Biographer Douglas Brinkley looks at the life and career of CBS newsman Walter Cronkite, the St. Joseph native who became the most trusted man in America. Drawing on newly disclosed letters, diaries and interviews with nearly 200 of Cronkite’s friends and colleagues, Cronkite reveals not an icon but a real human with passions, loves, and occasional enmities.

Brinkley is a professor of history at Rice University and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. His mentor, historian Stephen Ambrose, called him “the best of the new generation of American historians.