For years, I wanted to marry Walter Cronkite. Despite the age difference.  Every night, after dinner, after the pots and pans were settled on shelves and my brother sat gurgling in his playpen, my mother, grandparents and I would watch Walter Cronkite on CBS, Channel 2, from 7:00 to 7:30, Monday through Friday. 

       The first tingling of a crush began at five as I stood in scuffed white Stride Rights watching Mighty Mouse in black and white and the screen suddenly flickered and rolled.  Mighty Mouse vanished and there he was, sitting behind a desk, speaking, telling me the president had been shot.  Of course I knew who Walter Cronkite was—I was weaned on his news reports—but when he took those black horned rimmed glasses off, wiped his eyes and struggled to stay so terribly in control,  I wanted to kiss him on the cheek.  I touched the screen at the same moment my mother flung the front door wide.  I did not know why she was home from college so early. My grandmother, tall, willowy, the age I am now, met her and then my grandfather, and they all hugged in the middle of the living room, weeping.   I looked back at the television, vaguely aware I should not be wishing so for Mighty Mouse.  And then my mother, wiping her own face, knelt to tell me President Kennedy had died.  She hugged me, very hard, and I heard Walter Cronkite’s voice once again repeat her words.           

       Though I did not know what a president did, I knew who John Kennedy was, and I watched the processional, his wife in her black veil, the cars and horses, the men with rifles, the little salute from JohnJohn.  I felt an odd affinity watching JohnJohn, as if I could feel the loss of a father as well.  Walter Cronkite led us carefully through tender, raw and gaping parts of that decade:  the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., Bobby Kennedy, reports on the civil rights movement, people beaten, hosed and cuffed, and when films of Viet Nam filled our living room five nights in a row, week after week, my mother began painting protest banners.             

       In 4^th grade I was secretly thrilled, when the lights dimmed and the newest film from a series called You Are There projected Walter Cronkite behind a desk, looking somewhat younger, recounting the news from the Civil War, the Salem witch trials, the fall of Troy, and the succulently titled, the “Scuttling of the Graf Spee.” These stories of people and events, recounted and reported like the news, made history relevant, echoing issues discussed nightly on the news.  His news.           

       There were other stories from my childhood. The Apollo missions flared on the television, now in color, and my family, with a new father and a new baby sister would sit out under the stars in the California desert and watch the Apollo crews fly overhead – man made stars hurtling through space with prescribed velocity and purpose.  Cronkite took us on every mission, his voice asking us to watch in awe as Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.  And then there was Apollo 13 and I sat on the floor, heart throbbing as he calmly told us what exactly was going on in the void of space, how these three men could return to earth and how, equally, these three men could be lost.  And when he fleetingly smiled at their return, I cried.  I didn’t cry because they were safe, though I was elated.   It was Cronkite’s naked relief, his swift vulnerability marking this an important moment, that slayed me and I knew I was a part of history.    

       There were only four stations we could watch out in the desert: CBS, NBC, a snowy ABC, and channel 13 which ran reruns of old movies.  This meant you had a one in three chance of having watched the same show as the person sitting right next to you, as no one watched the reruns. No matter who you were in school on any given night, everyone had either tuned in National Geographic, Jacques Cousteau, The Wonderful World of Disney, Wild Kingdom, or the Evening News with Walter Cronkite.  We shared a social lexicon in the classroom and on the playground crossing race, economic status, and lord of the flies peer pressure only because there was nothing else on television and the subject matter united us in conversation.    

       The crush lingered into college. Over glasses of red wine I tried to enjoy, I joked with friends how Cronkite should run for president.  I just knew he’d beat Ronald Reagan and I wanted to cast my virgin vote for him.  And though my friends laughed, I wanted someone with a memory of the past and someone I could trust with the future.  Someone who put his own interests last and the country’s first.  Someone who was passionate about words and the truth and, most importantly, delivering that truth.               

         With his memory lingering after the elections, I thought briefly of majoring in journalism.  The allure of investigative reporting ignited from the gritty tinder of Woodward and Bernstein’s work and they prove the fourth estate a vital check.  But the fire waxed and waned and I decided for all the allure and fantasies of changing the world, I did not like deadlines.             

       Many years later I bought Walter Cronkite’s autobiography, A Reporter’s Life.  The title mirrored his style: clarity to the point.  I learned how he never voted all the years he worked, believing a news reporter should remain unbiased.  How news people in other parts of the world call themselves “cronkites,” how his coverage of the Nuremberg trials electrified the world, how wedded he was to language, to the written word, to broadcast journalism and a belief in the power of education. Not caring about being right, he sought truth and he made me care about the world and left room for thoughtful discussion. 

       The reason the word “nuanced” is so overused now is because we need it so badly.  In a news world of towering icons of dichotomtist thinking, we seek nuance.  With Walter Cronkite’s news there was no need for nuanced discussion and he trusted the listener would bear intelligence and integrity to what information he had to offer before that final, “and that’s the way it is.”           

       When Walter Cronkite died, I wept.  Though sad, I do not weep for movie stars, nor did I (I am ashamed to say), for Lady Di.  But I cried when Philippe Cousteau was killed, and again when JohnJohn’s plane went down.  And when Jim Henson died—a mentor to my own children.  But fuzzy muppets will continue to entertain children and adults, the Cousteaus are still influencing environmental policy worldwide, and Caroline Kennedy remains a heroic character, her family a stable of leaders.             

       But the news will never be the same.  I’m not sure the fourth estate is an estate anymore. 

       And there are certainly no more Walter Cronkites.