Walter Cronkite, 92, the television newsman once famously described as the most trusted man in America, has died.

CBS vice president Linda Mason told the Associated Press that Mr. Cronkite died at his home in New York at 7:42 p.m. Friday after a long illness. His family was by his side. Mr. Cronkite's longtime chief of staff, Marlene Adler, said the cause of death was cerebral vascular disease.

The term anchorman was invented to describe Mr. Cronkite. As the anchor of the CBS Evening News from 1962 until 1981, he set a standard for accuracy, fairness, and dependability. His fame was worldwide: In Sweden, anchors are called "Cronkiters."

"He was a great broadcaster and a gentleman whose experience, honesty, professionalism and style defined the role of anchor and commentator," CBS Corp. chief executive Leslie Moonves said in a statement.

Mr. Cronkite's avuncular and authoritative baritone guided viewers through some of the most traumatic and spellbinding news events of the 20th century: the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy; the civil rights struggles in the South; the tumultuous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago; the first walk by a man on the moon in 1969; the Vietnam War; and the Watergate scandal. In an oft-quoted accolade, an independent poll in 1972 named him "the most trusted man in America."

After retiring from CBS, Mr. Cronkite became an active elder statesman, putting his prestige behind journalism education and efforts to improve television coverage of politics.

He also put his money behind a variety of charitable projects, especially those dealing with the environment and international development.

Mr. Cronkite's achievements at CBS were preceded by a distinguished career as a combat correspondent for the United Press wire service during World War II. He went on bombing missions over Germany, went ashore during the Allied invasion of Normandy, dropped into the Netherlands with the 101st Airborne, and covered the Battle of the Bulge.

In all, Mr. Cronkite's working life as a journalist spanned more than six decades.

After his retirement from CBS, Mr. Cronkite enjoyed a leisurely third career as a narrator of specials and documentaries on PBS and cable channels. He reflected on the lessons of recent history in a series of essays broadcast by National Public Radio. And he wrote. His memoir, A Reporter's Life, appeared in 1996 and, predictably, became a bestseller. An enthusiastic sailor, he also coauthored two books about sailing the waters of the East Coast: South by Southeast (1983) and North by Northeast (1986).

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Walter Leland Cronkite Jr. was born Nov. 4, 1916, in St. Joseph, Mo., the only child of a dentist. His ambition to cover news began in boyhood.

"At the age of 6," he recalled, "I went running down the hill through our neighborhood to spread the news of President Harding's death. Three years later, I started peddling the Kansas City Star, so I guess that's when I knew the die was cast."

Several years after his birth, the family moved to Texas. In 1933, at age 16, Mr. Cronkite enrolled in the University of Texas, where he worked on the campus newspaper and as a stringer for the Houston Post and the old International News Service, which in 1958 merged with United Press.

In the most unusual of his several jobs, he called the race results in a bookie joint in Austin for $75 a week.

Mr. Cronkite dropped out of the university in his junior year to help support his mother, who was left without an income or alimony after her divorce from Mr. Cronkite's father, who had become an alcoholic. That year, 1935, he began life as a full-time journalist, first with the Austin bureau of the Scripps-Howard News Service and then for the Houston Press.

In 1936, Mr. Cronkite went to work briefly for a Kansas City, Mo., radio station, KCMO, where one of the most significant events of his life occurred. There, in a hallway, he told A&E's Biography in 1998, he saw "the most gorgeous creature I had ever seen in my life, an absolutely sensational redhead."

She was a fellow employee, Mary Elizabeth "Betsy" Simmons Maxwell. They married in 1940 and had three children, and their union endured until her death in March 2005. He later dated opera singer Joanna Simon, who lived in his New York apartment building. "We are keeping company, as the old phrase used to be," Cronkite said in a 2006 interview of his relationship with Simon, sister of pop singer Carly Simon.

Well-schooled by his varied apprenticeship, Mr. Cronkite began an 11-year career with United Press in its Kansas City bureau in 1937. Kansas City was raffish and lively then, home to jazz clubs and strip joints, and young Mr. Cronkite took it all in. "The Chesterfield Club had nude waitresses, and that was for lunch," he told Biography.

Twenty-five years old when the United States was drawn into World War II, Mr. Cronkite made his reputation with a series of hazardous overseas assignments, including sailing in a convoy that was attacked by Nazi submarines and covering the invasion of North Africa. But he refused to be called heroic: