Approving of You Are There, influential TV critic John Crosby called Cronkite CBS News’ “man of all work.” One day Cronkite was interviewing Paul Revere or Confucius and the next he was in Yucca Flats, Nevada (for real), where the U.S. Army had invited the press to witness an atomic bomb detonation. Instead of scrambling to the front of the pack on March 17, 1953, Cronkite and Morgan Beatty (for ABC News) cautiously positioned themselves about seven miles away from ground zero. There were limits, Cronkite believed, to earning a scoop—contracting radiation sickness from a multimegaton thermonuclear detonation was one of them. Chet Huntley of NBC News was one of two journalists who braved the Yucca Flats explosion from a closer proximity, unafraid of fallout. About 5:20 a.m. Pacific time, the bomb detonated into a raging ball of fire. Television viewers didn’t see the ghastly flash on their screens because the camera lens was momentarily covered to protect it from heat-warp. But they did see the mushroom cloud form in the aftermath. A fiery gloom streaked across the dry desert basin. Cronkite did a masterful job of explaining everything to viewers about the atomic age, from fallout shelters to emergency duck-and-cover drills to radio warning sirens.
In the fall of 1953, CBS News beat NBC News in overall audience share on television. Cronkite and Murrow were major reasons why. By 1956, CBS’s Douglas Edwards with the News sailed ahead of NBC’s fifteen-minute Camel News Caravan, which meant a lot more advertising dollars for the “Tiffany Network” (a reference to the high-quality shine of the company’s news product). Besides having an R. J. Reynolds cigarette product actually sponsor a news show, The Camel News Caravan broke other ground. Its host, John Cameron Swayze—always a suave dandy—created signature sign-off lines such as “A good good-evening to you,” or “Hopscotching the globe” or “Glad we could be together.” Long ago, back in Kaycee, Cronkite had taken notice of the well-groomed Swayze-style wardrobe, realizing that appearance mattered when communicating truths. Nobody wanted to be told about the Soviets testing a hydrogen bomb or China invading a country by Freedie the Freeloader.
When in early 1954 Sig Mickelson became CBS News vice president, Cronkite was comforted. Mickelson, a one-man organizing vortex, didn’t get along with Ed Murrow (or producer Fred Friendly, for that matter), so he was always looking to give Cronkite breaks. As CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr noted, Murrow simply wasn’t Mickelson’s “cup of tea.” Cronkite, on the other hand, was exactly what Mickelson thought TV news needed. If Friendly was Murrow’s alter ego in the 1940s and ’50s, then Mickelson was Cronkite’s sponsor in the 1950s and early ’60s. Whenever the opportunity arose, Mickelson, sounding like Colonel Parker promoting Elvis Presley, rattled off Cronkite’s impressive résumé, from the New London, Texas, fire of 1937 (covered for UP) to the Yucca Flats, Nevada, blast of 1953 (covered for CBS News).
What differentiated Cronkite from the pack, Mickelson believed, was that he was preternaturally encyclopedic about U.S. political history. Who else had been at both the Houston and Kansas City nominating conventions back in 1928? Yet Murrow was the one regarded as a hero by New Deal liberals in New York media circles. While Cronkite was re-creating history on You Are There, Murrow had undeniably made history with his “Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy,” which harshly criticized the senator’s alarmist methods, for See It Now. The public only had a hint of the keen insight Cronkite had accumulated about how the Electoral College functioned. “The name which most viewers immediately identify with political coverage,” Mickelson insisted, “is that of Walter Cronkite.”
What worried Cronkite was that if television news could be used for good (as with See It Now), then it could also be used to further malicious ends—and who was to judge the difference? World War II was less than ten years distant, and the memory of the Third Reich’s infamous radio and newspaper propaganda machine was fresh in the minds of many. Murrow might be trusted with the potential to turn news into opinion at CBS, and he was. But the disturbing thought to Cronkite was that an American-fried Joseph Goebbels type—somebody even worse than McCarthy—might take to the U.S. airwaves espousing hatred. To Cronkite, journalism had a mandate to challenge totalitarianism in any guise everywhere in the world. “I think newsmen are inclined to side with humanity rather than with authority and institutions,” he explained to Playboy. “And this sort of pushes them to the left. But I don’t think there are many who are far left.”
