Cronkite

by Douglas Brinkley

  Life, however, threw Cronkite a real curve ball in the fall of 1933. Quite unexpectedly, Bit Winter was yanked out of San Jacinto High by her mother and relocated to Anna, Illinois. Cronkite was devastated. He had chosen the University of Texas, in part, to be near her. During the Great Depression, with commercial air transportation minimal, the 750-mile distance between Austin and Anna was insurmountable. So he and Bit resorted to letter writing, with dreams of wild summertime adventure exploring America.

  Encouraged by his fraternity brothers at Chi Phi, where he cut a popular figure, Cronkite ran his only political race—for freshman class vice president. His campaign slogan read: “Freshmen, Vote for the New Deal Ticket. For President—GEORGE ATKINS of North Texas, Halfback of Football Team. For Vice-President—WALTER CRONKITE of South Texas, Daily Texan staff. FAIR—SQUARE—INDEPENDENT.” His ticket was beaten badly. What made the election licking unbearable was that Joe Greenhill, a friend from San Jacinto High School and his Chicago trip companion, was the ballot box victor. Losing punctured Cronkite’s whole big-man-on-campus façade. The only consolation he ever gleaned from the defeat was Greenhill’s success later in life as chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court from 1972 to 1982.

  It was quite understandable that Cronkite, as a UT freshman in the early 1930s, made a temporary divestiture (sort of) from journalism. To make it in the fourth estate you had to develop a brand identity like Arthur Brisbane, Heywood Broun, or Walter Lippmann. Getting paid by the word was a hard racket during the deep Depression years. Studying the communications industry—learning how to be a radio operator, for example—made only slightly more job market sense. When a popular gossip columnist such as Walter Winchell of the New York Daily Mirror took to radio, beginning his broadcast with “Good Evening, Mr. and Mrs. North America and all the ships at sea,” it was clear that a global radio revolution was under way. A well-rounded knowledge of world affairs, it seemed, was a prerequisite for an aspiring broadcaster. Cronkite was too lackadaisical with his studies to rise quickly in journalism. He never learned a foreign language. The day-to-day monotony of applying himself was unappealing. If UT stood for anything to Cronkite, it was partying at the Chi Phi house. “I missed a lot of classes,” Cronkite admitted. “I should have spent a lot more time there and concentrated more on my studies.”

  When corresponding with Bit and his mother, Cronkite wrote about Hell Week, pledge hazing, tennis matches, bull sessions at the O.P.K. restaurant, and sleep deprivation. His waning grades were an embarrassment. “I still want to be a journalist and hope to specialize in political analysis,” he told his St. Joseph grandparents. “Therefore my college tendencies are toward government, economics, English, and journalism. I am experiencing great difficulty in staying on the beaten path that leads to a degree.”

  Getting to write newspaper articles now became Cronkite’s primary focus. While most of his articles for The Daily Texan were of the calendar event kind, he did score a coup with an interview of Gertrude Stein at the Driskill Hotel, located at the corner of Brazos and Sixth Street. Accompanied by Alice B. Toklas, her famous partner, Stein was in town to give a public lecture. If one were to pick a high point of Cronkite’s journalism career in the 1930s, it would be his profile “Miss Stein Not Out for Show, But Knows What She Knows.” Cronkite took a real shine to Stein, who was dressed in a “mannish blouse, a tweed skirt, a peculiar but attractive vest, and comfortable-looking shoes.” Calling Stein a “modern,” Cronkite enthused that the famed author of Three Lives was a twentieth-century-thinking woman visiting a nineteenth-century-thinking Austin. “She is genuine,” Cronkite reported after his forty-five-minute interview with Stein, “the real thing in person.”

  Using his Campus Cub and Daily Texan clippings as bait, Cronkite secured a job at The Houston Press freelancing articles. He wore a suit to work—soft fabric with a vest, a shining watch chain (set on Kansas City time) across his vest, and two-toned wingtips (never polished). Developing a keen interest in politics, Cronkite, in time, was freelancing well-crafted columns about campus life and the legislature to several other Texas newspapers. These papers paid a pittance (for one column in a local paper, he received ninety cents). Others didn’t pay at all. But college cost money, while journalism actually paid him. Writing columns on Lone Star governmental issues for two struggling newspapers was a start. It provided spending money for dating and drinking, hoots and sing-alongs.

