You Are There

In my lifetime, I suppose I've watched thousands of CBS Evening News broadcasts anchored by Walter Cronkite. His death today reminds me that he had a great influence in shaping my interests in studying world history and the American experience. Cronkite first came into my world in 1953 as the host of You Are There, a weekly half hour, first-person reenactment of historical events. I was seven that year, and for the next four years Cronkite brought me and my family into some riveting historical events, including wars, disasters, political events, and discoveries. In 1957, Cronkite began hosting The Twentieth Century. The program was a weekly half-hour documentary featuring interviews, newsreels and other footage of significant events. It survived well into my college years in the mid-'60s.

Tomorrow, the news wires and blogs will be humming with the Cronkite biography, his influence on the anti-war movement and Vietnam, his political convention and election banter, his excitement over NASA and manned flight in space and the lunar landings, and his empathic words in time of national sorrow.

I can recall all of those events, but I would rather think of him interviewing George Washington crossing the Delaware on a bitter Christmas dawn. Why? I was there thanks to Walter Cronkite, a most powerful shaper of me, perhaps you, and without question, the American experience..