The Way We Were : A REPORTER’S LIFE.<i> By Walter Cronkite</i> .<i> Alfred A. Knopf: 384 pp., $26.95</i>

Walter Cronkite “stepped down,” as he puts it, from the lofty anchor chair of the “CBS Evening News” in the first year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. So it’s likely the vast majority of today’s very young television news viewers never saw him and that many who did may since have forgotten that polls once showed him to be “the most trusted man in America.”

Cronkite, as he makes clear in his lengthy memoir, has not forgotten. He often recalls it--most dramatically when he repeats the story that when then-President Lyndon Johnson saw CBS’ dim assessment of the Vietnam War in 1967, Johnson reportedly said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.”

Cronkite is entitled to boast--especially in a book that is less surprising for its hubris than for the bitterness with which it ends. After almost 400 pages of great stories, unforgettable characters and impressive journalistic achievements at CBS, Cronkite complains that ultimately he was “driven from the temple where for 19 years . . . I had worshiped the great god News.”

However dubious the “most trusted man” polls may have been, Cronkite by 1967 really was important enough to influence affairs of state. Television had become the nation’s dominant source of news. CBS had the best reputation and the highest ratings. Cronkite was the first news reader to be called “anchorman.” (In Sweden, he tells us, such people for years were called “cronkiters.”)

Cronkite claims credit for shaping not just the “CBS Evening News” but the very image of a news anchorman as simultaneously omniscient and reassuring. His insistence that he be managing editor, as well as on-camera news reader, however, seems historically ironic. Originally designed to insulate Cronkite from management meddling and advertiser pressure, the title has been misappropriated at local stations, he now complains, by lesser lights who don’t meet the journalistic standards he brought to his network job.

Concern about such pretensions is one expression of a recurring preoccupation in Cronkite’s book: his dissatisfaction with a contradiction that is inherent in commercial broadcast news. The inevitable conflict between the values of journalism and those of advertising and entertainment is a source of continuing anguish for him; in this post-Marshall McLuhan era, he remains bemused that the medium so easily triumphs over the message.

There is no doubt that the values Cronkite wants to be identified with are those of journalism. He has called his autobiography “A Reporter’s Life.” He proudly describes how he earned his spurs in print, with service on newspapers in Houston and Kansas City, Mo., and with United Press International. His most vivid writing involves his apprenticeship in city rooms and his coverage of combat during World War II. Those stories benefit from a memory still infused with the enthusiasm of a young man learning his craft while immersed in the defining events of his generation.

But these early pages also introduce a kind of defensiveness that becomes pervasive as the book goes on. Since the values of journalism will be under assault, Cronkite’s devotion to them has to be established. Too often, this results in sententious moralizing and simplistic lectures that sound like Journalism 101. “My mother and father drilled honesty into me,” he assures us, paving the way for a newsroom mentor who “made clear there was a sacred covenant between news people and their readers.”

Such precepts, however, were soon violated. At about the same time he was learning about the “sacred covenant” at a radio station in Kansas City, two uniformed policemen employed by the notorious Pendergast machine escorted Cronkite to polling places so he could vote under false names--twice on the same election day. But that great story could not be told at the time because Cronkite’s employer was friendly with the Pendergast organization.

Cronkite also reveals that he faked live radio broadcasts of football games just as “Dutch” Reagan once did. He even suggests that President Reagan later stole and passed off as his own a story Cronkite told him about the day the wire services broke down, forcing Cronkite to manufacture an entire quarter of play by play, without the benefit of printed reports.

Given these early accounts of journalistic compromise, the reader is hardly stunned by what is presented late in the book as revelation. “The TV industry,” Cronkite teaches, is “a huge building dedicated to the business of entertainment,” while “journalism is an attached annex next door.” It is harder still to be properly appalled after a series of anecdotes about the road to becoming America’s “most trusted.” At CBS, Cronkite willingly performed commercials for tobacco products, made speeches for causes “dear to a major sponsor” and had answers fed to his earpiece while posing as a quiz-show “expert.” On one program, he chatted daily about the news with a puppet lion named Charlemagne, which he still defends as “a witty, erudite and acerbic critic of the daily scene.”

