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Title: A Reporter's Life by Walter Cronkite ISBN: 0-394-57879-1 Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf Pub. Date: 01 January, 1997 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.8 (40 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Fascinating look into the stories behind the news
Comment: Although an avid reader of biographies, I am usually not a fan of memoirs that incorporate events of history. I usually find them far too dry and uninteresting with their rigid, chronological structure. A REPORTER'S LIFE by Walter Cronkite, however, is a rare exception. Cronkite narrates his own personal history while touching on many of the most significant events and people of the past 50+ years. Cronkite does so in a engaging and page-turning narrative.
As seen through the eyes of perhaps the most respected and trusted reporter of this century, events such as our involvement in war, particularly Vietnam and the division of our country over it, Watergate, the Nuremberg trials, South Africa, Communism, the first steps toward peace between Egypt and Israel, the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement, the assassination of John Kennedy, the NASA space program, and many more are given a more personal, and sometimes different, perspective than the "history" we have come to know or have been led to believe.
The Kennedys, Menachem Begin, Anwar Sadat, Martin Luther King, Jr., George Patton, Jimmy Hoffa, Neil Armstrong, Rosa Parks, Adolf Hitler, and our presidents: from FDR to George Bush, are just a few of the many figures to be found here. Cronkite not only recounts stories about them, but in many cases gives us heretofore unknown and sometimes surprising insights into these colorful and complex personalities.
I found each of his recollections about these important people and events in history both absorbing and entertaining. Having personally reported on all these events, Cronkite is able to make them come much more alive and make them far more interesting than any typical history book's dry recital of facts and dates.
But it is Cronkite's personal history of the development of media journalism, and his own career in it, that makes for the more compelling story. From his beginnings as a newspaper boy, to newspaper reporter, radio announcer, becoming the first news "anchor" for the CBS Evening News, to the sad state journalism is in danger of becoming, as news stations are taken over by corporate conglomerates, more interested in "entertaining" the public in an effort for higher ratings and profits, than in educating and informing said public, we follow both the neophyte journalism student and newly developing industry as they grow up and mature side-by-side through the intervening years.
A REPORTER'S LIFE is a very fine book. It is highly recommended for anyone interested in the life of one of our most distinguished news reporters and human beings, or a brief, but personal look into the history of media journalism.
Rating: 2
Summary: You'd think the guy could write
Comment: This is a surprisingly bad book, written essentially as a string of anecdotes on interesting things that happened to Walter Cronkite in his years as a newsman. For a guy who used to complain that a half-hour newscast wasn't long enough to adequately convey news, it's disappointing to see so many interesting moments in time (Walter's role in covering the Apollo 11 moon landing is a good example) get such short shrift.
This book reads like it was dictated into a tape recorder. There's a continual "then there was the time I..." approach to introducing the various anecodtes, and while I suppose a straight chronological approach might not have worked, it's jarring to read about LBJ's reaction to the Kennedy assassination several chapters BEFORE Cronkite recalls the assassination itself.
It'll be up to someone else to do the definitive Cronkite biography.
Rating: 1
Summary: The Man Who Killed American Soldiers
Comment: General Weyand presented this speech at the GEORGE CATLETT MARSHALL MEMORIAL RECEPTION AND DINNER for the Association of the United States Army Convention, held in Washington, DC on October 18, 2000 GEORGE CATLETT MARSHALL MEMORIAL RECEPTION AND DINNER Association of the United States Army Convention
Washington, DC October 18, 2000
"After Tet, General Westmoreland sent Walter Cronkite out to interview me. I was in Command of the Forces in the South around Saigon and below and I was proud of what we'd done. We had done a good job there. So, Walter came down and he spent about an hour and a half interviewing me. And when we got done, he said, "well you've got a fine story. But I'm not going to use any of it because I've been up to Hue. I've seen the thousands of bodies up there in mass graves and I'm determined to do all in my power to bring this war to an end as soon as possible." It didn't seem to matter that those thousands of bodies were of South Vietnamese citizens who had been killed by the Hanoi soldiers and Walter wasn't alone in this because I think many in the media mirrored his view. It was a far different situation for me than when I was in Korea with my Battalion. I had a fellow named John Randolph who was an Associated Press Correspondent. He literally lived with our Battalion and he wrote about the men in a way that was good for them. It raised their morale. He never undercut their effort nor maligned the cause for which they fought. He became like one of them. He was awarded the Silver Star for Valor for helping them retrieve wounded and dead from the field of battle under fire. When I was in Paris at the Peace Talks, it was the most frustrating assignment I think I ever had. Sitting in that conference, week after week listening to the Hanoi negotiators, Le Duc Tho and his friends lecture us. Reading from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Herald Tribune, the Atlanta Constitution, NBC, CBS, you name it. Their message was always the same. "Hey, read your newspapers, listen to your TV. The American people want you out of Vietnam. Now, why don't you just go ahead and get out?" So finally a Peace Agreement was signed that everyone knew would be violated and with no recourse or hope of enforcement on our part.
Walter Cronkite, the 'Reporter's Life' is a fraud, weak in story and rambles on and on about his sailing boat. In his first ever, televised editorial about the evnst of Tet 1968 barely offer a page in his book. He was not balanced or based on any facts whatsoever his fact-finding few days to Vietna during Tet 1968. It was his "personal opinion" telling his audience and or our government what he thought about foreign affairs. Sounds a lot like what is going on today with the media being more entertainment than news? It's like actors today criticizing American soldiers and Marines in Iraq. The massive numbers of dead were South Vietnamese that were murdered by the Viet Cong terrorists meant nothing to these liberal evil do-gooders like Cronkite, John Kerry and Hanoi Fonda. The "Killing Fields of Cambodian" mean nothing to these liberal holier-than-thou, know-it-alls. People who worshiped Mr. Cronkite as a so-called "fatherly figure" jumped on his bandwagon like Jane Fonda and college hippies. Walter had a new following of young minded zombies for peace.
As Richard Rowere wrote in his book, WAIST DEEP IN THE BIG MUDDY, "This is the first war of the century of which it is true that opposition to it is not only widespread but fashionable."
Sleep well Walter and that's the rest of the story he omitted in a 'Reporter's Spoiled Life.'
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Title: A Long Way from Home: Growing Up in the American Heartland in the Forties and Fifties by Tom Brokaw ISBN: 0375759352 Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks Pub. Date: 30 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Cronkite Remembers by Walter Cronkite ISBN: 0743500563 Publisher: Audioworks Pub. Date: 01 June, 2000 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: This Just In: What I Couldn't Tell You on TV by Bob Schieffer ISBN: 0399149716 Publisher: Putnam Pub Group Pub. Date: 27 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: David Brinkley: A Memoir by David Brinkley ISBN: 0345374029 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 08 October, 1996 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Greatest Generation by TOM BROKAW ISBN: 0375502025 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 30 November, 1998 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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