John F. Kennedy became the primary source by which people were kept informed of events surrounding John F. Kennedy's assassination. In fact, television started to come of age before the assassination. On September 2, 1963, Kennedy helped inaugurate network television's first half-hour nightly evening newscast according to an interview with "CBS Evening News" anchor Walter Cronkite. Newspapers were kept as souvenirs rather than sources of updated information. In this sense his assassination was the first major TV news event of its kind. TV coverage united the nation, interpreting what went on, and creating memories of this space in time. All three major U.S.
Walter Cronkite relay what Johnson had said to him. During the final ten minutes of that broadcast, Cronkite reported on the death, giving a retrospective on the life of the nation's 36th president, and announced that CBS would air a special on Johnson later that evening. This story was re-told on a 2007 CBS-TV special honoring Cronkite's 90th birthday. NBC-TV's Garrick Utley, anchoring "NBC Nightly News" that evening, also interrupted his newscast in order to break the story, doing so about three minutes after Cronkite on CBS. The news was not reported on that night's "ABC Evening News", which was anchored by