Remembering Cronkite’s Apollo 11 contributions
Fifty years ago this July 20, the unimaginable became a reality.
Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins have rightfully become familiar names in the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon.
We have seen their images in special television shows and print journalism.
And we typically see the brief excerpt of a 1961 speech by President John Kennedy pledging to place a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
A television news broadcaster, who in 1962 became the CBS network evening news anchor, deserves credit not only for educating the general American public about the space program, but for promoting and extolling its achievements in historical perspective and grandiose terms.
Walter Cronkite, born in 1916, became the nation’s educator for our national space program from its beginning of manned flights with Alan Shepard’s launch on a Redstone rocket into space in May 1961. The space program became a major passion for Cronkite, a Texan who began a career in sports rapersonal dio broadcasting.
For Cronkite to become the most passionate and best educated news personality on space exploration is a bit ironic — he was a dropout from the University of Texas and even failed a college physics course.
Through eye-opening courage and candor on national issues that mattered most, Cronkite established high credibility.
Many Americans well remembered that sad occasion on Nov. 22, 1963, when Cronkite took off his glasses, looked directly into the camera, and, with obvious grief in his heart, announced the death of President John F. Kennedy.
Surveys confirmed what common sense told us about this avuncular anchor and reporter — Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in a highly divided nation. Some called him “healer of the nation.”
By the time of the Apollo 11 mission, Cronkite had already established a reputation for insightful and courageous journalism. After the shocking Tet Offensive waged by North Vietnamese military forces against U.S. and South Vietnamese forces in early 1968, Cronkite valiantly traveled to Vietnam to personally assess the war’s progress.
When he returned to the anchor desk and weighed his ethical responsibilities as newsman, Cronkite forthrightly informed the nation that this costly, terrible war was unwinnable.
He knew the war was a stalemate and declared as much in prime-time. In essence, he exposed the falsely optimistic and misleading propaganda by President Lyndon Johnson and Pentagon officials that U. S. victory was right around the corner.
Prior to the Apollo 11 mission, Cronkite devoted hours of study and travel to learn all he could about the space program. Though his knowledge of aerospace concepts was immense, he was able to explain them for Americans of all ages.
At this apex of American technological achievement, a half century ago, Cronkite remained on CBS-TV live for 17 and a half hours straight. This successful mission lifted an American spirit that had been so plagued and fractured by a decade of war, assassinations, urban riots and divisive protests.
With neither teaching certificate nor elective political office, Walter Cronkite was both national educator and patriotic critic. When he reported discouraging realities that challenged Pentagon optimism about the Vietnam conflict, no one in the Johnson administration accused him of reporting “fake news.”
Perhaps both Johnson and Cronkite being friends and fellow-texans mattered, but both parties knew it was the truth and that the vital role of news media was to disseminate that truth.
How refreshing now to recall how a network news anchor could be accorded such a high measure of credibility, trust and respect.
And that’s the way it was — July 1969.
Dr. Perry Cotham is a retired professor from Middle Tennessee State University’s Department of Communication Studies. He is the author of “American Rhetorical Excellence: 101 Public Addresses that Shaped the Nation’s History and Culture.”