CULTURE WATCH : Master Sandman

To those who were young when television itself was young, Walter Cronkite remains the only news anchorman worthy of the name. He created the role; and as he created it, it was indeed a role that no one else seemed able to fill.

With his mustache and his formal, faintly stern air, Cronkite was the knowing father many Americans had never had, interposing himself firmly between the children and the world, unsentimental but somehow solicitous, aware that disaster might be in store at any moment but not telling us, not just yet.

Johnny Carson did not create the role of late-night talk show host; but by a tenure lasting nearly 30 years, he has come to define his role as completely as Cronkite defined his. No real person changes as little as the video versions of Cronkite and Carson changed over the years. What we responded to, even as physical aging took place before our eyes, was their mastery of their roles.

If Walter was Dad, Johnny was a winking, indulgent, rule-bending big brother. And it can be just as reassuring to have that kind of big brother as to have that kind of father. What underwrote the reassurance in the end, however, was the America-centered, postwar world whose doings Walter reported and Johnny snickered over, and that world is no more.

Tonight, at the end of Johnny Carson’s last show, the one nation that of all nations ought to be able to sleep at night may find that it needs a sleeping pill. The comedian will have left the stage. More troubling, perhaps, the stage will have left the comedian.