If Walter Cronkite is the father image of broadcast journalism and David Brinkley the cool analyst, Harry Reasoner of CBS is television's friendly next-door neighbor. Other commentators are effervescent or stern, puckish or olympian, earnest or remote. Reasoner comes across as warm, witty and involved not only with the news but with his audience as well. Everything about his face -- the grey-white shock of hair, shaggy temples, rugged chin, deep smile lines flanking a spreading nose -- seems square, safe and reassuring in a 'chaotic world. His manner brings viewers a message that middle-class values and Midwest calm still endure.

Reasoner's style has kept him rising through CBS echelons until he now delivers the Sunday night television news and a daily radio essay as well as continuing his wry documentaries on the English language, chairs, women and other necessities. He also narrates special programs and often substitutes, as he did again last week, for Cronkite on the network's flagship early-evening newscast. This season, Reasoner has been a mainstay on 60 Minutes, a Tuesday-night television newsmagazine that ap pears every other week and on which he alternates quarter-hour features with Mike Wallace. This week rival NBC is paying it the supreme compliment -- imitation at twice the length -- by launching a two-hour monthly magazine of its own called First Tuesday.

No Guarantees. Reasoner's appeal to devotees is his ability to cloak the pit falls of life in smiles. His rueful comment on losing a billfold, with all its credit cards and documents of identity: "Life is laid out there on the desk, the circumspection of a respectable existence, and I'd hate to spend another day with nothing but an honest face to prove my right to a place in the Great Society." Sometimes accused of being too light, Reasoner said in an interview last week: "I think light is just as much a part of news as heavy. What I resent is the implication that merely because you see something funny, you are going to take that attitude toward everything." He explains that when he started writ ing his quips, "I wouldn't guarantee to write one every day. Sometimes the news just isn't funny."

Reasoner's fans are also served occasional acid. Two weeks ago on radio, he devised a game called Homeowner, in which "one person, designated the homeowner, immediately would be declared the loser, and the rest of the game would be spent determining how much he would lose." When Reasoner called the phone company to complain about digit dialing, the response made him fume: "They've got that defense in depth, whereby the first three people you talk to know only one phrase each, like a chimp trained to press a lever for a banana-flavored pellet."

Highest Ranks. Reasoner sharpened his saws on the long road out of Dakota City, Iowa. He attended Stanford and the University of Minnesota, spent World War II in the Army, then returned to Minneapolis to be drama critic for a paper, write news for radio, and finally become a television station's entire news staff. He put in three years with the U.S. Information Agency in the Philippines before joining CBS in 1956. The father of seven children (boys 21 and 6, and five girls in between), he coped with diapers in Minneapolis while his wife Kay earned her law degree. As a "Protestant who has lived in amity with eight Catholics for 22 years," he says, "I have no comment on the pill." But he considers diapering behind him, and he is glad. He would "rather argue with a child than change it."

Now 45, he has written and talked his way into the network's highest news ranks. The substitute is becoming the original. "I'm not Walter Cronkite," he says, "but I can read a newscast pretty well. I'm not Mike Wallace, but I can do a pretty good interview." Reasoner's interviews tend to be love feasts because he lacks Wallace's instinct for the jugular or Cronkite's implacable persistence. Primarily, Reasoner is kind. "I've drawn as much blood as anyone," he insists, but Wallace retorts: "Then he switched to electric razors."

Producer-Writer Andrew Rooney, Reasoner's collaborator on the series of light documentary TV essays, insists: "It's easy to write for Harry because he doesn't really need me." Rooney and others produce the bulk of Reasoner's copy, but he writes most of his own radio shows, all TV jokes and endings and often the opening passages. "I have a theory," Reasoner says, "that the quality of writing in broadcast journalism means a lot more to the success of your enterprise than anyone knows." Cliches make him sad, and he recalls his story of the man in Manila who said: "Oh no, not another damn beautiful sunset!"--and killed himself. The audience may not be aware of bad newswriting, he says, but "they feel vaguely uncomfortable and turn away."

Less Dapner. After a show, before commuting home to Westport, Conn., Reasoner likes to rehash his work over a drink. "I've sometimes thought I'm an intermissioner rather than an activist," says he. "Basically, I like to do good things for the nice feeling you have afterward." Sometimes the feeling is self-depreciating: "I come out less dapper than I think of myself."

He feels particularly good about 60 Minutes, a style of program that has intrigued him for years. Dissatisfied with most hour-long documentaries (he finds them often boring, padded and inept), Reasoner predicts that the segmented, magazine style will spread on television. CBS carefully watches rival NBC as it moves ahead with its two-hour version. The prospect adds just a touch of spleen to Reasoner's generosity as he offers the competition a suggested alternative title: "120 Minutes."

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