1979 was not a watershed year for the Jimmy Carter Presidency. A lot was going wrong and a lot that had gone right just the year prior was in danger of sliding off the rails.

Iran was proving to be a bigger problem than originally thought with signals the Soviet Union were contemplating an overture or two towards Tehran. Our presence in the world was not on the best of terms. Embassy's in Iran and Afghanistan were attacked. Our Middle East policy, pointed with such optimism and accomplishment via the Camp David Peace Accords only a year earlier, was in danger of being derailed. The SALT II Treaty with the Soviet Union was on shaky ground if the Senate had anything to say about it and our agreement with The People's Republic Of China at the cost of our relationship with Taiwan had many in and out of government wondering if damage control would do any good.

And so Walter Cronkite, the Most Trusted Man In America, weighed in on the issue of our Foreign Policy and where we stood in the midst of all this. Here is his commentary for February 20, 1979 as broadcast by CBS Radio.

News of the day began with the massive outpouring of grief over the funeral of recently assassinated South Korean leader Park Chung Hee. Estimates placed the number of mourners lining the procession route at roughly 2 million.

In other mourning news - former First Lady Mamie Eisenhower was scheduled to be buried next to former President Eisenhower in Abilene Kansas. Mamie Eisenhower had suffered a stroke on September 25th and never regained consciousness, dying quietly in the early hours of November 1st.

In the "Life goes on" department - the situation in Cambodia was continuing, the U.S. was planning on cutting off aid to Bolivia. The SALT II Treaty was at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The 1980 Presidential campaign was heating up. Presidential hopeful Sen. Ted Kennedy called for a moratorium on Nuclear Power Plan construction, citing the recent 3 Mile Island catastrophe as a plausible reason.

A threatened strike by workers at American Airlines was averted and the Pegasus II Satellite was expected to crash somewhere on earth on this particular day. Nobody knew exactly where.

And that was what happened on this November 1st in 1979 as told by Neil Strawser and the CBS World News Roundup.