NBC News in April 1962, by Walter Cronkite. NBC's vice president of news and public affairs, J. Davidson Taylor, was a Southerner who, with producer Reuven Frank, was determined that NBC would lead television's coverage of the civil rights movement. In 1955, NBC provided national coverage of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s leadership of the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, airing reports from Frank McGee, then news director of NBC's Montgomery affiliate WSFA-TV, who would later join the network. A year later, John Chancellor's coverage of the admission of black students to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas was the first
Walter Cronkite hands together on camera with a smile and uttering, "Whew...boy" on July 20, 1969, when the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission put the first men on the moon. According to the 2006 PBS documentary on Cronkite, there was "nothing new" in his reports on the Watergate affair; however, Cronkite brought together a wide range of reporting, and his credibility and status is credited by many with pushing the Watergate story to the forefront with the American public, ultimately resulting in the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon on August 9, 1974. Cronkite had anchored the CBS coverage of Nixon's address,