BBC Hardtalk's Tim Sebastian talks to Walter Cronkite - 'America's most trusted man' - about his career in journalism, including the moment he told a shocked nation that its president had been killed.

You don't think much of television news these days. You think the viewers are being sold short.

I'm deeply concerned about it. I think that there's a real problem in the United States. Polls show that most people still get most of their news from television.

I claim that those who do are inadequately informed, too poorly informed to intelligently exercise their franchise at the polls. The democratic system is challenged by the failure in television because our evening news programmes have gone for an attempt to entertain as much as to inform in the desperate fight for ratings.

Cable has come along; many all-news 24 hour cable outlets in the United States. They have cut deeply into the traditional networks' viewing audience.

The owners of the networks today are not the old pioneer broadcasters who founded the networks, but these great entertainment conglomerates mostly dictated by Hollywood standards. They're going for the lowest common denominator.

One of the broadcasts that you're most remembered for was the assassination of John F Kennedy. How clearly do you remember your feelings when the news of the shooting in Dallas started to come in?

That is etched on my memory. I was at my anchor desk. One of our editors was over at the teletype machines when the bulletin came from Dallas that shots had rung out in Dealy Plaza in the streets of Dallas as the President's motorcade went by.

A moment later, it appeared that the President might have been hit. The motorcade had broken up and was rushing to the hospital and it got worse and worse. He appeared to be in bad shape.

Well you know there's an interesting thing about us newspeople. Not until after its over do we sit down and really think emotionally about what has happened.

But after an hour or so of reporting this developing story I had to make the announcement; 'An announcement has come from Parkland Hospital. President Kennedy died at such and such an hour.'

When I said those words, I realised the horror of the whole thing. I choked up a bit. I had difficulty finding words through welling tears but managed it somehow or other.

For all of your experience of war, you're still in favour of bringing the action of war into people's living rooms.

Oh very definitely. The military people don't like it; the government probably doesn't like it, but the people should know what they're sending their young people into when they permit their governments to declare war and engage in war.

They should have to share what they have asked those young people to share. I believe in that. Perhaps if all the peoples of the world understand what war really means, we would eliminate it.

You did a report in 1968 on the Tet offensive which was credited with swaying American public opinion towards removing US troops from Vietnam. Did you cross the line? Did you go too far?

I didn't go too far. I crossed the line! The difference was that we enunciated very clearly that this was an editorial. It came at the end of a documentary on my experiences going out to cover Tet - one person's view of Tet.

I got there within a week of the Tet offensive. I saw this action and we reported it. We said 'After this commercial break, I'm going to come back and give you my personal opinion of what I saw out there. This will be my personal editorial which we do not do normally do here, but I think it's important.'

You said that it's increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out would be to negotiate: not as victors but as honourable people. Apparently President Lyndon Johnson watched this in the White House and was quite affected by it, wasn't he?

Yes. Some of his assistants said later that his remark was 'If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America.' I was a little offended when I heard that . I considered that if he lost me he must have lost all of America!

The fact was he apparently thought that this was somewhat important. A couple of weeks later, he announced he would not run for re-election. Some people said that the broadcast had an importance in having him reach that decision.

I don't think that is so. There were a lot of other things impressing him at that moment - that he could not win again. He was disappointed with the Pentagon for having misled him into staying with the war for as long as he did.

The military still blames the press over Vietnam, don't they?

Officially, they brought out a report which claimed it wasn't the press coverage that did them in. Most of the military establishment believes that it was television and its exposure of their soldiers at their worst moments of death and mortal wounds, the horror of war.

And you're happy about that?

Yes I am. It makes it difficult for democracy. But it's the only fair way. I believe in total openness of the press in all things. I'm an absolutist in the matter of freedom of speech in the press.

I am convinced that democracy cannot function unless its people are fully informed as to what their government is doing in its name.

Do you believe in presidential privacy?

Depending on whether their peccadilloes affect their ability to govern. I do not think that the stand-off with President Clinton - the Monica Lewinsky scandal - was proper to bring to the public's attention.

He wouldn't have had to lie to the country if it hadn't have been made a public issue for political purposes. He should not have been asked those questions about his personal life.

I don't think that's the public's business. Unless that seems to endanger the job they're doing, the job they've sworn an oath to - then it should be exposed.

The case of President Kennedy. He had several liaisons. He had one with a woman called Judith Exner. She was the mistress of a Mafia boss.

Highly dangerous situation. Opened him to blackmail and all kinds of dangers. If the press had known about that - I don't think they did - they had a responsibility to report that.

You seem to have had the news business in your blood right from the start. You were something of a town crier from the age of six growing up in Kansas City.

I was perhaps the only one of my six-year old colleagues who read the newspaper and I couldn't wait to tell my friends the news of the day. We didn't have radio in those days - barely.

I remember reading in your memoir about the Nuremberg war crimes trial. It was the only time you said that you had seen a group of people - the Nazi officials - you wanted to spit on. How strongly did you feel?

My flesh crawled just seeing those people marching near the dock in Nuremberg and knowing the blood of millions of people was on their hands. It was creepy. It was awful.

You hoped that some good would come out of there, that there would be a 'Parliament of Nations'. If the UN is anything to go by, that's not going to work is it?

I wouldn't give up on the UN yet. I think we are realising that we are going to have to have an international rule of law.

We need not only an executive to make international law, but we need the military forces to enforce that law and the judicial system to bring the criminals to justice before they have the opportunity to build military forces that use these horrid weapons that rogue nations and movements can get hold of - germs and atomic weapons.

Our whole society is in danger - more than its ever been from limited numbers of people - terrorism, national war movements, civil war type movements.

There's going to be a realisation of that now. Whereas before, there was a possibility of each nation being in its own way insular, particularly the USA, being protected by two great oceans.

We are not protected by two great oceans any longer. American people are going to begin to realise that perhaps they are going to have to yield some sovereignty to an international body to enforce world law, and I think that's going to come to other people as well. It's a fair distance to get there, but we are not ever going to get there unless we keep trying to push ourselves onto the road.

There's still a Walter Cronkite Unit at CBS, 20 years after you finished presenting the news programme. The mail still comes in. Are you gratified by that?

Well of course I am. I don't understand it but I'm gratified by it. Little old ladies come up to me. Recently, I was doing a film out at Yellowstone National Park. A woman came up to me and said 'Did anybody ever tell you that you look just like Walter Cronkite looked before he died - except I think he was thinner!'

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The full interview with Walter Cronkite can be seen on Hardtalk with Tim Sebastian on BBC News 24 at 2230 and on BBC World at 1530, 1930, 0030 and 0430 gmt