Walter Cronkite

In Walter Cronkite’s last, official interview for CBS before being replaced by Dan Rather, he chose to interview one man: The President of the United States. Not in the Oval Office, but in Normandy, France, and just moments after the President delivered his historic addresses on Omaha Beach and at Pointe du Hoc. Today, we evaluate how a President will be interviewed based on the interviewer. From a certain news agency, we know there will be softballs. From other news agencies, there are curves, sliders, and fastballs coming from left field. But Walter Cronkite represented the best of what journalism does. He sought genuine answers, longed for enlightenment, and never revealed his personal political preferences. The chronicler and historian, David Halberstam, called Walter Cronkite “the most significant journalist of the second half of the twentieth century” in the way one might say, “George Washington was the most significant politician of the second half of the 18th Century.”