Walter Cronkite 13 moon missions, Cronkite received the best ratings and made CBS the most-watched television network for the missions. In 1970, when Huntley retired, the "CBS Evening News" finally dominated the American TV news viewing audience. Although NBC finally settled on the skilled and well-respected broadcast journalist John Chancellor, Cronkite proved to be more popular and continued to be top-rated until his retirement in 1981. One of Cronkite's trademarks was ending the "CBS Evening News" with the phrase "...And that's the way it is," followed by the date. Keeping to standards of objective journalism, he omitted this phrase on nights when
Walter Cronkite dispatch Cronkite to the CBS Radio Network booth to report the events and play the audio over the television airwaves while the crew worked on the camera to see if they could get it set up quicker. Meanwhile, CBS was ten minutes into its live broadcast of the soap opera "As the World Turns (ATWT)", which had begun at the very minute of the shooting. A "CBS News Bulletin" bumper slide abruptly broke into the broadcast at 1:40 pm EST. Over the slide, Cronkite began reading what would be the first of three audio-only bulletins that were filed in the