A Pleasant, Low-Cal Memoir Lite   

A Reporter's Life
By Walter Cronkite
Alfred A. Knopf

A Reporter's Life
By Walter Cronkite
Alfred A. Knopf
390 pages; $26.95

The legendary TV anchor Walter Cronkite has exercised a sort of magisterial privilege here, producing a pleasant but low-cal Memoir Lite, an attractive tail-wagger of a read, long on charm but short on surprise.

ôronkite commands the stature to pull off such a feat. After all, how could we resist Uncle Walter's rocking-chair reminiscences of his 19-year career as anchor of the "CBS Evening News" (plus a generation of reporting before becoming anchor)?

Here is someone who was on the scene or the screen for almost every major story from
D-Day to Watergate. Given the exotic locales and cast, going backstage with Cronkite would almost have to be interesting.

Yet "A Reporter's Life," for all its smooth readability, offers little special insight or fresh material and few "Holy cow, get a load of this!" yarns. There's scant evidence Cronkite dipped into notes or did much research at all.

Still, the book is valuable, more for its earnestness than its content. Icon is an overused word these days, but certainly Cronkite is one: the quintessential anchor, one of the most trusted people in history. It was always his personal essence, that Midwestern decency and Scout-leader trustworthiness, that drew and inspired us, far more than the words and stories he happened to offer.

Just so with "A Reporter's Life." The stories are mildly engaging. There is a funny one about how he ended up having breakfast with a bristly Lady Bird Johnson in a robe and hair curlers. Another involves his attempt to meet clandestinely with Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, only to find that "the anchorperson of the most popular television news broadcast in America" could go nowhere incognito.

At the beginning, Cronkite's career hardly seemed destined for such antics. He was born in St. Joseph, Missouri; a newsboy grabbed early by journalism; a college dropout who amazingly failed an early audition for local radio; a knockabout reporter for the Houston Press, Scripps Howard, KCMO radio (where he was known as Walter Wilcox), and United Press before landing at CBS.

His ride to the top started with covering the FDR White House, World War II, the Nuremberg trials, and continued with a stint in Moscow for UP. In 1950 he moved on to several CBS network assignments, including covering the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, before assuming the CBS anchor role in 1962.

ünterestingly, the "most trusted man in America" came of journalistic age during an ethically ambiguous time. Cronkite relates how he "filched" an accident victim's photo from an empty home; once voted fraudulently as "Anthony Lombardo" in Kansas City; and during World War II fired on German planes while riding with the Air Force and arranged for an artillery battery to level a German crossroads.

êhe highlights of his tenure — presiding over political conventions and space explorations; holding us together through assassinations and tumult; gradually turning himself (and us?) against the Vietnam War — are dutifully recorded here.

Cronkite isn't above delivering the occasional barb. He firmly defends the First Amendment and aggressive, independent reporting. He remains indignant that William Safire and Patrick Buchanan "lied" for Richard Nixon. And he bitterly objects to the "neon lights," and "infotainment" that have marked TV news after his retirement.

What sticks with me most about Cronkite's report is his unflagging allegiance to good citizenship. It has a corn- fed, old-fashioned quality to it, but it strikes me as heartfelt, authentic and, like his warnings about Vietnam, instinctively well-timed.

Cronkite blames today's civic cynicism on "the politicians, the press and the public, which tolerate an educational system that turns out a population which in large numbers is too illiterate to participate meaningfully in a democracy." He exhorts the media to stand firm in providing serious information and the society to rededicate itself to the responsibilities of informed democratic dialogue.

"The nation whose population depends on the explosively compressed headline service of television news," Cronkite writes, "can expect to be exploited by the demagogues and dictators who prey upon the semi-informed."

He urges that we "better educate our young people to become discriminating newspaper readers, television viewers and computer users." And he entreats businesspeople and advertisers to "accept some public responsibility" for supporting quality journalism.

Cronkite believes public life should be taken seriously. He believes journalism should serve society. Despite his celebrity, he comes across not as an aloof intellectualizer, but as a concerned regular person. His voice is that of a sensible neighbor gently remonstrating us for letting our children roam outside after dark.

It's Uncle Walter again, and he's still persuasive.