The main thing I’ll miss the late Walter Cronkite for is his charming yearly New Year’s concert broadcasts from Vienna. Still, when I heard of Cronkite’s death it was the following two anecdotes that came to mind:
Once when he was asked how he’d like to die, creepy old man Cronkite said “I’d like to go out the way Errol Flynn did – on a 60 foot yacht with a 16-year-old mistress.” His wife, sitting beside him, quickly put a damper on this fantasy by adding, “You’ll be lucky to get a 16-foot yacht and a 60-year-old mistress.” (Reports of his death have thus far not specified which it turned out to be.)
- A friend of mine for whom Cronkite recorded some historical narratives on tape once told me that Cronkite seemed to have surprisingly little idea of the meaning of anything he was reading; he also read “King George III” as “King George Three,” and had to be told that the preferred rendering was “the Third.”
There’s also a certain irony in the fact that just last month Cronkite’s people were informing the media: “His condition is being grossly exaggerated. … It is not true that he’s gravely ill.”
“A friend of mine for whom Cronkite recorded some historical narratives on tape once told me that Cronkite seemed to have surprisingly little idea of the meaning of anything he was reading…”
Hmmm…I’ll wager that very few of his (now former) media colleagues do, either.
There’s something appropirately honest about the British practice of referring to folks with similar jobs, not with the grandiloquent “anchor,” but rather as “newsreaders.” One wonders how many have actually done meaningful reporting for years–it’s much easier to be a media personality.
I like “anchor,” actually. A deadweight on a tight chain.
The 2nd anecdote reminds me of Hitchens’s hilarious one about Jesse Helms, which tops it:
“But what about the hearings on North Korea in which he made repeated references to ‘Kim Jong the Second’? In order to prevent any repetition of this idiotic gaffe, Helms’ staff propped up a piece of card on which was clearly written the pronunciation ‘Kim Jong ILL.’ The senator from North Carolina duly made the adjustment, referring thenceforth to the North Korean despot as ‘Kim Jong the Third.’”
http://www.slate.com/id/2194921/
I remember when Helms, having just spent an hour talking with Benazir Bhutto, introduced her as the prime minister of India and started talking about how interesting it was to chat with Bhutto about the problems of her native India.