Cronkite

by Douglas Brinkley

  But Cronkite’s UT boosterism had its limits. He was a Texan by adoption only. Given a choice, he always claimed he was a Missourian first and foremost. During his later journalism career, Cronkite traveled to more than fifty countries, but he tended to keep his pocket watch on Kansas City time. Throughout his life, he romanticized the City of Fountains, and in 2000 he emceed Kansas City’s 150th birthday celebration before a sold-out crowd at Arrowhead Stadium with rock ’n’ roller Little Richard as cohost. Cronkite concurred with something painter Thomas Hart Benton once wrote about Kansas City people: “I have not met a really complete ass among them.”

  In May 1936, Cronkite drove from Austin to Kansas City to visit family. The Houston Press gave him two weeks off. His plan was to visit his father and have a secret rendezvous with the married Bit in Illinois, hoping she’d dump number two. But the scheme—chasing after a married woman—left him feeling duplicitous. While in Kansas City, Cronkite, without moral compunction, was drawn to the previously forbidden Twelfth Street music clubs. He had inherited his father’s penchant for drink.

  Cronkite was leisurely reading The Kansas City Star on the front porch of his grandparents’ home on May 13, 1936, his eyelids heavy from a hangover, when an article caught his eye. It reported that a license had been granted to the new owners of the local radio station, KWKC, to begin broadcasting under a different set of call letters, KCMO (as in “K.C., Mo.”). Despite Cronkite’s steady job at The Houston Press, the item reignited his old interest in broadcast news and tempted him to take another crack at radio. As Cronkite perused the article, one name jumped out at him—Tom Evans, a family friend. This was his gold-star opportunity to enter the wireless medium.

  KWKC had struggled since it went on the air in 1925. It had a weaker signal than other local stations, and so had trouble finding an audience. By 1932, a distant fourth among Kansas City’s four commercial radio stations, it was forced to reduce its broadcast hours. And two years later the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) seized the station in lieu of back taxes. But at the beginning of 1936, as the article reported, three businessmen made an offer to purchase KWKC; one of them was Tom Evans, a principal in the city’s Crown drugstore chain. At first the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which regulated broadcasting, was in no hurry to approve the transfer of ownership from the IRS. So Evans asked Missouri first-term senator Harry Truman to sit in on a meeting with representatives of the IRS and the FCC. Evans had known Truman, who was from nearby Independence, since they ran retail stores in the same northside K.C. neighborhood and attended KCDO meetings. Evans wasn’t asking Truman to do anything unethical, only to help untangle the red tape in the two government agencies that had stalled the deal.

  The nineteen-year-old Cronkite knew a good ride when he saw it. KCMO could be a fast-moving station in a growing industry. Because it was still at the bottom of the heap in Kansas City, it would probably have room for a fellow like him—especially if that fellow had an “in” with Tom Evans. Dr. Cronkite had attended the Kansas City College of Pharmacy at the same time as Evans’s father. With things starting to fall into place, Cronkite canceled his visit with Bit (she would die a year later in a car crash). Full of excitement, he reported his big radio break to his mother in Houston. “Yesterday I went to K.C.M.O., a new station in the Commerce Trust Building and was given an audition,” he enthused. “The program director, a Mr. Simmons, handed me some stuff to read. He stood in the other room listening over the amplifying system and when I had finished he came dashing into the studio, grabbed my arm and said, ‘Come on, we’re going to see the manager.’ We got into the manager’s office and Simmons said, ‘Here is a man with the best radio voice I’ve heard in my years of radio.’ ”

  During the following week, the station manager formally hired Cronkite. His strong yet relaxed voice would earn him twenty-five dollars per week, ten dollars more than The Houston Press had been paying him as a cub reporter and rewrite man. Knowing firsthand just how hard it was to research, write, rewrite, and edit—and then re-edit—a single article for a newspaper, Cronkite was intrigued to be in the more modern stream of media, in which he would be paid just to talk. Technically, he had applied for a job as a newsman—a role that barely existed in local radio at the time. News reporters scoffed that radio commentators were expositors of fact at best, prose thieves at worst. Joining the Ringling Bros. or entering into vaudeville was considered nobler work than radio. Newspaper journalists crashed through daunting obstacles to find the truth and confirm facts. To be a newspaper reporter—whether trained at college or in the school of hard knocks at an obituary desk—was to uphold high standards of clarity, accuracy, and objectivity that had made newspapers “the fourth estate” across America, and an adjunct to decent democratic government.

