Growing up in the sixties and seventies, the Six-o-Clock News on CBS with Walter Cronkite formed the backdrop to almost every evening meal.  The sound of his serious, but reassuring voice and the drone of the helicopters coming from places like Saigon and Hanoi as Cronkite gave us body counts and explained to us all the quagmire that was Vietnam, formed the soundtrack to our lives as we went about the wonderful, terrible business of trying to grow up.
      Cronkite’s dignified demeanor seemed to embody all that was good and decent.
      His visible grief when President Kennedy was shot was moving, not only because he was expressing publically out own collective shock –  but also partly because of its restraint — in the effort he took to suppress it.
      His range was unprecedented.
     He covered World War II and the Nuremberg trials, moved onto Vietnam and Watergate and watched a man Walk on the Moon. “Oh, boy,” he said when the apollo spacecraft touched down on that heretofore mythical place in the sky. ‘Oh boy.”
    His Voice was that of the Decent Everyman.  When Walter Cronkite declared during one of his broadcasts that Vietnam War was at a stalement — that it was unwinnable and the United States should negotiate a peace treaty, President Lyndon Johnson famously declared: ”If I’ve lost Cronkite. I’ve lost middle America.”