Bernard Shaw, a Trailblazing Icon Who Knew When to Leave the Microphone

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on Sep 9, 2022

“You got to have it in the gut to be a good journalist, a good reporter — and a good editor, a good writer, a good broadcaster,” said Cronkite in a CNN interview when Shaw retired in 2001, ”and he did all of that.”

Shaw met Cronkite in Hawaii when the 1959 graduate of Dunbar Vocational High School in Chicago was serving in the Marines. Shaw heard that Cronkite was shooting a documentary on the same island. As Cronkite confirmed, Shaw left about 40 messages for Cronkite for two days at his hotel until Cronkite met him in the lobby.

Shaw in his neatly pressed uniform wanted to know how to pursue a journalism career. They talked for about 40 minutes and began what would turn into a long-running friendship years later when Shaw went to work for CBS News — and appropriately won the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism in 1994.

But Bernie, a notably private man in a profession with no shortage of grandstanders, still had the capacity to surprise his fellow journalists.

In a special farewell program at CNN 2001, I had the honor of joining a tribute panel with Judy Woodruff, who co-anchored a politics program with Shaw, ABC anchor Sam Donaldson and PBS NewsHour co-host Gwen Ifill. Shaw surprised all with his grim assessment of the toll that extensive travel had taken on his family life.

“When I think about all the precious times I was away from my daughter when she was growing up, my son and Linda,” he said, “in retrospect, it was not worth it.”

I wasn’t the only panelist who found the candor and finality of his gloomy assessment to be stunning. But, as my own wife reminded me later, people do need to have a life outside of work, even when they have become iconic.

True. But I still miss him.

========

(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)