Cronkite had liberal opinions like Murrow’s regarding politics and trends in American society. But he didn’t believe his preference for Adlai Stevenson over Dwight Eisenhower for president should be public knowledge. “I thought he’d gotten the nomination simply because of the hero worship of World War II,” Cronkite explained of Eisenhower, “not by his ability to be president. Ike’s association with a lot of the right-wing Republicans bothered me a great deal.”
But Cronkite also knew that objectivity had its limits. Although he privately toasted the news of Soviet premier Joseph Stalin’s death on March 1, 1953, he didn’t editorialize. When on May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education that racial segregation was illegal, Cronkite again rejoiced. But he also knew that the South might soon become a tinderbox as the U.S. Department of Justice tried to enforce the landmark ruling. During World War II Cronkite’s UP dispatches lacked objectivity because the Nazis were so heinous. Post-Brown, he hoped CBS News would do the same in covering the civil rights movement as it fought for the implementation of the Supreme Court opinion. “CBS executives sensed a more immediate concern,” Cronkite recalled. “Their job was to gather an audience and sell it to advertisers. . . . In the 1950s, CBS chairman William Paley didn’t want to alienate his Southern affiliates whose defection could weaken CBS ratings and revenues. Those of us who would do the reporting would feel caught in a rare dilemma between commerce and journalism.”
Later in life, Cronkite skirted questions about why he didn’t decry Joe McCarthy in the 1950s with tomahawk in hand or become a public advocate for the Brown decision like Howard K. Smith and Eric Sevareid. The honest answer was that such audacity would have been a career killer for Cronkite. He was hired by Mr. Paley to be a TV broadcaster, not a crusader. But by working with blacklisted writers on You Are There, he nevertheless earned street cred in the broadcasting industry for standing up, by proxy, to the Red Scare.
The same month that Murrow’s “Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy” aired on CBS’s See It Now, Cronkite started a new gig, one that the network regarded as paramount. He was to be the network’s morning man, in counterpoint to Dave Garroway on the fabulously popular Today show on NBC. CBS longed for an a.m. ratings winner—that is, a reliable morning show of its own. And that was the title Cronkite’s program received: The Morning Show, which he hosted for much of 1954 and 1955. Critics noticed a certain similarity between the NBC and CBS shows. They were, in fact, almost identical, combining a gently witty host with a gregarious weathercaster, a sober news announcer, and a nonhuman cohort. Garroway had a chimpanzee (J. Fred Muggs) to chat with, and Cronkite had Charlemagne, a lion puppet manipulated by Bill Baird. “A puppet,” Cronkite said in defense of his cohost, “can render opinions on people and things that a human commentator would not feel free to utter. It was one of the highlights of the show.”
Oddly, Cronkite was the perfect straight man for Charlemagne. While Murrow Boys such as Sevareid and Collingwood belittled Cronkite for goofing around with a puppet on The Morning Show, CBS was right to take advantage of how Cronkite combined, as one syndicated columnist put it, a “whimsical and frequently off-beat sense of humor.” Cronkite, in person, had a delightful sense of humor and was extremely good with little kids. His mother, Helen, was bitingly funny, a lively conversationalist and sometime late-night card player, and so was her son. Walter was sprung of people, and an era, that valued parlor room wit and canned laughter. Instead of seeming like a doofus for being a serious newsman with a puppet, Cronkite came off—as critic John Crosby wrote�
��as nerdy cool. He just didn’t look cool; therein lay the comic element.
At first The Morning Show aired Monday to Friday from 7:00 to 9:00 a.m. But David Garroway, host of NBC’s Today, kept trouncing Dick Van Dyke and Cronkite in the ratings. As an interviewer, Cronkite was solid but didn’t sparkle in that chipper, wake-up-everybody-it’s-a-brand-new-day format. Before long, Paley cut The Morning Show in half, giving the second hour to Captain Kangaroo. Mickelson pulled Cronkite for a few weeks from The Morning Show, but ultimately put him back into the mix. But the verdict was in. Cronkite, even with the ace assistance of Barbara Walters (writer), Dick Van Dyke (slapstick), and Merv Griffin (music), simply wasn’t well suited for the breakfast spot. There was a knifepoint to Cronkite’s banter with guests that was more Drew Pearson or Walter Winchell than Captain Kangaroo.
