Uncle Walter: The Anchorman
“And that’s the way it is.” — Walter Cronkite’s sign off
Our Man Walter Cronkite would be on the caseAnd what will you miss when you’re gone?Lovers and songs and light ever-changingAnd the sense that once you belong to something amazing
–-Mary Chapin Carpenter, 2019
Mary Chapin Carpenter, the folk and country music artist, may have never crossed paths with Walter Cronkite, yet his presence shines brightly on her soul-stirring melody, Our Man Walter Cronkite.
As she told Rolling Stone Magazine, as she delved into the intricate dimensions of his life, loves, and the impact on the human experience in a half century flashback to the era of civil rights marches, Vietnam War, and Apollo moon landing, she realized that “ it’s very hard to find someone in our present day that collectively we can lean on in that way.”
“Who is Joanna?” I inquired.
“Joanna happened to be Walter Cronkite’s lover,” said the Dean of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at ASU.
I had been summoned on my first day as a professor of the Cronkite School . When I entered the dean’s exalted realm, the ordinarily gracious smile curled up like a caterpillar. This was not a good sign. How the news that I was about to feature Peter Simon’s photographs in the profile of Walter Cronkite I was writing for the American Philosophical Society, was astonishing unless you consider that college faculties are notorious gossips.
“The politics are complicated.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
He began by saying, “Peter Simon’s photographs could potentially offend the Cronkite children.” The reason, as he explained to his obtuse listener, wasn’t merely due to Peter’s relationship with his sister Carly Simon, who happened to be married to James Taylor, but because he was Joanna Simon’s brother.
The relationship between Walter and Joanna was tolerable as long as Cronkite was alive, but after he was gone, as the dean alluded, it turned a bit like rancid wine, and the Cronkite children weren’t too happy about seeing Simon’s name affiliated with the school.
And although Cronkite had already disappeared from the scene, for reasons that only a family member could discern, Joanna was still persona non grata among the Cronkite clan and Peter’s pictures were likely to be a Casus Belli for my future as a professor.
That’s when I heard a spiraling sound, which was my career. I was caught in the middle of a nasty love triangle had brought two worlds together, the sacred if gossipy terroir of Martha’s Vineyard and the hallowed halls of academe, and they didn’t care much for one another.
Such was Walter Cronkite’s enduring impact that Arizona State University honored him by naming its esteemed journalism school after him. It is how, after joining the faculty, the dean assigned me the task of writing the official biography for the American Philosophical Society where Cronkite had been a distinguished member.
The research led me to Martha’s Vineyard, his summer residence, and there I delved into the essence of the man beyond his celebrity status, including his relationship with the Simon family. I sought to uncover the driving force behind his success and try to understand what shaped him as a media heavyweight. During this journey, I obtained a collection of Cronkite photographs, and when I returned to Arizona I began work.
That was when the phone rang.
There are moments you comply and then there are those in which you scream bloody murder and jump. This was neither. I spoke to Aaron Brown, anotheer colleague with a reputaiton for fierce independence (he had been kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan for a short while). I figured he’d know what to do.
His comment was to toss caution into the sea and finish the article as planned, Simon photos and all, and waited for the fireworks.
They never came.
Call it a light bulb moment. The Cronkite story was a delight to write not only because of the man’s accomplishments, but in fact because behind that celebrity life was a bit of murky detail that no one wanted to touch. Instead, it inflamed my passion for digging into the less well-known secrets of a great life.
Cronkite was many things. A deep connection to time we now call the Cronkite Era of JFK, Vietnam, Apollo moonshots, and race riots, and a natural skepticism of his native “show me state” of Kansas City, Missouri. That and the romantic sailor Martha’s Vineyard created the life he lived.
Together those elements made Cronkite who he was, the most trusted man in America, and the man that enjoyed his life immeasurably. I felt if you were to describe success, he rather nicely fit the mold, or broke the mold. It proved what we all know intuitively that success is the product of an enigmatic stream that includes many people, places, and things.
Most biographies write about people and things. What we discovered was that place is equally if not more important. Take away the place and the person just ain’t the same; talented, yes; successful, to a point; but not the iconic individual they became. Place matters, singularly and profoundly. Then we thought about applying the idea to other lives we knew and look at the influence of place on their success.
I wrote Warren Buffett.
PS I met Cronkite in the 90s when we both attended Malcolm Forbes’s birthday party in Morocco thrown by King Hassan II. The brief encounter told me something about the man. He talked to me about sailing for an hour — I was neither a sailor not anyone he ever needed to spend a moment with — until his wife Betsy pulled him aside and said the Hassan II, the King of Morocco, wanted to see him. She added, “professional courtesy, I’m sure.”
