The only Russian words Cronkite knew were “hello” (privyet) and “good-bye” (do svidaniya). The UP office was a short walk from the Kremlin and the American embassy. It consisted of a single room at the Hotel Metropol, a low-amenities art nouveau building that housed most of the English-language correspondents in Moscow. As Harrison Salisbury of The New York Times recalled, “Life at the Metropol was a little like living in a prison run by the Mad Hatter. We had adjoining rooms, we ate together, travelled together, drank together, we suffered together and fought together, we knew who slept with whom and who didn’t and when the partners changed.”
Cronkite initially suffered from a bad case of “Ain’t Life Grand” intoxication in Moscow, a common malady for foreign correspondents living behind the Iron Curtain. He turned native, eating blini for breakfast and drinking vodka at night. With Betsy at his side he visited sights such as Lenin’s mausoleum, the Bolshoi Theatre, and St. Basil’s Cathedral, feeling the riptide of Russian history on every street corner. With UP picking up the tab, the Cronkites spent a long weekend in Leningrad and took a memorable cruise down the Volga. Right out of the gate, Cronkite wrote a colorful piece, full of lighthearted affection, about the differences between Russia and the United States. Datelined Moscow, the article ran in American newspapers on October 24, 1946: “Sprawled in a snowbank this morning I heard for the first time a guffawing belly-laugh by a Russian,” Cronkite began. “A heels-over-breakfast tumble, like a funny paper character who steps on a banana peel, is just as uproarious in Moscow as it is in New York or Mooselookmeguntic, Maine.”
If Cronkite’s initial UP articles from Moscow read like goofy travelogues or cornpone jokes, they at least catered to growing American curiosity about Soviet society, which had been painted as bleak and colorless throughout the Stalin era, particularly during the unyielding defense of the homeland during World War II. Cronkite’s articles showed that Muscovites were regular people who laughed, cheered, and flirted just like Americans. They were also the kind of pieces the Soviet press censors wanted foreign correspondents to write. The Soviet Union was a deeply totalitarian, closed society. To be a Western journalist in the USSR during the years right after the war was an exercise in frustration. Conflicting attitudes between the foreign correspondents and their Soviet hosts were coalescing, with a totalitarian government shielding its society from view. Cronkite responded to the handcuffed world of Moscow journalism by writing frequently on the subject of Soviet censorship—articles that he amazingly managed to file through the New York bureau.
Even as he failed to produce a single breaking news story during two years in Moscow, he became an operative in the snowballing American-Soviet cold war. At the time Walter and Betsy arrived, the USSR and the United States were still allies—wary ones to be sure, but joined in the afterglow of victory. Cronkite’s early articles reflected the friendly curiosity of Americans regarding Soviets. By 1947, with the Truman Doctrine (which stated that the United States would provide aid to Greece and Turkey to counter the encroaching Soviet influence) and the Marshall Plan (which offered American economic support to rebuild the economies of Europe during the postwar years) in place, the Kremlin treated reporters such as Cronkite as if they were OSS or newfangled CIA spies. One of Cronkite’s UP articles that drifted entirely away from hard news described his reportorial work in Moscow to the newspaper public in America, allowing them to understand the process by which news was gathered in the closed-door Soviet Union: “The foreign correspondent in Moscow is a blood cousin of a digest magazine editor,” Cronkite explained. “Ninety-five percent of the news he files from Moscow is gleaned from newspapers, magazines, or other periodicals.”
Soviet newspapers such as Pravda, the house organ of the Communist Party, obviously would not be trustworthy sources of facts, but Cronkite did archly quote a Soviet TASS news commentator asserting that President Harry Truman “wants to be the ruler of the universe and use England as his lackey.” Cleverly, he decided to cover Pravda—the censors couldn’t find a problem with that. There was much to catch the eye of the American reader as both amusing and frightening: “After the smashing of the German source of international reaction and criminal aggression, another such source was formed, no less dangerous. It is in the United States, its headquarters are on Wall Street. Its heads are Truman and [Secretary of State George] Marshall, its agents all over the world are American generals and diplomats, its hunting dogs are American capitalist papers.”