Cronkite is perfectly frank about how much he enjoyed the non-journalistic benefits of national stardom. As to “television fame,” he tells us, “there is a considerable upside and almost inconsiderable downside.” On the downside, he includes autograph seekers who mistake one celebrity for another, along with restaurant headwaiters who craftily seat “preferred” customers at tables no one else wants. On the upside, there is the opportunity to be seen and heard by millions; there is acquaintance--even friendship--with powerful people, from presidents on down; there is enough wealth to permit the impulse purchases of sports cars and sailboats; and there is a CBS contract allowing a dedicated reporter three months off every year.

Keeping up the image, of course, made demands on the family. At the 1964 Republican convention, for example, rebellious daughter Nancy was asked to refrain from “demonstrations or activities that could embarrass us, particularly any that could cast doubt on my impartiality.” (Nancy responded by demonstrating against conservative Barry Goldwater in favor of the more liberal William Scranton.) Because his otherwise much-praised wife, Betsy, had the habit of “fabricating” embarrassing “little items” for reporters who were profiling him, Cronkite tried to persuade the formidable Oriana Fallaci that he was a widower.

As a rule, though, Cronkite’s relish of the perquisites of his position reduces the urgency of his often repeated worry that TV-news stardom distorts events and distances wealthy anchors from the realities common to their audiences. When he was better received at political rallies than the candidates for which they were held, he was not displeased. He was not embarrassed to wear the watch given him by the president of Rolex and recalls almost with a chuckle that Johnson noticed it and remarked, “I thought he told me those were only for heads of state.”

Because he and CBS News were so important to the nation’s perception of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and other events of the day, Cronkite’s discussions of them make compelling reading. He is open about his own positions: “I don’t believe the public has rejected liberalism”; “I had trouble with [Ronald Reagan’s] political philosophy”; “World government would be preferable to ‘mindless national sovereignty.’ ” His analyses are insightful enough to survive some awkward language: “It is too bad the Vietnam War gave itself such a bad name. It was its own worst enemy.”

Again, he rightly perceives that his strength is in his reporting. When he addresses the nature and impact of what even he calls America’s media “elite,” he struggles. The press during World War II is praised for “a rare show of delicacy” because it withheld from the public the severity of President Franklin Roosevelt’s disability from polio. But the failure of White House reporters to reveal President Kennedy’s “romantic escapades” gets much rougher treatment as “a gross dereliction of the Fourth Estate’s duty.” Cronkite never makes clear why one incident was acceptable while the other was not.

Perhaps confusion results from the fact that news is not a “great god” after all--certainly not to those who run the television business. Cronkite’s own definition of news is familiar but still revealing: “A story is newsworthy depending on how many people it affects and how deeply it affects them and / or how close it happens to home and / or how aberrational it is.” If the basic currency of the profession is so vague, subjective and flexible, it should come as no shock that journalism is vulnerable to the interpretations of those whose principal interests are making money and building audiences.

Nonetheless, Cronkite professes surprise at the devolution of “CBS Evening News” into “sound-bite journalism” and “infotainment” after he “stepped down” from the anchor chair. On the board of directors of CBS, he says, he tried to resist the downsizing that would cripple the news operation--only to be ignored and finally pushed out.

It is hard not to share the anger or sympathize with the frustration of a man who seemed--even claims to have been--spectacularly successful but who now declares his career a failure because he did not “make a difference.” By which he mean: make CBS News resistant to the brutal realities of the marketplace. But his conclusion that only better-educated viewers and more responsible managers can save broadcast news seems inadequate and disappointing after so long and illustrious a career.

The final hope of “A Reporter’s Life” is that, wherever he is, “folks will stop me, as they do today, and ask: ‘Didn’t you used to be Walter Cronkite?’ ” The unspoken message for this reader is, “Don’t blame me.”