"I was scared to death all the time. The truth is that I did everything only once. It didn't take any great courage to do it once. If you go back and do it a second time, knowing how bad it is, that's courage."

It wasn't all fright, however. While he was stationed in blacked-out London, Mr. Cronkite's customarily keen powers of observation and analysis came into play during a walk on the wild side:

"As we males made our way down Piccadilly in the impenetrable darkness, we would hear the click of heels announcing the arrival of a lady of the night. Wearing cheap perfume, she would run her hand along our pants leg. That might have seemed the opening to a streetcorner mating dance. Wrong.

"This was economic foreplay. By feeling the cloth, the ladies could tell whether the male concerned was in the American or British army and whether he was an officer or an enlisted man. On that determination hung the price at which she would open the bidding."

After the war, Mr. Cronkite covered the Nuremberg war crimes trial and served as chief of United Press' bureau in Moscow. Like so many Unipressers, he left in 1948 because of the wire service's chronically low pay, and created a job for himself covering Washington for 10 Midwestern radio stations.

The dean of radio newsmen, the magisterial Edward R. Murrow, knew Mr. Cronkite from their wartime days in London. After the Korean War broke out in 1950, Murrow offered Mr. Cronkite a job with CBS and he snapped it up, starting a television association that lasted more than three decades.

Beginning with his Korean War coverage every night on WTOP, the TV station that CBS owned in Washington, Mr. Cronkite's rise was rapid. With little news film to speak of, working mostly with maps and a blackboard, Mr. Cronkite demonstrated his great powers to simplify and explain, backed by the sure sense of authority born of his experience as a war correspondent.

His WTOP work caught the eye of Sig Mickelson, president of the CBS news department, who chose Mr. Cronkite to spearhead the network's coverage of the 1952 Republican National Convention in Chicago. Mickelson coined the term anchorman to describe Mr. Cronkite's role as the hub of the coverage.

"Within hours of the opening gavel, an electric excitement swept through the CBS people," Gary Paul Gates wrote in Air Time: The Inside Story of CBS News (1978). "The moment was not unlike an opening night on Broadway when a new talent explodes across the footlights for the first time."

The year 1952 brought a landmark in television history: It was the year TV replaced radio as the dominant force in broadcast journalism.

While Douglas Edwards anchored Douglas Edwards With the News in the 1950s, Mr. Cronkite busied himself with a variety of anchoring, hosting, and narrating assignments on shows including The Week in Review, Pick the Winner, and You Are There.

He never grumbled or shirked, not even when he was assigned to discuss the news of the day with Charlemagne the Lion, a puppet, on The Morning Show. "A puppet can render opinions on people and things that a human commentator would not feel free to utter," he wrote in his memoir. "It was one of the highlights of our show and I was, and am, proud of it."

While polishing his coverage of political conventions to peerless luster, Mr. Cronkite saw an opportunity to develop a second salient specialty when the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957. As Gates wrote in Air Time:

"He was determined to be better prepared for that story than any other TV correspondent, and he spent months studying the deeply complicated subject of astrophysics. As a result, by the time the astronaut program was launched in the early 1960s, he was far more conversant in the language of space technology than any of his colleagues or competitors."

In 1962, Mr. Cronkite replaced Edwards as the anchor of the renamed CBS Evening News, beginning a 19-year run in the role that made him more famous than most of the people he covered.

In 1963, as the show became more serious and scrupulous under his sway, the CBS Evening News was expanded from its original 15 minutes to the 30 minutes it still occupies today.

When Mr. Cronkite took over, however, The Huntley-Brinkley Report, coanchored on NBC by Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, was No. 1 in the Nielsen nightly news ratings. It took Uncle Walter, as he came to be called by millions, years to overtake them.

On Nov. 22, 1963, a visibly moved Mr. Cronkite went on the air in his shirtsleeves to tell the nation that President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas.

Mr. Cronkite encountered only one broken rung as he climbed the ladder of success in the 1960s. After he finished second to Huntley and Brinkley in the ratings for the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco, CBS president William S. Paley ordered him replaced at the subsequent Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City.

But the replacement team of Roger Mudd and Robert Trout, derisively nicknamed "The Field and Stream Show," did no better. So Mr. Cronkite returned to the role that Mickelson had named for him and anchored all eight national conventions from 1968 through 1980.