Cronkite cited that quotation in a UP article on the average Soviet’s conviction that the United States was planning an imminent attack on Russia. He, and the brand of journalism that he was allowed by both sides to practice, now focused on the widening cold war gulf between the two nations. In a small way, he contributed to the anti-Soviet attitude developing in America by quoting the most outrageous demagoguery of Russian leaders. By the time he approached the end of his Moscow hitch in September 1948, the world’s democracies no longer wanted to hear about the delightful way those melancholy Muscovites laughed when the winter weather played a trick.
There were various reasons for Cronkite’s departure from Moscow after exactly two years. Betsy was expecting their first child and had left for the United States early in the summer of 1948, via West Berlin. She later bragged that she was part of the historic Berlin Airlift. Cronkite naturally wanted to go home to Kansas City to be near Betsy, to share in the joyous excitement of pregnancy. As he pointed out in A Reporter’s Life, as an expecting father, he was increasingly nervous about being arrested on one pretext or another by the Soviet authorities. He wanted to leave Russia as soon as possible.
Everything about living in the Soviet Union now felt overtly oppressive to Cronkite. Whatever veneer of excitement that had glossed over him in 1946 had been wholly stripped away by 1948. Under Stalin the Kremlin was ending its policy of “limited friendship to brotherly Western correspondents,” revoking even “marginal privileges.” He was impatient, too, with the church-mouse penury of UP, tired of its penny-ante ways while NBC and CBS were growing. UP was always steadily downsizing, whittling down its greatness, cutting corners only until the sawdust was left.
Cronkite liked to tell his own story about his relationship with UP circa 1948. Leonard Lyons, a gossip columnist for the New York Post, met him on his return to America and the result was an anecdote about the Cronkites’ life in Moscow. One day, they returned home to find that someone had painted a dollar sign on the door of their apartment. It was meant as an anticapitalist gesture. Betsy, known for her verbal zingers, made an off-the-cuff comment about how godawful poor journalists were. According to Lyons’s column, however, it was Walter who made the quotable remark. “If they had known I worked for the United Press instead of the Associated Press,” he said, “they would have put a cents sign on the door.” (Cronkite ever afterward insisted—not wanting to mock UP publicly—that the quote should have been “If they had known we were newspaper people, they would have put a cents sign on the door.”)
In New York, on a quick stopover on his way to see Betsy in Kansas City, Cronkite learned that he would not be receiving an expected pay raise—and that if he accepted UP’s offer of a posting in London, he would not receive any expense money. For Cronkite, one of the company’s highest-paid foreign correspondents, this was the equivalent of a pay cut, not a minor trespass on his integrity. His entire reportorial life had been consecrated to UP, his allegiance to the wire service sincere. But UP’s niggling for dollars caused him to break ranks. In truth, he might have already been tired of all that UP reminded him of: the grueling war coverage; the nomadic lifestyle of a foreign correspondent; the constant company of other heavy-drinking reporters, some of them friends, all of them competitors; the time zone distances from Kansas City.
By October 1948, Cronkite was feeling the urge to lead a normal life. Missing out on the GI Bill, which would have paid for him to finally get his college degree, he was light-years behind Mur
row Boys in his industry such as Collingwood (class of ’39 at Cornell) or Sevareid (class of ’35 at Minnesota). Not having worked in America since the first year of the war, he didn’t know much about the country in the present postwar tense. He had not taken a serious vacation since he’d left Missouri for New York back in 1941; that was seven years on the front line in Europe and Russia. With a child on the way, Cronkite relished being back in the Midwest, in Kansas City, where the trolleys still ran on time and no one was a spy.
In 1948, although he didn’t know it yet, his life would soon change significantly. That year, for the first time, CBS televised the Democratic and Republican national conventions (both held in Philadelphia). There was a whiff of new technology about the TV coverage that was intoxicating to those with a nose for the future. Jack Gould, distinguished radio and television critic for The New York Times, wrote an article that summer about the significant role TV was playing in the presidential election. While he admitted that a lot of the proceedings of the conventions were an “arduous grind” to watch, there was no escaping the hard, futuristic fact that TV’s influence on electing politicians was “going to be great indeed.” When Truman arrived in Philadelphia he was dressed to the nines, like a riverboat gambler at a wedding, wearing a white suit and dark tie that was “the best masculine garb for the video camera.”