  From then on Cronkite focused on learning the gritty trade of journalism in a hands-on, tangible way, even as he took UT courses. But it didn’t pay much. When a mysterious Mr. Fox offered him $75 a week (more than his father made as a dentist) to announce horse races at a bookie joint, he seized the opportunity. With piles of money at stake, it was a dangerous mob-related job. The sawdust-floor Texas establishment smelled of smoke and rye. Spurring horses toward the finish line out of a megaphone, he made acquaintance with shady characters—gamblers, swindlers, drunks, and con men. “Well, I’d never been in a place like this before, so I gave them the real Graham McNamee approach on this, described the running of the race and all,” Cronkite recalled. “A mean character ran this place—a guy named Fox . . . came chasing into the room and asked me, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? We don’t want entertainment! We just want the facts!’ ”

  As Cronkite admitted about his Chicago World’s Fair TV debut, he was a bit of a ham, a jocular egotist wanting to please and show off in front of adoring crowds. Unfortunately, people simply didn’t see Cronkite as he saw himself. While he aspired to be the leading man in a UT Curtain Club production, he was instead cast as the stodgy, middle-aged university president born into squarely bourgeois circumstances. Cronkite considered himself a colorful card, even dashing; other people thought of him as the embodiment of Mr. Beige. During the play rehearsals that went on from 7:00 p.m. to midnight, Cronkite learned that to his peers he was a rather muted and mundane classmate.

  What Cronkite came to understand, even in the improvident rush of those college days, was that he’d never become a Broadway or Hollywood star. He tacitly abandoned the stage in favor of a communications field in which everyone was then an adventurer. Broadcast radio was entering its own golden age during the Great Depression, with live programming on local stations all through the day. Stations needed singers, musicians, announcers, and whipcord personalities, along with Christian clergy for prayers and pundits on world affairs. Each local U.S. radio station created a carnival in its studio. The four preeminent radio networks—CBS, Mutual, NBC Blue, and NBC Red—provided regional or national programming in the evenings. Cronkite’s best asset in 1934 was a budding reputation as something of an authority on sports—a boon in tackle-hard Texas. Years later he recalled that he failed his freshman engineering class at UT in part because he couldn’t fathom the workings of a pulley. Yet he had a steel-trap memory for football rosters, baseball box scores, and horse racing numbers.

  Scrambling for cash to stay afloat on his own in 1935, Cronkite was hired by KNOW, a major AM radio station in Austin, as “the man who gets behind the campus news.” It was a heady prospect, since he would be not merely a reporter but the “talent”—earning a dollar a day. The fact that Cronkite landed the job at KNOW, whose studio was in an alley behind Sixth Street, without any real radio experience indicated that he could sell himself. Later, the station asked him to write and read a sports report every Tuesday and Friday at 5:15 p.m. As an added perk he got to drink free 3.2 percent beer. In his memoir, A Reporter’s Life, Cronkite writes eloquently of how incredible it was to be alive in the “crystal days” of radio reading the Western Union baseball score ticker. “One could tell a wireless faddist,” Cronkite recalled. “He or she was the one whose eyes were rimmed with dark circles from having stayed up all night when reception was best, bringing in distant stations.”

  At KNOW, Cronkite was shackled by the same conundrum that faced all radio at the time: corroborating facts was difficult. His boss, Ha
rfield Weedin—later to become the general manager of Lady Bird Johnson’s Austin radio station, KTBC, and then West Coast head of CBS Radio—warned Cronkite of misusing the airwaves with erroneous babble. Nevertheless, Cronkite was expected to read aloud sports scores with flare even though he didn’t have the actual play-by-play color at his disposal. Because the wire services wouldn’t pay for access to these game results, Cronkite had to be cunning and resourceful. A local Austin tobacconist, who encouraged patrons to linger in the shop and smoke, paid for a ticker service to provide up-to-date box scores, and Cronkite furtively looked at the ticker and memorized the teams, the scores, and the highlights for his broadcasts later. His modus operandi for collecting sports stories had its banana republic side, but it worked. Later in the year, the CBS network would form its own news service, organizing news sources, reporters, and stringers around the country. Radio news gathering was getting streamlined.

