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Anderson Cooper interviews Walter Cronkite
By Jon Menaster | May 26, 2007
This post has been languishing in the drafts section for some time now, so I’m glad to get this out to you all! It’s a little off topic but still very interesting to me, so oh well.
On Febuary 26, 2007, I had the fortune to be at the Universal Ampitheatre for a special interview with Walter Cronkite. Anderson Cooper is a journalist best known for hosting Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN, and Walter Cronkite was the host of CBS’s evening news for almost 20 years.
The first thing that struck me was both the age and youth of Walter Cronkite. He is 90 years old right now, had trouble walking into the auditorium and hearing Mr. Cooper, but his intellectual ability was still there! He was able to recount stories from 50 years ago with ease. My favorite story was when he parachuted from a plane over Europe with the 101st Airborne during WW II - absolutely incredible!
The following are my top 5 quotes from the interview.
1) On children wanting to grow up and become a politician, Anderson Cooper said
I think you should become a real person before a fake one
to a huge applause and laughter across the room (There were probably close to several thousand people in attendance). Thinking about that quote, it’s clear that Cooper is a cynic in his belief about the realness and empathy of today’s politicians. I can agree with him there - it’s obvious that most politicians are experts at seeming to empathize with the majority of voters. It’s definitely not easy to appeal to such a broad swath of people that make up the American electorate, so to become elected as President it’s clear that a politician might have to become an amorphous blob with constantly changing beliefs. However, most local politicians simply mirror the preferences of their constituents, who often hold fairly similar beliefs. Perhaps then all politicians start out as real people, but over time as they become more and more popular, they have to slowly become the everyman that can appeal to everyone. Therefore all politicians that seek greater power eventually have to become fake. Hmph.
2) Anderson Cooper said
You can’t allow fear to alter what you see
And unfortunately that is exactly what happened in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001. Our fear at being attacked led us to see Bush as a President who could lead us through the horrors of terrorism. Bush’s approval rating spiked at 90% in the immediate aftermath of September 11th (Source). Then the Bush administration used our fear of Al Qaeda and September 11th to link to Saddam Hussein and Iraq, which was then used to justify going to war in Iraq. The majority of American people now want to leave Iraq, but when the war began the majority wanted to remove Hussein from power. Clearly fear played a big part in shaping people’s opinions, and I hope that in the future people will be more cautious of whom they support and for what reasons.
3) Walter Cronkite on the war in Iraq:
I don’t think we should have gone in the first place.
Which was met by loud thunderous applause and a standing ovation, only met by the ovation that Cronkite received after the interview was over. The audience was mostly people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, who had grown up watching Cronkite, and as a young person I felt like I really had missed something by not seeing his broadcasts. He may have been preaching to the choir in this case, but I also must mirror his beliefs. I think that quote stands on its own quite well.
4) When asked by Anderson Cooper, “Who would you most like to have interviewed”, Cronkite responded with:
I would have liked to interview Hitler, and find out what makes him tick
That quieted the audience in a hurry. When you think about it, that really would have been a great interview. Sure Hitler was a terrible man, but finding out the logic behind his madness might have helped the world notice someone else like him coming into power before it was too late.
5) Asked by Cooper for his thoughts on Fox News, Cronkite said
The ownership there puts me off
to raucous laughter by the audience, clearly no fan of Fox News. I’ll let you come up with your own reasons why.
For further reading check out the Wikipedia entry on Walter Cronkite and Anderson Cooper
Topics: Education, Interviews |