To Murrow, no fan of Cronkite, the problem with CBS News’ 1956 convention coverage was executive producer Mickelson’s overproduction and quasi-religious vulgarity in pleasing corporate sponsors. Murrow thought CBS’s coverage was an orgy of distraction, false news, and propaganda. Everything was too staged in Chicago and San Francisco. The stodgy Cronkite unscripted, he argued, was better than the owlish Roper tethered to a desk, rattling off political factoids learned at some number-crunching camp. And there were other Mickelson mistakes that irritated Murrow considerably. Overly worried about being pro-Stevenson, Mickelson prohibited the showing of In Pursuit of Happiness (a triumphant Democratic National Committee short documentary) to the blistering consternation of DNC chairman Paul Butler. Why censor the most thoughtful bit of the whole confetti-crazed convention? Murrow didn’t overly mind Cronkite’s emphasis on ad-libbing analysis, but he thought Robert Trout, who broadcast the conventions for CBS Radio News, was better at it. Murrow came up with an idea. Why not have Trout become the anchorman of special events instead of Cronkite?
What infuriated Cronkite even more than the CBS boycott of In Pursuit of Happiness or UNIVAC, he wrote Mickelson in October 1956, was the unnerving commotion in the control booth. His beef was that while broadcasting to millions of Americans, he heard CBS staff chortling off-camera. It was beyond disruptive. A suspicious Cronkite even intimated that perhaps the Murrowites in Chicago and San Francisco had sabotaged his performance on purpose. Absolute “Q-U-I-E-T” was what he told Mickelson he needed in the booth. All Mickelson could do was stare at him in disbelief.
Self-consciously pointing fingers at the Murrow clique was perhaps convenient for Cronkite, but it was bull. The real problem CBS faced at the 1956 conventions was the stellar on-air chemistry of David Brinkley and Chet Huntley at NBC News. They, as Gould said in the Times, naturally “clicked.” Paired for NBC’s coverage of the conventions, these competent newsmen provided accurate and economic commentary. The NBC duo—with Huntley as straight man and Brinkley the dry wit—offered a chemistry that was pioneering to television news (or even radio news before it). If something quirky happened in Chicago or San Francisco, Huntley and Brinkley laughed. Cronkite, by contrast, reported that something funny had happened. Maintaining a journalistic remove had its limits. The nation, in one of its cultural whims, was starting to believe that two NBC anchormen were more profitable than one self-effacing Cronkite. It was like the double-dipped ice-cream cone or buy-one-get-one-free cheeseburger rages. “While past attempts at using two anchormen had mixed results,” historian Michael A. Russo noted about the 1956 conventions, “Huntley and Brinkley brought to the task greater editorial skills, a closer coordination of ideas with visual illustrations, and a sense of humor which TV audiences liked.”
Moreover, Huntley (based in New York) and Brinkley (in Washington, D.C.) could themselves be humorous when the moment cried out for lighthearted informality. Huntley had a Westerner’s laconic sense of irony. And Brinkley was the undisputed master of the droll aside. It wasn’t that Chet and David were clowning around or trying to score cheeky points. They just allowed themselves the flexibility to make succinct journalistic observations in a relaxed give-and-take style. With their unique toss-back-and-forth approach, Huntley and Brinkley were not merely broadcasters; they could momentarily become part of the audience as well, commenting to each other as the audience surely did at home with fellow family members in the living room staring at the Tube.
Unlike Cronkite, the press wizards didn’t think the 1956 conventions required much on-the-run reporting. With a couple of shoo-ins in the incumbent Republican president (Eisenhower) and the second-time Democratic nominee (Stevenson), there was precious little breaking news to cover. Only Stevenson’s vice presidential choice—would it be Estes Kefauver of Tennessee or John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts?—held dramatic possibility. “It was a situation made to order for Huntley and Brinkley,” Mickelson explained. “Brinkley’s sardonic wit enlivened the proceedings and created an attitude of mild amusement among viewers. CBS continued to view the proceedings as a serious news story long after there was no news remaining.”