  In the spring semester of 1935, after two years at the University of Texas, Cronkite dropped out. At the time, college was still considered a luxury, not a birthright, and given Walter’s steadily diminished return, the family couldn’t afford his UT tuition. He had squandered the opportunity to be a college-educated man. Antsy beyond words, Cronkite also didn’t have the patience to sit still in UT classes. He preferred toiling in the newspaper field full-time, but later in life he told his daughter Kathy that he was embarrassed because he hadn’t earned a degree at UT. Kathy pointed out that without a college diploma he had nevertheless become the best TV broadcaster in American history. “Yes,” Cronkite shot back, “but if I had gotten a formal education, I could have been the Kaiser!”

  Becoming a first-rate print reporter was more a pleasant daydream than a burning ambition for Cronkite in the mid-1930s. The newspaper industry that Cronkite entered looked primarily to one of the wire services—led by the Associated Press and the United Press—to obtain general news. The Hearst Corporation’s International News Service (INS) was the third largest. What Cronkite soon learned about the fiercely competitive wire service industry held true for all journalism enterprises: internal corporate policy and budget requirements shaped the direction of news coverage.

  The idea behind AP, founded in 1846, was that this association of newspapers would sometimes share reporting and otherwise underwrite the cost of gathering news in bureaus around the country and the world. The influence of the AP was tremendous, and its slant eastern and conservative.

  Edward W. Scripps founded the United Press in 1907 as, in his words, “the people’s news source,” and any paper could buy its service—even those that were subscribers to AP. The United Press never grew quite as big as AP, but its brilliant reporting from Europe during World War I gave it a reputation for high standards. By the time Cronkite entered the newspaper field in the mid-1930s, the general feeling was that AP was a more prestigious place to work, but it was just a journalism job. By contrast, UP, where resources were thin, was sold to cub reporters as a sacred calling.

  Cronkite’s big Austin break came when Vann M. Kennedy of Corpus Christi hired him in 1934 to write stories for the Austin bureau of INS, in a small office “up with the pigeons” on the press wing of the state capitol. An Alabaman by birth, the stiff-necked Kennedy was a gifted mentor. An advocate of objective journalism, Kennedy, an expert wire transmitter, was fact-driven and judicious, believing that reporting was a dignified occupation. “I learned the principles of great journalism from him,” Cronkite said, “because he lived them.” As an assistant reporter, Cronkite was basically a gofer at INS. But Kennedy, wanting him to earn his medals, refusing to offer a soft landing, also assigned him the heady job of covering Texas government. Kennedy represented intelligent and principled journalism to Cronkite. “I have never found anything I like so much as working at the Capitol,” Cronkite wrote in a letter home. “I go down a little after ten and work until one. . . . This week I met nearly all the Houston members of the legislature and worked the Teletype machine.”

  At INS Cronkite learned how to write in an adjective-free way and how to send a wire report. Journalism wasn’t a conceit to Cronkite—it was a trade with stature, a concrete way to earn money in the Great Depression. Under Kennedy’s watchful eye, Cronkite was taught how to get a story, how to write it, and how “ethics” mattered most of all. Competing head-on, the wire services undoubtedly made one another hungrier, and news in America stronger. Day in and day out, AP, UP, and INS raced one another for scoops with fanatical energy, commitment, and concentration. The battle for stories was brutal. The industry was not for the timid. Only an instinctive counterpuncher could prevail, one with a tough hide and a knack for making correct split-second judgments to scoop people. Cronkite of INS, patching together a living as a freelance writer in Austin, competed with the major wire services. “The columns to weekly papers over the state concerning the Capitol doings fell through,” he wrote home. “It seems that those who are able to support such a column already get weekly Associated Press or United Press columns for a very nominal sum.”