  Radio news, by contrast, had no standards (except that curse words were verboten on the air). The new medium seemed rudderless and gimmicky in terms of integrity to something other than filling airspace. In radio, men with velvety baritones could earn a living by repeating news purloined from the daily paper, boiled down into two or three declarative sentences. By the most generous calculation, radio news was only fifteen years old in 1936, when KCMO had its license upgraded to increase its broadcasting range. A more steely analysis would conclude that in terms of news gathering, radio had yet to arrive. Later in life, Cronkite was asked what his greatest achievement was in his long, storied broadcasting career; his answer was “helping establish . . . news standards.”

  The hearty and pleasant Cronkite went on air at KCMO in 1936 with a modulated voice that was, if not quite velvety, surprisingly rich for a man his age. Having that airtime experience in Austin had proved helpful. And with a slight staccato-like delivery, as if typing out the news while talking, he was very distinctive.

  Just as Cronkite was getting going on K.C. radio, executive vice president of CBS News Edward Klauber hired twenty-nine-year-old Edward R. Murrow as “Director of Talks” (which meant that he would arrange for scientists and scholars to broadcast on the radio for fifteen minutes on Sundays). Realizing that his clear voice was a resonant asset, Murrow, who had been studying elocution since college at Washington State in Pullman, majoring in speech, wanted a broadcasting career. Late in 1936 the young executive received permission from Klauber to step behind the microphone and deliver a news broadcast. At the time, the CBS network was not much more sophisticated than struggling KCMO in Kansas City: broadcasts consisted of a few lines for each story, with no original reporting or remote feeds. Murrow was nervous enough to solicit private coaching from Robert Trout, a North Carolinan with a dozen years of experience in radio. Unflappable in the extreme, Trout had taken to radio easily, and he tried to impart the importance of a natural cadence to the budding Murrow.

  Murrow was assigned to Europe by CBS to broadcast cultural events such as Viennese waltzes and German operas. In March 1938, CBS journalist William L. Shirer told Murrow that the expected Anschluss, Hitler’s annexation of Austria, had begun. German troops were pouring over the border. Springing to action, Murrow flew first to Berlin, then chartered a twenty-seven-seat Lufthansa transport at great expense to get to ground zero: Vienna. Taking a streetcar from the airport to downtown Vienna, he described on a shortwave radio the sacking of the Austrian city perched along the Danube River. On March 13, with Cronkite listening in Kansas City, Murrow broadcast his dramatic report from Austria for American listeners’ edification. It was a leap into grown-up reality:

  This is Edward Murrow speaking from Vienna. It’s now nearly 2:30 in the morning and Herr Hitler has not yet arrived. No one seems to know just when he will get here, but most people expect him sometime after ten o’clock tomorrow. . . . I arrived here by air from Warsaw and Berlin only a few hours ago. From the air, Vienna didn’t look much different than it had before, but nevertheless it’s changed . . . they lift the right arm a little higher here than in Berlin and the “Heil Hitler” is said a little more loudly
. . .

  Up until that Murrow broadcast, the most illustrious voice Cronkite knew was NBC’s Lowell Thomas, an old boyhood hero. Murrow’s Anschluss report turned Cronkite inside out like a sock. For the first time, Cronkite started listening regularly to CBS News. The whole CBS News “Round-up” crowd—from William L. Shirer in London, to Edgar Ansel Mowrer in Paris, to Pierre Huss in Berlin, to Frank Gervasi in Rome, to the indomitable Robert Trout everywhere—were major discoveries to Cronkite. How did CBS News present real-time history in the making with such dramatic flair? The tumultuous events in Europe were being routed via a shortwave transmitter in Berlin, onward to London, then to New York and straight to the American heartland.

  Generally, radio news in 1936, during the lull between the two wars, was synonymous with such diligent and dapper men as Trout. He happened to be a good newsman, but first he had been a voice. A mesmerizing voice: that was the only thing that radio offered over newspapers at the time. Cronkite had, for all intents and purposes, abandoned print journalism—Houston Press style—for wireless entertainment. At first, talking to the microphone was fun for Cronkite. His star turn each week lay in broadcasting sporting events without seeing them. That was the accepted sleight-of-hand of radio, first learned in Texas bookie joints. Cronkite, fast on his feet, mastered the art of what he called “reconstructed games.”

