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November 4, 2022

Almanac of Story Tellers: Walter Cronkite

Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books

Today is the story of Nov. 4th
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    It is the 308th day of the year, leaving 57 days remaining in 2022.

    On this date in 1916, the newsman Walter Cronkite was born.

    He told his stories live, mostly on television, earning himself the sobriquet "the most trusted man in America" during the turbulent and tumultuous years of the 1960s and 1970s. He covered everything from the Kennedy assassination to the moon landing to the resignation of President Nixon.

    He began his journalistic career in the 1930s at the University of Texas in Austin, where he wrote for The Daily Texan and as a correspondent for a newspaper in Houston. He never graduated, and when World War II came along, he was sent overseas to cover the war for the United Press, one of the wire services of the time.

    Returning to the United States after a stint as the Moscow correspondent, Cronkite started working for CBS in 1950, hosting a variety of news-related programs and reporting on news  events.

    In 1962, he became the anchor of the CBS Evening News, which was expanding from 15 minutes to a half hour. A year later, he was the man who choked up when he told millions of Americans glued to the CBS network that John F. Kennedy was dead from an assassin's bullet.

    He was exuberant when he described the launch of the Apollo 11 flight that put two men on the moon. He was believed when he told the American people in February 1968, after two weeks of intense reporting in Vietnam, that the country was "mired in a stalemate."

    "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America," President Johnson reportedly said after watching the program.

    Cronkite was the sole anchor on the news program from 1962 to 1981, when he retired.

    He died in 2009.

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