What Gould saw missing from the 1948 TV convention coverage was a network master of ceremonies, a clever ringleader who could ad-lib when the marathon oratory got dull. Just as TV was going to place a premium on personality in politics, and being telegenic became almost a prerequisite for seeking national office, the networks needed to have a happy-go-lucky “anchorman”—a vague TV term not used regularly until 1952 and then specifically for Cronkite—to hold all the disparate parts together. In 1948 the seasoned CBS trio of Ed Murrow, Quincy Howe, and Douglas Edwards distinguished themselves from NBC by a long shot. The CBSers came off as good-natured, detached, and quick-witted. “In a town overrun with eager beavers,” Gould wrote in the Times, “the Messrs. Murrow, Howe and Edwards acted as relaxed and seasoned reporters.”
Murrow, it turns out, didn’t like the notion of being an anchorman for CBS TV. His past experiences at national conventions had left him cold; such events tended to degrade reporters’ professionalism, turning them into cheerleaders and spectators, clapping like silly sycophants at prewritten political speeches. Being obedient and rote was not the Murrow way. So there was a job opening at CBS. Although it wasn’t posted until four years later, for the 1952 conventions, CBS executives had an ad in mind: “Anchorman Wanted.”
Meanwhile, all across the United States, television affiliates for NBC and CBS were prospering. TV was incrementally becoming the communications medium of the future, and Cronkite wasn’t yet in the game, his sepulchral voice yet to be truly discovered.
PART III
Cold War Broadcaster
CHAPTER TEN
Infancy of TV News
BABY BOOM FATHER—TRUMAN’S MISSOURI—GOING TO WASHINGTON, D.C., VIA KMBC—THE TV PIONEER—DOUGLAS EDWARDS—KOREAN WAR BEGGING—GROWING FAMILY—TV NEWS AT WTOP—WORKING WITH SHADEL—ONE-TAKE WALTER—TRUMAN GIVES CRONKITE A WHITE HOUSE TOUR—GETTING THE 1952 CONVENTION GIG—FACE TIME RULES
Dutiful and determined to be a hands-on father, Walter Cronkite was in Kansas City on November 8, 1948, when Betsy gave birth to their first child, Nancy, at St. Luke’s Hospital. He took a brief home leave from the United Press. While Walter was in Russia working, a pregnant Betsy had returned to Kansas City to live with Arthur and Eva Maxwell, her parents, at 3220 Agnes Avenue. “I raced half way around the world from Moscow to be present for the event,” Cronkite was fond of saying, “only to find my presence was not required.”
The Cronkites were participating in what became known as the Baby Boom, a phenomenon in the postwar years between 1946 and 1960 marked by a large increase in American births. Still a roving reporter, all he got to do was kiss newborn Nancy (the first of the Cronkites’ three children) before heading out on the road again for UP. “That’s the way it was in those days,” Nancy said. “The wife took care of the kids while the husband traveled for business.” What Cronkite realized upon his return to Missouri was that the United States—where baby items such as diapers, baby food, and infant clothes were easy to come by—was ideal for raising a family. Before Cronkite left for New York (and then back to Moscow), he had lunch at the Kansas City Club with Karl Koerper, vice president and general manager of KMBC, the CBS affiliate in Kansas City. Looking for career headway and anxious to move back to America, Cronkite suggested to Koerper that KMBC needed an able Washington-based correspondent. The pitch was that Cronkite would move to the District of Columbia on behalf of KMBC. The Kansas City Journal-Post was defunct and Cronkite theorized he could pick up the slack with radio broadcasts from Washington aimed at a Midwest—particularly Missouri and Kansas—audience. “It was a very fine, responsible radio station,” Cronkite recalled of KMBC, “the sixth station Bill Paley had put together of the original CBS network.”