  During the fall of 1936, Cronkite, broadcasting under the fictional name Walter Wilcox (Cronkite sounded too German), sat in the KCMO studio every Saturday and received via Western Union telegraph a running description of a preselected college football game. Cronkite had to rely on a nimble mind and a tireless imagination to create a fully believable and exciting live broadcast. Listeners were informed at intervals that the broadcast was a re-creation based on wire reports, yet Cronkite continued to hone the masquerade of play-by-play broadcasts. It was fake sports announcing by a fake Walter Wilcox. Four words on the ticker were turned into a solid minute of description over the radio. It was exactly the opposite of his work during the week, when he turned long newspaper articles into three- or four-sentence news briefs for the radio. “I didn’t need many facts,” Cronkite told The Oklahoman in 2002. “I just used my imagination.”

  Cronkite’s KCMO sports broadcast re-creations were successful, even if the station was still by far the weakest on the Kansas City radio dial. The proof came when an official from the FCC told the station to increase the number of advisories that the broadcast was not actually live, but a re-creation from telegraph reports.

  After Cronkite relocated to Kansas City, his mother returned there to be near her son. Walter didn’t live with her, instead taking an apartment with his KCMO coworker Harry Bailey. Cronkite explored local bars and jazz haunts, sometimes with Bailey, who wrote commercials at KCMO. The waitresses at the Chesterfield Club were naked, though that was not entirely uncommon in the clubs, where serving drinks and prostitution were often blended into one profession. At Chesterfield’s, the waitresses’ pubic hair was shaved to reflect the suits in a deck of cards: clubs and spades for the African American waitresses, hearts and diamonds for the Caucasian ones. That innovation seemed almost innocent when compared with the scheduled onstage sexual performances, at some clubs, that might feature any combination of humans—and animals. “The joints were shoulder-to-shoulder, and there wasn’t any closing hour,” Cronkite recalled. “There were girls in most, transvestites in a few and, the street’s real glory, great jazz in many. . . . If there was anything comparable in Houston, it had certainly escaped my attention. I was nineteen when I hit Kansas City. The visits to Twelfth Street and the brief associations with its denizens helped me grow up in a hurry.”

  Soon after starting at the radio station in early 1936, having finally worked Bit Winter out of his emotional system, Cronkite met a beautiful young advertising copywriter at KCMO. Mary Elizabeth “Betsy” Maxwell was a recent graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia. Cronkite couldn’t take his eyes off her when she glided into the station. Although he wanted to flirt with Betsy, he was tongue-tied by her comeliness. “I watched her coming down the hall,” he later recalled, “and I was stricken, absolutely stricken.” But Betsy could feel Cronkite’s gaze, and reciprocated with a smile worthy of Veronica Lake. “It was,” she recalled, “love at first sight for both of us.” The two began dating a few days later, and within months they were seriously considering marriage. “Betsy and I went from the studio to lunch, from lunch to dinner,” Cronkite wrote, “and from KCMO through life together.”

  Betsy was bright, feisty, and rapt with words. A native of Kansas City, she was, in the parlance of the time, a looker. At the University of Missouri, while earning As in journalism courses, she became runner-up in the campus election of Agriculture Queen. About five foot four, with a lithe, nimble figure, slightly pale, with large eyes and a profusion of curl-ironed hair, Betsy exuded a girl-next-door allure. Blessed with a wicked sense of humor and the gift of putting everyone at ease, she was the unusual combination of homespun sweet and scorpion sting. After graduation, she took the job at KCMO, but her goal was to join the staff of a newspaper. The first time Walter and Betsy bonded was when they were co-reading a radio commercial script for the Richard Hudnut Corporation, a cosmetics company. They performed together on air, selling makeup, courtesy of a come-on written by Betsy:

  Cronkite: “Hello, Angel. What heaven did you drop from?”

  Maxwell: “I’m not an angel.”

  Cronkite: “Well you look like an angel.”

  Maxwell: “That’s because I use Richard Hudnut.”

