PBS documentary on Cronkite

“Walter Cronkite: Witness to History,” an American Masters special on PBS tonight, tries to recapture that early sense of awe and skates serenely across the surface. Mr. Cronkite, 89, interviewed at the helm of his sailboat, still looks hale and disarmingly good-humored, and his many colleagues and friends make the point that he was a real newsman schooled in radio and wire-service work during World War II who became the kindly “Uncle Walter” of unconditional trust.

“He never let himself dominate the news,” Bill Moyers says. “He always understood that people were more interested in the message than they were in the messenger.” That, of course, is nonsense. Mr. Cronkite is a mythic figure not because he broke news but because he invested news with his personal stamp of authority, from the Vietnam War and Watergate to the Middle East peace process in 1977.

The documentary makes a lot of the role he played while covering the death of President John F. Kennedy, and that has perhaps been oversold. He informed and consoled the nation with stoic grace, but it’s hard to imagine that anyone in that chair, at that moment, wouldn’t have been just as memorable simply because he was there. (There are people who mist up at the name of Howard Cosell because they first heard of John Lennon’s murder during “Monday Night Football.”)

The CBS commentator Andy Rooney may be right when he calls Mr. Cronkite “the best anchorman there ever was.” But he is wrong to say “he typifies all the best of what television news should be and no longer is.”