Walter Cronkite had, as the cliché goes, a front-row seat for history for more than 40 years. What he covered—and how he covered it—tells not only the story of America, but of how America's stories were told.

Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley visited the University of Georgia Monday to discuss his new book, Cronkite, a biography of the man known affectionately as "Uncle Walter," as part of UGA's annual Peabody/Smithgall lecture series.

Born in 1916, Cronkite grew up poor in Kansas City and Houston. "He started in journalism to make money," Brinkley said, and in high school worked as a copy of boy for the old Houston Post, where he fell in love with seeing his name in print. He would read the paper on the bus and hold it in such a way that the person behind him could see his byline, Brinkley said.

Cronkite studied journalism for two years at the University of Texas but dropped out, something that would come back to haunt him in later years. Brinkley obtained a cache of love letters he wrote at the time. "It gave me great insight into his mind, especially how much he was drinking in college," he said.

After college, he worked for United Press, a wire service. His first big story was a school explosion in Dallas that killed 290 students. Even then, he was cautious. One early employer fired him because he advocated waiting to air news of a fire at City Hall that his boss believed killed three people. Cronkite was right—no one had died—but the station aired the incorrect news anyway. That commitment to accuracy over speed stayed with him throughout his career. "On election night, he was usually beated by NBC," Brinkley said. "He waited. But he wasn't wrong."

Cronkite had wanted to become a pilot, but he was colorblind. His interest in aviation led UP to send him to London during World War II to cover the 8th Air Force. He flew on bombers that almost crashed and once had to take over for a dead gunner. But his only injury was a cut from a tulip's thorn thrown at him during a parade in the Netherlands. In those days, reporters put a positive spin on war news. "It was all propaganda—'the boys got Hitler on the run again,'" Brinkley said.

During the war, a rivalry began between Cronkite and another legendary newsman, Edward R. Murrow. Murrow offered Cronkite a job as a CBS news correspondent in Stalingrad (now Volgograd). He initially accepted it, but later decided he didn't want to leave London, enraging Murrow, Brinkley said. They had very different personalities—Murrow acerbic and Cronkite genial—and Murrow's Harvard- and Columbia-educated acolytes in journalism didn't respect Cronkite because he didn't have an elite college degree.

Cronkite's decision to stay in London when other reporters returned to the U.S. paid off during the Nuremberg trials, which he owned, according to Brinkley. UP then made him its Moscow bureau chief.

He went to work for CBS in 1950 but declined an assignment to go to Korea. In retribution, Murrow gave him what was then the lowliest job in journalism—television. The Washington, D.C. station he worked for had only a 15-minute newscast and an audience of a few thousand. But two years later, Cronkite was anchoring coverage of political conventions as TV's popularity exploded. He was a utility player at the time, as Brinkley described him, co-hosting a morning news show with a puppet and interviewing actors pretending to be historical figures on You Are There.

Then then the space race began, launching Cronkite's career into orbit. He started anchoring the evening news in 1962. "While Edward R. Murrow is going after McCarthy and making that a seminal issue, Cronkite got space," Brinkley said. He hung around Cape Canaveral, covered every Mercury, Gemini and Apollo mission and got huge ratings. "It was boosterism..." Brinkley said. "It wasn't right or left. It was America."

Perhaps Cronkite's best-known moment was the JFK shooting. "He really sealed the deal with the Kennedy assassination," Brinkley said. "The fiddling with the glasses, the looking at the clock. He wasn't first, but he was the most memorable.

"He became our pastor, our rabbi, our grief counselor. It was an awful lot to ask from an old wire reporter. He did it, and he did it well."

Around that time, journalism started to change. Cronkite and future 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt, looking to add more drama to the newscast, began covering the civil rights movement regularly. "That was edgy stuff to be putting on the nightly news," Brinkley said. In 1965, Morley Safer did a story on U.S. marines burning villages in Vietnam. President Lyndon Johnson threw a fit, calling his friend, CBS President Frank Stanton, in the middle of the night. "Your communist reporter shat on the American flag," Brinkley quoted Johnson as saying. Stanton replied that Safer was Canadian, but not a communist. "I knew there was something wrong with that boy," Johnson said.

After the Tet Offensive in 1968, Cronkite famously called the Vietnam War a stalemate, becoming "a kind of folk here to the anti-war movement and people who wanted out of Vietnam, but it didn't cost him anything," Brinkley said. That's because anti-war Democrats agreed with him, and Republicans were happy he was criticizing Johnson.

After Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, Vice President Spiro Agnew and henchman Charles Colson went after Cronkite because he was part of the media elite Nixon despised. Nixon was right to fear Cronkite. "Woodward and Bernstein were back-page news at the Washington Post," Brinkley said. "It was Conkrite who gave 17 minutes of a 23-minute broadcast to a Watergate story."

He continued to exercise enormous power during the 1970s, for example, orchestrating diplomatic overtures between Egpytian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin after Sadat told him during an interview that he'd meet with Begin if Begin invited him.

Cronkite left the anchor's chair in 1981, sensing that the infotainment brand of news he opposed was on the rise when CBS gave Barbara Walters more money than he was making. He never stopped worrying about the direction journalism was taking. In the last years before he died in 2009, he fretted about the Internet's effect on journalism and proposed classes to teach students how to ferret out bogus sites and bad information. "To the very end, Cronkite was trying to find ways to make factual journalism reign supreme in an America that's often attracted to tabloid stories and entertainment as news," Brinkley said.