Walter Cronkite and Heifer International

In 2002, the late Walter Cronkite gave an interview to Ray White, Heifer’s public information director. What follows is an edited version of that interview, which originally appeared in the Winter 2002 editon of World Ark magazine. Heifer International would like to recognize Walter Cronkite for his immeasureable contributions to Hefier, the United States and the world.

Legendary newsman suggests U.S. model Marshall Plan, says Heifer builds bridges

The late Walter Cronkite poses with a Hefier sheep during a 2002 photoshoot in support of Heifer International.

"It is unique in its program to directly aid people around the world," Cronkite said, speaking of Heifer before posing in New York City with animals like the ones Heifer has used to help million of families around the world.
 
"With so much of the aid that goes to people ... the givers are lost in the miasma of all the protocol, the delivery process and so forth. With this project you get a much greater sense of a person-to-person relationship, which is very important."

Cronkite said he supports Heifer's work around the world, and that more work like Heifer's could help to build bridges between people.
"Besides the need to know that we are helping these people, there is a need for them to know that we are helping. While that sounds like a selfish objective, perhaps, this mutual understanding helps bring people together.

"If we're hoping to succeed in this world, and to have an ever-more peaceful world, and not a more violent world, we're going to have to learn to understand each other and to appreciate what we can do for each other."

He sees Heifer as part of a global solution to world strife, he said. Helping the underprivileged become sustainable for food and income will lessen world tension, he said.

With all the resources at the disposal of the developed world it should be possible to solve the problem of world hunger, Cronkite said.
"I think that many of our problems today—and goodness knows we have very severe ones around the world—are very importantly based on our riches and their poverty. And if we are to bring an understanding to the world and give us all a chance for a long-term future, there's going to have to be a clearer attempt ... to level the economic playing field as much as we possibly can.

"But around the world you see these great depths of depression, in which half the world lives most of the time, and our peaks of success and riches—it just isn't likely to commend us to the friendship of the rest of the world that we need, and want to live in. We want to live in a world in which people like us, and understand that we have helped them lift themselves by their own bootstraps."

"What I've said is the basis for my belief in what you're doing — the necessity for it. I don't see how we can avoid living in a revolutionary world as long as our television sets are broadcasting for the rest of the world the riches with which we're endowed and the luxury in which we live and the waste in which we indulge, the people who are starving to death, and not expect them to be exceedingly jealous."

But Americans may not clearly understand how things stand, he said.

"I think we have a surface feeling and an understanding about it, but I don't think it gets to the point where they understand the necessity for us to actively work on this problem, particularly if it gets to sacrifice on our part."

We should follow the model of the successful effort to rebuild Germany and Japan after World War II, he said, and it wouldn't require great sacrifice.

"Sacrifice on our part is an almost meaningless word. We can take so much off the top of our riches to pass around to these poor, hungry, starving people in the world and scarcely miss it. You can't imagine how deep we'd have to go into our budget before it becomes sacrificial. I think our example today should be the Marshall Plan after World War II, in which we ... helped rebuild the nations destroyed by the war, including our archenemies."

Today, Germany and Japan are important allies and contributors to the world's wealth.

"If we had left them in the tatters in which the war left them, they would not have recovered to this day, and goodness knows what trouble their discontent might have bred. Now they're major contributors in the effort to feed the world's impoverished millions."