Legendary CBS anchor the holly celebrity Walter Cronkite dies at 92

NEW YORK – Walter Cronkite, the premier TV anchorman of the networks' golden age who reported a tumultuous time with reassuring authority and came to be called "the most trusted man in America," died Friday. He was 92.

Cronkite died at 7:42 p.m. with his family by his side at his Manhattan home after a long illness, CBS vice president Linda Mason said. Marlene Adler, Cronkite's chief of staff, said Cronkite died of cerebrovascular disease.

Morley Safer, a longtime "60 Minutes" correspondent, called Cronkite "the father of television news."

Walter Cronkite

"The trust that viewers placed in him was based on the recognition of his fairness, honesty and strict objectivity ... and of course his long experience as a shoe-leather reporter covering everything from local politics to World War II and its aftermath in the Soviet Union," Safer said. "He was a giant of journalism and privately one of the funniest, happiest men I've ever known."

Walter Cronkite

Cronkite was the face of the "CBS Evening News" from 1962 to 1981, when stories ranged from the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to racial and anti-war riots, Watergate and the Iranian hostage crisis.

Walter Cronkite

It was Cronkite who read the bulletins coming from Dallas when Kennedy was shot Nov. 22, 1963, interrupting a live CBS-TV broadcast of the soap opera "As the World Turns."

Walter Cronkite

He died just three days before the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, another earthshaking moment of history linked inexorably with his reporting.