Journalism giant Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America,” spoke on Thursday, Oct. 12, to a standing-room-only audience in Fordham’s McNally Auditorium, on the Lincoln Center campus. The event, “A Conversation with Walter Cronkite,” was hosted by the Fordham Graduate School of Business Center for Communications, and was conducted by Everette E. Dennis, Ph.D., Distinguished Felix E. Larkin Professor at Fordham.
Cronkite got his start on small newspapers in 1937 and joined CBS television in 1950, anchoring the CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981. In his storied career he went ashore with troops at Normandy on D-Day, covered the Nuremburg trials, the Vietnam War, and the flight of Apollo XI—the first mission to put a man on the Moon. He reported on eight U.S. presidents for CBS (his first thirty minute newscast as anchor included an exclusive interview with President John F. Kennedy), and his coverage of the Nixon administration’s Watergate scandal was credited with making the unfolding drama intelligible to the average viewer. Cronkite was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1981.