At an afternoon meeting, Sig Mickelson told Cronkite he seemed overextended with substituting for Douglas Edwards on the Evening News and serving as impresario of You Are There. He was fired permanently from The Morning Show. His replacement was Jack Paar, a rising Ohio comic who set the mold for Johnny Carson, host of The Tonight Show from 1962 to 1992. While Cronkite spoke in a halting way, Paar had a quick-mind comic delivery that had the same stimulating effect as coffee. Many CBSers believed that Paar’s success meant the reversal of Cronkite’s upward trajectory at the Tiffany Network. Getting a lot of face time on a merry-go-round of CBS News shows was great, but for some reason Cronkite couldn’t carry a major broadcast on his shoulders. Perhaps he was destined to be a CBS utility player. Maybe he had reached his peak at the 1952 Chicago conventions.
At CBS News in late 1954, Mickelson—still trying to find the right time slot for Cronkite—had him host, off and on, such shows as Eyewitness and The Twentieth Century. He also considered having Cronkite moderate a new Sunday-at-noon show, Face the Nation, which premiered on November 7, 1954. Mickelson envisioned the show as probing U.S. government officials and world leaders. It was partially conceived as the CBS counterpart to NBC’s Meet the Press and, later, ABC’s Issues and Answers. Tellingly, however, even Mickelson thought that Cronkite wouldn’t be tough enough as an interviewer to carry the Sunday show. He was too nice. The gig went to Bill Shadel, the brave CBS Radio correspondent who had reported from D-day in June 1944 and accompanied Murrow to Buchenwald in April 1945. It was humiliating to Cronkite, who practically blew a gasket at the news, because Shadel had worked for him at WTOP in Washington, D.C., and now was deemed by CBS management as a more “serious broadcaster.”
There was a flaw in Cronkite’s character that resulted from being the child of an alcoholic father: he couldn’t handle shame. His chipper attitude camouflaged a deep hurt. Feigning relief at being scrubbed from The Morning Show, Cronkite told The New York Herald Tribune that dawn held zero appeal for him. “I don’t like the challenge of getting up that early,” he explained. “I am basically a creature of the night.” His stubborn ego wouldn’t admit he had bombed on The Morning Show and was blackballed from Face the Nation. Denial was easier. Cronkite truly believed that he had outperformed Jack Paar, his replacement, on The Morning Show. The unflappable Paar ended up hosting NBC’s Tonight from 1957 to 1962, a comic turn for which the quick-witted raconteur was well suited. One of Paar’s more famous quips pertained to his old Morning Show rival at CBS: “I’m not a religious man,” Paar said. “But I do believe in Walter Cronkite.”
When off-duty from CBS, Cronkite could often be found racing cars or tinkering with old radios like a Popular Mechanics devotee. One day in 1955, he was passing a car dealership in New Jersey and impulsively bought a flashy sports car for $1,700. That British model, a Triumph TR-3, was soon replaced by an Austin-Healey that Cronkite drove only for weekend pleasure around Westchester County. Then he and Betsy began to compete with the Austin-Healey at road rallies. Helmets in place, they worked together—pilot and navigator—to negotiate road courses precisely as event organizers dictated. They were hoping to win trophies. Soon the Cronkites were invited to join a team at the “Twelve Hours of Sebring” race in 1959. The tabloids loved showing Cronkite in racing clothes, looking like a hybrid of the Red Baron and auto racing pioneer Barney Oldfield, explaining how liberated he became when the speedometer hit one hundred miles per hour. All of life’s tension evaporated. But in 1961 Cronkite, while competing in an international rally, skidded off a road in the Big Smokies of Tennessee. The car flipped over an embankment, almost killing Cronkite (whose Austin-Healey landed in a lake one hundred feet away). “Cronkite,” The Saturday Evening Post reported, “emerged wet but unhurt.”
Life was good for the Cronkites. They owned a home at 519 East Eighty-fourth Street. They now had three children: Nancy, the eldest; Kathy; and a son, Walter Leland Cronkite III (known as Chip).Walter, in the CBS tradition, was seen about town dining at the trendiest lunch spots with Lowell Thomas and enjoying musical events at the Rainbow Room with variety show host Ed Sullivan.
Aside from his gruff, newspaper editor demeanor while at the CBS office, Cronkite was often described in profiles as a down-to-earth guy. The CBS affiliates found him a refreshing face, a voice from the heartland. But Cronkite felt underappreciated by Paley. He fantasized about becoming a local TV anchorman in the Midwest (where raising a family was cheaper). CBS’s best-run affiliate in the 1950s was WCCO (channel 4 on TV) in Minneapolis; its 50,000-watt clear channel on radio could be heard as far south as New Orleans. Frustrated over The Morning Show experience, Cronkite accepted an offer to become the anchorman of WCCO. When Mickelson learned of Cronkite’s rash decision to move to Minnesota, he put his foot down. “You’re our next Douglas Edwards,” he scolded Cronkite. “You’re staying put in New York.” Unbeknownst to Cronkite at the time, CBS News executives had plans for him to anchor the 1956 nominating conventions.
