I would have bet you on Walter Cronkite surviving till Monday at least, just to beat The Reaper to the deadline for the 40th anniversary of his marathon coverage of the first manned moon landing. I would have bet you as well big money on his chagrin at finding himself the object of so much news coverage Friday night upon his passing at age 92.

Many of you reading this will not have understood what the big deal was, why so much attention was accorded that gray-haired guy with such enormous eyebrows. (The same sort of reaction was mirrored recently by another age group mystified by all the hoopla surrounding Michael Jackson’s unexpected death.)  

The simple answer is that, during a tumultuous two decades in our history, Walter Cronkite was the news. Inconceivable as it seems in a world engulfed by 24-hour cable coverage and instantaneous internet access, at one time America took only 30 minutes a day to find out what was going on around it. Despite the best efforts of NBC and ABC, The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite became the broadcast most information-seeking Americans preferred to watch between 1962 and 1980.

He was neither the handsomest newscaster nor the most stentorian, but Walter Cronkite exuded authority behind a microphone, quite in the manner of Edward R. Murrow, the legendary CBS newsman who hired the Missouri native in 1950. Like many other reporters of that era starting out in the brave new world of television, Cronkite had a solid background in print journalism and understood the power of a well-written sentence. (It was illustrative of his approach to television that Cronkite’s official title at CBS News was Managing Editor.)

Succeeding Alabama’s Douglas Edwards as CBS’s evening newscaster in April 1962, Cronkite made an indelible mark on mass communications as the anchor — another TV news legend, Don Hewitt, gets credit for coining that word’s usage — of the network’s nonstop coverage of the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath in 1963. The footage of Cronkite announcing the death of the President still galvanizes; as he reads the UPI press bulletin, he removes his glasses, checking the time, then hesitates a breathtaking five seconds, a broadcast eternity of silence, before composing himself to continue. It was in that moment of vulnerability, breaking the fourth wall as only entertainers had previously been allowed to do, that a vast viewing audience bonded with Walter Cronkite. 

He was not content to sit behind a desk and merely read news. Following the lead of Murrow’s World War II radio reporters, the managing editor made it his business to go where stories were breaking and originate his broadcasts from those datelines, creating a model for news presentation practiced by anchors to this day.

Here, though, is a crucial difference: despite his proximity to the news, Cronkite took care never to become the story. Like fellow anchors Frank Reynolds, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, he knew that in a nation with only three networks, it was vital to convey the appearance of objectivity to maintain the audience’s trust. 

Only once, in 1968, did Cronkite veer from the middle while on the air. Though he had followed the Pentagon’s lead in reporting on the early years of American combat in Vietnam, after returning from the war zone in February, Cronkite gave voice to his disillusionment in a broadcast that used words his audience was not used to hearing in that context, such as “stalemate” and “disaster.” “It is increasingly clear to this reporter,” he summarized, “that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” Many viewers refused to acknowledge Cronkite as the most trusted man in America after that, but not even Lyndon Johnson could prevail against the ultimate accuracy of that assessment.

Dick Nixon had become President by the time Apollo 11 attained lunar orbit, which was somewhat ironic since the frenetic race to the moon was his old adversary John Kennedy’s bequest to the Cold War. While watching a Monday rebroadcast of Cronkite’s anchoring from the night of the Eagle’s landing, I couldn’t help wondering why this particular anniversary was remarked with so little fanfare. Even the ersatz culture marker called Woodstock seemed to be getting more recognition, though, high as they may have been, not one of its 400,000 attendees walked around Mare Tranquillitatis. 

Posterity, what there is of it, will forever cite America’s headlong quest to set foot on the Moon as one of the craziest enterprises ever undertaken by a nation, but crazy in a good way, like trying to locate the Northwest Passage. 

The human race is not destined to squat forever on the rock of its inception. Men and women yet unborn will rise from the current doldrums of human space exploration to plant our species, for good or ill, elsewhere in the sky. (Though, as with previous great explorers, they probably won’t get subsidized until the rulers back home are assured of profiting enormously from their risks.) 

On a summer night in 1969, two uniquely American products — space exploration and Walter Cronkite — reached their apogee as two astronauts set foot upon the gray dust of our implacable satellite, firing our imaginations with possibility, however briefly. If it’s not raining Sunday night, just after sunset, you can go out in your yard and become inspired anew as you watch brave astronauts of this century, manning the shuttle Endeavour docked at the International Space Station, floating 212 miles above us, twinkling in the twilight sky. (Inclement weather? Check http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings to learn when next you can catch a glimpse of space history overhead.)

We can argue the merits of manned space exploration versus the unmanned kind all you want. Just remember, we’re part of a vaster enterprise here and we’ve only a few billion years left to fulfill our destiny, so let’s get cracking.

Courtney Haden is a Birmingham Weekly columnist. Write to courtney@bhamweekly.com.