Watching Apollo 11 with Uncle Walter

July 20,1969, was a Sunday, and the weather forecast in New York was cloudy with a chance of showers. The three networks were about to go wall-to-wall ( TV Guide would later estimate there had been a total of 31 hours of continuous three-network coverage that day and into the next).

 At ABC, Frank Reynolds and Jules Bergman anchored with assists from Apollo 8’s Frank Borman, while “Twilight Zone” creator Rod Serling moderated a panel of science fiction writers, including Isaac Asimov. At NBC, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley and Frank McGee filled the hours, along with Nobel laureate Harold Urey, who discussed the solar system’s origins.

Then, there was CBS, which was first to get on the air with Apollo coverage at 8:35 a.m. The nation’s most popular anchor, Walter Cronkite, would oversee the most-viewed coverage of the moon landing mission, beginning at 11 that morning. He’d be on the air almost continuously until early the following morning, when Neil Armstrong stepped off the lunar module at approximately 2:12 a.m. eastern time.

CBS offered some unique twists too. Special guests included entertainer Bob Hope, sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke and actor/director Orson Welles — his expertise on space travel presumably limited to his famous “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast in 1938. An interview with former president Lyndon Johnson would air that evening.

By 1969, network television news had reached maturity after a decade of trial by fire. Cronkite had long since earned the fond sobriquet “Old Iron Pants” for the endurance records he had set covering

Article source: https://www.newsday.com/entertainment/tv/apollo-11-walter-cronkite-cbs-news-1.32659661