Arnold Zenker Arnold Zenker Arnold L. Zenker (born 1938) is a retired media broadcaster and public appearance counselor who gained brief stardom by sitting in for Walter Cronkite on the "CBS Evening News" in 1967. Zenker studied at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, from which he received an undergraduate and a law degree. In 1967 at the age of 28, he was asked to sit in for anchor Walter Cronkite to deliver the nightly news. Zenker, working as a Manager of News Programming at CBS at the time, was chosen because a strike by the American Federation of Television and Radio
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