TV Anchor Walter Cronkite Dies

By Mike O'Sullivan

Los Angeles
18 July 2009

Walter Cronkite, the broadcast journalist once called "the most trusted man in America", has died late Friday at the age of 92 after a long illness. The longtime television news anchor kept Americans informed about the great news events of the second half of the 20th century.

Walter Cronkite was born in Saint Joseph, Missouri in 1916, attended the University of Texas and left to take a reporting job at a newspaper in Houston. He made a name for himself as a battlefield correspondent for United Press in Europe and North Africa during the Second World War. After the war, he covered the Nuremberg war crimes trials, then served for two years as chief of the United Press bureau in Moscow.

In 1950, another legendary figure in American broadcast journalism, Edward R. Murrow, hired Cronkite for the Columbia Broadcasting System. In 1962, Cronkite took over as anchor on the network's flagship CBS Evening News.