  After a year at INS, Cronkite was hired as a rewrite man by The Houston Press, which was owned by Scripps Howard. He moved to Houston’s Montrose neighborhood to live with his mother. “Hours,” he wrote a friend soon after moving back to Houston, “7 a.m. to 3 p.m., salary, $15 per week. My duties consist of taking stories over the phone and whipping them into shape.” The Press also asked Cronkite to organize the morgue (the newspaper archives). As a born bon vivant and lover of jazz, Cronkite soon owned the nightclub beat in Houston and Galveston Island—a truly great job for a hot-to-trot single man looking for a girlfriend. His journalism about music revues and movies was third-rate. And he drank too much whiskey.

  When Cronkite wasn’t judging the rollicking nightlife in Galveston, he covered the sedate Methodist and Baptist church news for the Press. For the first time he read the Bible with a sense of true understanding. He wasn’t writing political analysis yet, as he had hoped, but then, he wasn’t yet twenty. Time was on his side. He was generally happy with his Press work. But being desk-bound meant that “the poor old wanderluster”—himself—had no “means of wanderlusting.” With a fedora on his head, scrawny as a ship mouse, trying to grow a pencil-thin mustache to look older, he repeatedly begged his editor for an oceangoing vessel assignment, with the promise that he would write fun articles about the Caribbean. The Houston Press wasn’t interested—and in truth, even Cronkite wasn’t that adventurous when push came to shove. In the summer of 1934, for his first paid vacation, he didn’t book passage on a freighter out of Galveston to Jamaica, but went to Anna, Illinois, to see Bit Winter; the visit proved disastrous.

  The saga of Bit Winter had turned sordid for Cronkite. During the summer of 1934 he learned that she had been two-timing him. Just weeks after Cronkite began his sophomore year, Bit, who had graduated from high school in Anna, married twenty-year-old H. E. Hunskaker. To break the news, the new Mrs. Hunskaker wrote Walter a letter about the surprise marriage. Chi Phi pledge Woody Williams told Cronkite, who had been at a college lecture by folklorist J. Frank Dobie, that a letter from Anna was waiting for him at the frat house. Cronkite practically floated home to get it; he soon turned ill. “The old breath went out, the heart skipped a beat and sank as I read the parenthesized Mrs. H. E. Hunskaker,” Cronkite wrote her back. “And as I delved into the contents of the letter I had a million different sensations ranging from depths of sadness, which really prevailed throughout, to the heights of happiness that I imagined I was sharing with you.” Cronkite, in the same letter, went on to write a long, rambling, brokenhearted missive that read like a Hank Williams lyric. Bit had implied that he drank too much, and now, defending himself in a dust storm of temperance, he promised never again to “touch a drop.” It was all in vain. By letter’s end, Cronkite, recognizing that he had lost her heart, offered a melancholic good-bye. “Keep up the smoking though and maybe, when you’re in a reminiscent mood, you’ll see old Walt in
those smoke rings and I can and will be seeing you in my dreams,” he wrote. “Please don’t forget me Bit. But don’t feel under any obligation to write. I will understand.”

  Cronkite was beyond devastated. His stomach regularly did flips. He couldn’t study. His heartbreak knew no bounds. He worried that his relations with women in general were vexed. After the fall semester, during the Christmas hiatus, Cronkite finally came to terms with the betrayal. Free of foul humor, he wrote Bit, expressing hope they could remain special friends. Bit filed for divorce in 1935. Cronkite once again had a flicker of hope that she could be his wife. But instead of marrying Cronkite, in a fever she married the ambitious Illinois lawyer John Paul Davis. Cronkite, playing the fool, had been stiffed again.

  Although Cronkite never earned a degree from the University of Texas, completing only two years of classes before quitting in 1935, he considered himself an alumnus. Hook ’Em Horns forever. Because The Daily Texan had allowed him to write feature stories as a budding reporter, he remained beholden to the university once he made it big at CBS News. UT’s burnt orange and white colors were his coat of arms. In the 1990s, he lent his signature voice, pro bono, to a whole host of public service announcements promoting the university. If you attended a Longhorn sporting event, you’d see the huge face of Cronkite suddenly appear on the Jumbotron, making appeals for financial support for UT. On a couple of occasions, asked who his best friend was, Cronkite would jokingly name Bevo, the university’s Longhorn mascot.