was a Boy Scout, Episcopalian, and DeMolay member. He graduated high school but not college, dropping out of the University of Texas in junior year. He started his career in broadcasting as a radio announcer in Oklahoma City then back to his hometown of Kansas City. Perhaps that makes him a colleague of sorts of other great radio broadcasters who also are college drop outs: Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Or perhaps that is where the similarity ends.

Walter Cronkite was called the most trusted man in America. How did he acquire that appellation?

Cronkite covered World War II including battles in North Africa and Europe, bombing raids over Germany, the Battle of the Bulge, even the Nuremberg trials. He was a UP reporter in Moscow for two years. In the early days of 1950s television, Cronkite, recruited by Edward R. Murrow, joined CBS News and was one of the first reporters to be termed an "anchor" which referred to his role covering the 1952 Republican and Democrat conventions. His accomplishments are discussed extensively in many reference sources.

In 1962 he took over as the anchor of CBS Evening News. I remember Walter Cronkite but I do not remember watching him regularly as he reported the news. We watched the Huntley-Brinkley Report in our house; Good night, David, Good night, Chet. There was something soothing about those two guys that left a young kid feeling good about the news in those days of 1960s turmoil and nightly war reports from Southeast Asia, like a daily soap opera to which we eventually grew numb.

When Chet Huntley retired in 1970, Cronkite assisted by the substantial investment of CBS in its news programming, surpassed NBC and dominated the nightly news until his retirement.

Cronkite announced his retirement on February 14, 1980. This is his farewell statement from March 1981:

“This is my last broadcast as the anchorman of The CBS Evening News; for me, it's a moment for which I long have planned, but which, nevertheless, comes with some sadness. For almost two decades, after all, we've been meeting like this in the evenings, and I'll miss that. But those who have made anything of this departure, I'm afraid have made too much. This is but a transition, a passing of the baton. A great broadcaster and gentleman, Doug Edwards, preceded me in this job, and another, Dan Rather, will follow. And anyway, the person who sits here is but the most conspicuous member of a superb team of journalists; writers, reporters, editors, producers, and none of that will change. Furthermore, I'm not even going away! I'll be back from time to time with special news reports and documentaries, and, beginning in June, every week, with our science program, Universe. Old anchormen, you see, don't fade away; they just keep coming back for more. And that's the way it is: Friday, March 6, 1981. I'll be away on assignment, and Dan Rather will be sitting in here for the next few years. Good night."

There was something about Walter Cronkite that I did not like or trust. I have no idea what it was or that I understood it then. Now, in retrospect, I think it was my true common-sense, budding conservative self capable of ascertaining truth-tellers from snake charmers - those people who harbor a deep, dark evil secret within their being.

So when Walter left the airwaves I did not shed a tear of sentiment. He was gone, I didn't watch him anyway.

But in later years I learned some truly disturbing facts about Walter Cronkite.

By the time he campaigned in western Missouri for his Democrat "barbie-doll" cousin as she ran for national office - she who nearly devastated the Kansas City economy from her term as mayor, I found myself hissing at the TV screen when he appeared promoting her, full of the realization that he was not just a liberal, but a radical globalist that promoted the dominance of the United Nations and the withering away of the United States. A man who spewed the most vile, treasonous rhetoric to whomever would listen. And they did listen and sop it up.

For example, in a 1999 speech he gave before an audience at the UN when he was awarded the Norman Cousins Global Governance Award from the World Federalists Association, he stated that "the first step toward achieving a one-world government is to strengthen the United Nations." This is said to be his personal dream.

"It seems to many of us that if we are to avoid the eventual catastrophic world conflict we must strengthen the United Nations as a first step toward a world government patterned after our own government with a legislature, executive and judiciary, and police to enforce its international laws and keep the peace. To do that, of course, we Americans will have to yield up some of our sovereignty. That would be a bitter pill. It would take a lot of courage, a lot of faith in the new order," emphasis added.

Cronkite also reportedly stated the following: "American people are going to begin to realize they are going to have to yield some sovereignty to an international body to enforce world law..."

Cronkite is renowned for his negative impact on the Viet Nam conflict when he announced on his news program in February 1968 following a victory for U.S. and South Vietnamese troops and a defeat for the Communist North Vietnamese:

"For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate."

Shortly after the famous Cronkite "Report from Viet Nam..." then President, Lyndon Johnson, was heard to say "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America." Within weeks Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection.

In more recent years, Walter Cronkite steadfastly supported Bill Clinton during the impeachment proceedings; in 2006 he presented the Walter Cronkite Faith and Freedom Award to actor and activist George Clooney as the chairman of the Interfaith Alliance (an organization opposed to conservative Christians and which maintained a radio show on leftist Air America); he wrote a column in which he regularly condemned President George W. Bush and the Iraq war; he appeared in the 2004 film "Outfoxed" which bashed Rupert Murdoch and Fox News; and he was a contributing writer to far left blog, The Huffington Post.

This month of July 2009, the local news shows all carried their obligatory, hushed voice, reverential reports of this great American icon and not one mentioned Walter Cronkite's radical anti-America globalist agenda. Was he an icon of Americanism or an icon of radical anti-American sentiment?

To me, this passing is a reminder that we must be ever vigilant in assessing the agenda and the veracity of our once "free press." Fortunately, for those of us on the Right who love and pursue the Truth, we have the new media and the Internet, and no longer are captive to the so-called news from ABC, NBC, and CBS and print media as we were when I was a child.