Walter Cronkite, the premier TV anchorman of the U.S. networks' golden age who reported a tumultuous time with reassuring authority and came to be called "the most trusted man in America," died July 17. He was 92.

Walter Cronkite AP PHOTO

Cronkite's longtime chief of staff, Marlene Adler, said Cronkite died at his Manhattan home surrounded by family. She said the cause of death was cerebral vascular disease.

Cronkite was the face of the CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981, when stories ranged from the assassinations of U.S. President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., to racial and anti-war riots, Watergate and the Iranian hostage crisis. It was Cronkite who read the bulletins coming from Dallas when Kennedy was shot Nov. 22, 1963.

Cronkite, the broadcaster to whom the title "anchorman" was first applied, died just three days before the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, another moment of history linked inexorably with his reporting.

He followed the 1960s space race with open fascination, anchoring marathon broadcasts of major flights from the first suborbital shot to the first moon landing, exclaiming, "Look at those pictures, wow!" as Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon's surface July 20, 1969.

His 1968 editorial declaring the United States was "mired in stalemate" in Vietnam was seen by some as a turning point in U.S. opinion of the war. He also helped broker the 1977 invitation that took Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem, the breakthrough to Egypt's peace treaty with Israel.

Cronkite was born Nov. 4, 1916, in St. Joseph, Missouri.