What Mickelson was trying to convey to Cronkite was that CBS News was in flux. Paley announced that for the first time, in 1956, CBS radio operations had lost money while television was becoming a real breadwinner. Everybody was on the hunt for TV talent. As Reuven Frank, then the president of the NBC news division, recalled, some producers wanted to give a chance to a rangy, handsome newsman from Los Angeles, Chet Huntley. He was appearing on an NBC show called Outlook—a half-hour Sunday news and features segment—but neither the program, nor Huntley was well known by TV watchers. Scratching around for an alternative, a few executives promoted David Brinkley, but he was considered to be relatively unknown and quirky. With the 1956 conventions drawing closer, Frank recalled the panic that was starting to set in as NBC executives debated the merits of each of the two leading candidates: “And then, one of the great compromisers said, ‘Let’s put those two together,’ meaning Huntley and Brinkley. It was like the light bulb going on over somebody’s head in the comics.”
Chet Huntley and David Brinkley arrived as a breath of fresh air for NBC News, something entirely new to American broadcasting in the mid-1950s. To CBS News diehards, Huntley and Brinkley were nothing more than Kukla, Fran, and Ollie fortified by Associated Press news flashes. Cronkite himself analyzed the NBC duo’s on-air chemistry from a first-person perspective. “They received the critical attention,” he explained. “I was the old hand.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Huntley and Brinkley Challenge
DULL TIMES AT THE 1956 CONVENTIONS—MURROW’S COMPLAINTS—BLAMING COLLEAGUES—THE HUNTLEY-BRINKLEY CHEMISTRY—AVOIDING MURROW—NO DO-OVERS—CRONKITE AS SIMPLETON—MUDD IN THE WINGS—PICKING THE WINNERS—EISENHOWER BEATS STEVENSON—HOMAGE TO LOWELL THOMAS—“ANSWER PLEASE!”—I’M NOT A STAR—COULD SPACE BE THE NEW POLITICAL CONVENTIONS?—SPACE RACING—THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY MAN—THE AMAZING BUD BENJAMIN—LOOKING TOWARD THE GALAXY—GRAPPLING WITH SPUTNIK—FLORIDA AND THE NASA BEAT—CLIMBING TO THE TOP RUNG
The rap against Walter Cronkite at the 1956 political conventions was that he was a reliable dullard on the airwaves. The man was only in his late thirties, but he was already viewed as
a TV veteran. Few Americans knew that the producers were the real innovators of television, that all an anchorman did was take election feeds from guys such as Sig Mickelson and Don Hewitt. Because the 1956 presidential election was sedate—the incumbent, Dwight Eisenhower, against the same old Adlai Stevenson of 1952—there wasn’t much drama in the Chicago (Democratic) and the San Francisco (Republican) conventions. So the public demanded that CBS spice up the proceedings with fiber optics, new camera angles, upped voltage—anything cutting-edge to justify the preemption of popular prime-time shows such as Lassie, The Red Skelton Show, and I Love Lucy. Cronkite didn’t deliver any unexpected sparks that summer. Instead, critic Jack Gould of The New York Times, who had once worked for CBS News as an “information adviser” (whatever that was), derided his live broadcasts at the conventions as painfully “dead pan,” adding insult by asking Cronkite to cheer up.
Gould’s words stung Cronkite tremendously. He was irritated now, as well as hungry for scapegoats. The problem at the 1956 conventions could not have been him. He was rock solid. Instead of letting Cronkite fly solo, Mickelson and Hewitt had saddled their anchorman with “outside” political commentators—Elmo Roper, the opinion polling pioneer; and Samuel Lubell, a writer good at picking political winners—both of whom proved lethally boring when the cameras rolled. Cronkite would have preferred giving Sevareid and Murrow more airtime than have those two hapless wonks compete in a snooze fest. An internal debate ensued at CBS News in the fall of 1956 to figure out what had gone wrong. “The low CBS morale,” Sevareid wrote Mickelson in a memorandum, “was caused by too much executive tension, general uncertainty, and nervousness.”
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