  By the beginning of 1937, Betsy had found a new job, writing features for the women’s page at the Kansas City Journal-Post, a lot of local-color copy on quilting bees and library functions. The paper was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, but Betsy was pleased to be a “woman’s section” writer. Before long she was assigned to write the “advice to the lovelorn” column. The future Mrs. Cronkite joked that she wasn’t old enough to read some of the rather revealing letters sent into the paper, let alone to provide counsel on the problems. Betsy kept dating Walter, who was irresistibly attractive, but not handsome. “He used to be such a string bean,” she recalled of their courting days, “that my mother insisted on having us over for dinner all the time to fatten him up. Also, for many years he wore his hair slicked back, as was the fashion—but it wasn’t extremely flattering.”

  While Cronkite’s love life was on the upswing, his professional life hit a roadblock. One day the wife of his boss, Jim Simmons, called the station to report that three firemen had been killed in a blaze in her neighborhood. Simmons rushed to Cronkite’s desk, saying, “Get on the air with a flash! The new city hall is on fire, and three firemen just jumped to their deaths!” Cronkite, full of protestations and litanies, insisted on checking the facts himself with the fire department by telephone.

  “You don’t have to check on it,” Simmons snapped at Cronkite. “My wife called and told me.”

  “I do too have to check on it,” Cronkite said, remembering the fundamentals of journalism instilled in him at San Jacinto High, The Houston Press, and INS.

  “Are you calling my wife a liar?” a ticked-off Simmons asked the young Lone Star hotshot.

  “No,” Cronkite said, evoking the Standard Model of Professional Journalism. “I’m not calling your wife a liar, but I don’t know the details.”

  Simmons was now livid. “I’ve told you the details. The new city hall building’s on fire, and three firemen have jumped.”

  With Cronkite resolutely refusing to go on air, Simmons, in a temperamental snit, headed to the microphone himself. Playing the fool, he went on the KCMO airwaves ad-libbing a breaking news bulletin about the supposedly burned firemen. Cronkite’s sleuthing subsequently proved that the fire had been minor. There were no deaths. Nevertheless, the next day, Cronkite was summarily fired by the ego-bruised Simmons. Cronkite felt betr
ayed, clubbed over the head with the farce. “They felt,” Cronkite recalled, “that I was getting a little bit too big for my britches.”

  This unsettling fire incident might have precipitated the split with KCMO, but it probably wasn’t the only source of friction. Once the glamour of radio wore off—such as it was at a weak, 100-watt midwestern station—Cronkite began to chafe at the shallow radio version of events that passed for news. Even though he was unsure how his bills would get paid, he was relieved to be out of KCMO, uncontaminated by Simmons. With a snort of contempt, he remained proud of getting fired for refusing to go live without first triple-sourcing for confirmation of the fire’s reality. And he got the last laugh. When Cronkite died in 2009, one blog told the story of how KCMO canned, for being ethical, the broadcaster who became the Most Trusted Man in America. The headline of the post was “KCMO: Stupid Enough to Fire Cronkite, Downhill Ever Since.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Making of a Unipresser

  UP TRADITION—NEWS AS COMMODITY—MISSOURI METHOD OF JOURNALISM—THE WELL-PRESSED JOHN CAMERON SWAYZE—TEXAS SCHOOL EXPLOSION—PHONE BOOTH REPORTING FOR CBS—ACTION ADDICT—WKY SOONERS SPORTSCASTER—LEARNING TO AD-LIB—FLYING LOW WITH BRANIFF—MESSRS. SMITH AND SEVAREID GO TO EUROPE—BEGGING FOR THE UP JOB—THE HIGH-ALTITUDE KIDNAPPING CAPER—SPELLBOUND BY MURROW—HITLER’S RAMPAGE—POISED FOR WAR

  After three months of uneasy post-KCMO unemployment, Cronkite gladly accepted a job as night editor with the Kansas City office of the United Press. Located at the intersection of East Twenty-second and Oak Street, just two blocks from a burlesque joint, the UP bureau wasn’t much more than a garret with typewriters, Teletype machines, and a water cooler. Cronkite was elated to be a Unipresser, as UP’s wire service reporters were called. The Chicago Tribune got it right when it called UP a “scrappy alternative” to AP. UP’s fighting underdog attitude fit Cronkite’s indefatigable personality to a tee.