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(CBS)  In 1996, CBS "Sunday Morning" host Charles Osgood spent an afternoon chatting with Walter Cronkite about his just-published autobiography, "A Reporter's Life." It was a chance to learn a little about the man we'd all spent so much time watching on TV:

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Osgood: Your dad was a dentist.

Cronkite: My dad was a dentist. My grandfather was a dentist. My uncle was a dentist. Yeah.

Osgood: And you decided to be the first of a long line of dentists to do something else?

Cronkite: Yeah. I thought I'd rather look in the horse's mouth and get the truth rather than people's mouths.

Which he did, from the battlefields of World War II to the no-less combative theatre of Washington, D.C.

Osgood: You always refer to yourself as 'this reporter.' When did you know in your life that that is what you wanted to be?

Cronkite: Very early on . I was directed into journalism, if you please, by a series of short stories in American Boy magazine. And the one that hit me most intriguingly was that of the newspaperman.

As for so many of the pioneers of television, World War II gave Cronkite his biggest break - the chance to report under fire in what he called, in one piece of newsreel footage, "the biggest assignment that any American reporter could have so far in this war."

Cronkite: I was one of them who volunteered to be a front-line correspondent, to be out there where the shot and shell was. I made a few air missions. I was there a lot of the time.

He is heard in one vintage newscast: "The planes and gliders will split into two routes, northern and southern. Otherwise, the column will string so long, enemy fighters will be able to get up in time to attack the rear, or so wide that flak can hardly miss. It is a day this reporter cannot forget."

Cronkite: Those American Waco gliders were built of aluminum tubing with canvas skins. The canvas cover beat against the aluminum, and it was like being inside the drum at a Grateful Dead concert. Over the drop zone, the second surprise: The tow rope was dropped, and down we went - no glide, a plunge almost straight down. The dirt came pouring in, our helmets went flying off.

Cronkite was there on D-Day, in June of 1944, when the Allies swept across the English Channel into France and began to turn the war around. Later, he did a tour in Moscow as a wire-service reporter, and then came home to discover television.

With his characteristic modesty, Cronkite always attributed his success in television to his simply having gotten there first. And he had no reservations about the potential of the new medium.

Cronkite claimed the anchor chair of the "CBS Evening News" in 1962. His coverage of the Kennedy assassination and the Apollo program were touchstones of the age.

His reputation continued to grow into the 1970s, as he explained the Watergate story to the troubled nation.

He even had a hand in the Middle East peace process - by engaging, first, Anwar Sadat, and then Menachem Begin, through a series of satellite interviews, to agree to meet face-to-face . . . and the Camp David accords were born.

Osgood: This business about being the most trusted man in America. I mean, poll after poll was taken, and it always worked out the same way.

Cronkite: Yeah.

Osgood: Why do you think that happened? And how did you feel about it, personally?

Cronkite: I really do think it's mostly because I was the face hanging out there of CBS News. CBS News had established such a reputation, such a dominant reputation by the time we were getting into television news, and I was the anchorperson, that I think that all of that history of performance by CBS News, trustworthy news presentation, rubbed off on me.

After all that, it may sound hard to believe that Walter Cronkite was once discouraged from getting into broadcasting in the first place.

Osgood: Tell me about Harfield Weaden.

Cronkite: (LAUGHS) He was my first boss, in a sense. He was program manager of a station in Austin, Texas, where I was a student at the university. I auditioned for the announcer's job. And Harfield rejected me, practically out of hand, and with the immortal words, 'Walter, you'll never make a radio announcer.'

Happily, Cronkite ignored that bit of advice, and he went on to interview President after President. He says that the one he knew best was Lyndon Johnson.

Cronkite: I'd known him for a very long time. I had met him when he came to the Texas Legislature. And I was covering that way back when.

Osgood: It is said that when Lyndon Johnson saw some of your reporting from Vietnam, he told whoever was watching with him that, 'If we've lost Walter, we've lost America.'

Cronkite: Well, what he saw was a, an aberration, the only time in my whole nearly 20 years of "CBS Evening News" anchoring did I ever give a personal opinion. There was a vast exaggeration of our successes out there. And we decided that maybe a little guidance might be helpful, a little personal opinion. And we knew it was a chance we were taking, and a violation of all the rules of the game.

"But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate," Cronkite said on-air.

Osgood: Did he ever take you to task for that later? I know you got to know him well.

Cronkite: You know, never personally, but by indirection he did. We have it on tape. It was part of the program when I did his memoirs later on. He said, 'And you know that Tet offensive, people came out of the woodwork ...'

"Because immediately the voices just came out of the holes in the wall and said, 'Let's get out,'" said LBJ. "That's what Ho Chi Minh had been trying to do all the time."

Cronkite: Kind of looked at me, 'People came out of the woodwork and criticized our offensive.' Obviously that was a little bit of finger shaking right under my nose, without naming me specifically.

Osgood: More than once, Walter, it was suggested to you that you should have run for office and, indeed, possibly run for president. Were you ever tempted to do that?

Cronkite: No, I was never tempted. And I hope the day never comes when a nationally prominent anchorperson or reporter on the air is tempted to run.

Osgood: Why not?

Cronkite: Because if that ever happens, the public will have every right to question every other newsperson on the air as to whether they have in the back of their mind political objectives and, therefore, are skewing the news to build a platform for sometime in the future. And that would be a terribly dangerous situation, just one more nail in the - our coffin of believability.

Osgood: You talked a lot about responsibility and what a reporter should do. But this business is also fun, isn't it? I mean, did you not enjoy all these years of being a reporter?

Cronkite: Oh, my gosh, enjoyed immensely. And I went to work every morning absolutely delighted to get there. I could hardly wait to get there.

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