Earlier this month The New Yorker‘s Louis Menand reviewed a new book about the life of famed CBS News correspondent Walter Cronkite. Unfortunately, he got a few things wrong, as pointed out by… Walter Cronkite. Of course, this was a different Walter Cronkite, the grandson of the famed correspondent. Cronkite the younger is a broadcast associate in CBS’ Washington DC bureau.
Menand errs when he says of my grandfather’s coverage of the liberation of Europe that “he was not near the front lines.” Menand acknowledges that my grandfather flew on a bombing raid over Germany, but does not mention that during that flight, which took place in 1943, he manned a .50-calibre machine gun against German fighter planes.
In September of the following year, he crash-landed in a glider behind enemy lines with the 101st Airborne on the first day of Operation Market Garden, and was under heavy artillery fire and bombs near Eindhoven for days afterward. You can’t get much closer to the front lines than that.
Walter Cronkite IV
Washington, D.C.