Dear, Trusted Uncle Walter And the 'Legacy' Of World War II

It's good to have Walter Cronkite back on television, if only for an hour, but also something of a shock. Depending on how recent your previous sightings have been, he may appear to have gone from old to elderly, and in America, of course, a youthful appearance is prized to an unseemly degree. In television, it's a career necessity, unless you're Andy Rooney and being crotchety is part of your act.

To the irreverent, the opening moments of "Legacy of War," the Cronkite documentary about World War II airing on public television tonight, will present a nearly irresistible opportunity. Over aerial views of a bombed-out city we hear Cronkite say, "In 1945, Europe lay in ruins." The next shot on the screen is of Cronkite sitting at a desk. Viewers may be tempted to respond, "You're not looking so hot yourself, Walter." He doesn't lie in ruins, thank heaven -- but age, to invoke another cliche, has taken its toll. Uncle no more, he's Grandpa Walter now. Regardless, he is still intellectually vigorous, and the great voice, if thinner now, is still unmistakable. Walter Cronkite is 92.

The most indelible image in the documentary, which teams Walter with British TV newsman Alastair Stewart, comes late in the hour. Cronkite is visiting the Cambridge American Cemetery in England, where 3,812 GIs are buried. Many Americans who died on the battlefields of Europe stayed there when the war was over; their remains weren't routinely sent home as happens with casualties of the Iraq conflict. Volunteers maintain the graveyards and keep them from falling into disrepair.

In addition to the fields of white grave markers, there is a multipaneled wall into which some 5,000 names of those missing in action have been inscribed. Cronkite studies this wall and is overcome. It couldn't have been scripted or planned for him to interrupt his analysis of the future -- contemplating whether it will be filled with more such walls -- when he is struck by how many names there are.

"I'm thinking, 'My God, my God, my God,' " he says, voice trembling. "It's too damn much." His voice cracks -- similarly to the way it cracked when Cronkite told us that President John F. Kennedy was dead from gunshot wounds in Dallas in 1963 -- and, turning his face away from the camera, Cronkite weeps. It doesn't seem forced or melodramatic or in any way calculated; it seems natural, logical, appropriate.

Walter Cronkite has long since earned the right to respond emotionally and symbolically.

He was a close-up witness to much postwar history himself, after all, and it seems obvious that we are, in some ways, still living that history. Though it's hard to interest young people in it, and though it survives mostly on black-and-white film rather than more accessible color videotape, its shadow has proved very long indeed and may never go completely away.

Cronkite was there when Nazi officials were tried at Nuremberg for, among other things, that poetically worded offense "crimes against humanity." We see him in the courtroom wearing the earphones through which multilingual translations were piped. Cronkite remembers one thought that passed through his mind as he looked at the accused: "I wanted to spit on them." He calls Holocaust denial "a crackpot venture," and we see again excerpts from the horrific films made when Hitler's death camps were liberated.

The years are recalled in broad strokes, much of the photography reminiscent of picture postcards, and it's clearly Cronkite's personal touch that elevates "Legacy of War" above other similarly themed TV documentaries. We who weren't there can't know what it was like, not really, and this makes an old man's memories all the more valuable. He is, for all his occasional pomposities and pontifications over the years, one of the greatest broadcast journalists ever to emerge from amid the din of that mad medium. If he can't technically still be called the "most trusted man in America," no other media figure has come along in the intervening years to claim the title and make it his, or hers. In fact, it may not even be widely desirable anymore, since trustworthiness suggests venerability and that sounds too much like old and so on.

In another era, Cronkite's reminiscence would have aired on his home base, his alma mater, the CBS television network, but for many reasons, mostly economic, and through no one's "fault," an hour of prime time given over to Cronkite's cautionary memories is pretty much unthinkable.

So it is that public television proves again that it still has a place in the world and services to perform. There may be many, many documentaries this year that are better written, more cleverly conceived and more skillfully put together than "Legacy of War," but none are as likely to be remembered indefinitely as this one.

God bless you, Walter Cronkite.

Legacy of War (one hour) airs tonight at 11 on Channels 22 and 26.