Koerper, hoping to scoop up a talent like Cronkite, had KMBC hire Cronkite. Eventually ten radio stations across the Midwest would air Cronkite’s syndicated radio reports. In a glass-half-empty sense, Cronkite’s KMBC job was a demotion; he was reaching only a regional audience, not a national one. It was a step up, though, in the entrepreneurial aspect of running his own broadcasting operation, with clients but no bosses. In addition, the KMBC syndicate offered twice the salary he’d been receiving at UP in Moscow. What new father wouldn’t like that? While his bosses at UP were unhappy about his departure, they understood what double the salary meant to a family man. Truth be told, any news organization—even The New York Times—would have been lucky to employ Cronkite. What one columnist at the New York Daily News wrote about Cronkite in 1965 was already his reputation in journalism in 1948: “Solid as a mountain,” and “As reliable as the sunrise.”
In the 1930s, Cronkite had bounced back and forth many times between his first love, newspapers, and the new medium of broadcast radio. With his move to Washington in December 1948, though, his newspaper-reporting days were finished. Electronic broadcasting was still young and had yet to tap its full potential. The same was true of Cronkite, the newest voice in radio news at KMBC. “When Walter got into radio everybody was trying to sound like Ed Murrow,” veteran CBS correspondent Bob Schieffer recalled. “I mean even Charles Kuralt tried to sound like Murrow. Not Walter. He had his own, very distinctive way of talking. I don’t know where it came from. He came from Kansas City and grew up in Texas and lived a lot overseas. What ended up happening was that by the 1960s everybody at CBS Radio started sounding like Cronkite, not Murrow. He had taken over the cadence of the network.”
A columnist for the Kansas City Atchison Daily Globe, Jim Carson, ballyhooed Cronkite’s new KMBC assignment as a regional boon. “Cronkite is in Washington to establish headquarters,” Carson wrote on January 9, 1949, “and will begin his reporting about the first of February. Plans call for Cronkite to provide a daily news spot for each of the stations from our Nation’s capital. . . . Localized news, as it affects Missourians and Kansans, will be scheduled on a quarter-hour program each week.” The scuttlebutt in Kansas City, encouraged by Cronkite, was that his being a Missouri boy would open up access to President Truman himself. But in truth, the White House was new turf to Cronkite, a mystery mansion akin to mammoth caves. He had no “in” with Truman.
The Cronkites rented a little Georgian-style house across from Rock Creek Park and struggled a little to make ends meet, even though his new salary of over $15,000 a year lifted them into the upper middle class. It was more money than fellow Writing Sixty-Niners Andy Rooney or William Wade were making. He represented five states for KMBC: Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Furthermore, following a newsman’s primary instinct, he’d gotten to where the sizzling news of 1949 was: official Washington. Truman had de
feated New Yorker Thomas Dewey in the 1948 election and was promising a Fair Deal to the American people. This meant the role of the U.S. government was going to grow. Because Cronkite was broadcasting for the Midwest, the Department of Agriculture was a mandatory part of his beat. Murrow was a semi-regular guest at the White House (joining Truman to dine with the likes of Charles de Gaulle and Winston Churchill). Cronkite, by contrast, was hanging out with wheat surplus traders and stockyard operators from Des Moines and Fargo.
One of the stories Cronkite covered in Washington for KMBC was the rise of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican, and his determined hunt for Communists employed by the federal government. Speaking out against McCarthy was a dangerous idea for a radio or television reporter. The senator was at the forefront of a popular movement that portrayed communism as a threat as despicable as Nazism and even more insidious. To denigrate McCarthy was to appear, in many people’s eyes, disloyal to American democracy. More pointedly, McCarthy indignantly investigated those who were at odds with him and freely substituted innuendo—even rank falsehoods—for hard facts. Very few broadcasters had either the bedrock courage or unassailable reputation—let alone job security—to withstand implication by McCarthy. But Cronkite did. In May 1950, he was asked to speak to the Rotary Club in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a city whose WMT radio carried his District of Columbia reports. He might have chosen a safe topic, but instead he bluntly branded McCarthy a fearmonger—earning the respect of the White House. According to the Cedar Rapids Gazette, Cronkite said that McCarthy “has contradicted himself and proved little in his investigation of alleged Communists.” No recording of Cronkite’s Rotary Club speech exists today, but he insisted he didn’t cower before his audience that day. “I couldn’t believe that anybody was going to take McCarthy seriously,” Cronkite recalled. “I thought he represented a kind of fringe fanaticism and personal ambition that wouldn’t be followed by anyone of import.”
Cronkite Page 16
