Moonves on Cronkite: ‘It was like sitting with Babe Ruth’

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CBS Chairman and Chief Executive Leslie Moonves says he knew he had made the big time when Walter Cronkite called to congratulate him on getting the top job at the network.

‘It gave me goosebumps,’ Moonves said in an interview. ‘It said to me, ‘Gee, you’ve arrived.’ ‘ Chatting with Cronkite, he added, ‘was like sitting with Babe Ruth.’

Although Cronkite had been out of the ‘CBS Evening News’ anchor chair for more than a decade when Moonves joined CBS, he still kept an office on the 19th floor of the network’s New York headquarters, known as Black Rock. Moonves recalled that during the memo-gate controversy of 2004 that eventually led to Dan Rather giving up his anchoring job and several other major shifts at the network, Cronkite told him that ‘you did the right thing.’

Before Cronkite, ‘the role of network anchor never had that kind of stature before him,’ Moonves said, adding that he ‘represented what network news was all about.’

-- Joe Flint