As a ploy to beef up CBS News’ ratings at the 1956 Democratic Convention in Chicago, Cronkite—along with Douglas Edwards, Charles Collingwood, Eric Sevareid, and Robert Trout—went on the network’s beloved game show What’s My Line? It wasn’t unusual in the 1950s for broadcasters to do commercials and host game shows: journalists such as Mike Wallace, Douglas Edwards, and John Cameron Swayze did it all the time. But What’s My Line? was weird. The show’s premise was that four celebrities guessed the occupation of a mystery person. Cronkite sat in the guest chair alongside host John Daly, while the other four CBS correspondents stood behind him like suited-up crows on a wire about to cackle. When Cronkite answered questions from the blindfolded columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, he altered his voice to sound like the Mickey Mouse of Karnival Kid. He spoke spasmodically, in blurt-outs with long pauses between words. Eventually, after a lot of canned laughs, Cronkite and his CBS convention team were outed. (Cronkite’s What’s My Line? appearance has become a must-watch YouTube clip; the kitsch factor remained quite high into the twenty-first century.)
What’s My Line? didn’t help. The CBS news division with Cronkite at the helm came out of the summer with a chink in its armor. Huntley and Brinkley were the new undisputed TV darlings. They owned the buzz. The newsmagazines Time and Newsweek pronounced the NBC reporters truly worthy of the intelligent viewer’s time. Jack Gould poured on the praise in an August 1956 Chicago analysis. “Mr. Brinkley’s extraordinary accomplishment has been not to talk too much,” Gould wrote, not even mentioning Cronkite in his New York Times piece. “He has a knack for the succinct phrase that sums up the situation. . . . It is Mr. Brinkley’s humor, however, that is attracting audiences. It is on the dry side and rooted in a sense of relaxed detachment from all the political and electronic turmoil around him.”
A few critics rallied to Cronkite’s defense by saying, “We like the straight-news simplicity of Cronkite.” It was intended as a compliment for the Unipresser, but amid the general delight over Huntley and Brinkley, it was faint praise. Cronkite continued to broadcast with directness, but in the aftermath of the national conventions, “straight-news simplicity” was under siege. Entertainment was seeping into the TV news ship through the portholes of Huntley and Brinkley. Throughout the rest of Eisenhower’s presidency, it would remain so, and from two directions: inside CBS (by correspondents blending a point of view into their factual reports) and outside (by NBC, which made no-nonsense straight news passé). When Mickelson asked Cronkite to critique his broadcasts of the 1956 conventions to get the kinks out for 1960, Cronkite refused. Throughout his career he followed an ironclad rule—a superstition, really—that helped him survive in the business: he never watched himself. “Walter thought that there were no do-overs,” NBC News anchorman Brian Williams recalled. “Watching your own flubs set the ego back too many notches.”
By early fall of 1956, with the political convention floors barely swept, John Cameron Swayze was fired as anchor of the evening news at NBC. To no one’s surprise, Huntley and Brinkley replaced him, the former broadcasting from New York and the latter from Washington in a unique bi-city format that showcased their obvious chemistry. The Camel News Caravan was renamed The Huntley-Brinkley Report. While NBC News had yet to assemble a roster of ace correspondents to match those of CBS, Robert Kintner, president of NBC News, increased his division’s budgets and recruited new talent, including the likes of Edwin Newman, Sander Vanocur, and John Chancellor. And the production quality of The Huntley-Brinkley Report was even more impressive than it had been at the 1956 conventions. NBC’s ratings didn’t skyrocket, but suddenly it was something that well-informed people had to see and fashionable people wanted to see. The suppertime evening news broadcast was on its way to becoming an American ritual. Where CBS News continued to excel was in documentaries and s
pecial reports (the Murrow tradition). Most important of all—in financial terms—CBS was also making tremendous inroads into NBC’s traditional stronghold: entertainment programming. Its killer lineup of situation comedies, led by I Love Lucy, gave the company banner years during the 1950s. Inevitably, NBC retaliated. It signed its own big stars, including comedian Bob Hope.
That fall, Cronkite went into fighting overdrive,with a CBS News prime-time special called Pick the Winner, which ran right up to Election Night. Dr. Frank Stanton spared no expense in buying CBS News ads in The New York Times and The Washington Post to promote Cronkite’s prime-time interviews (and sometimes debates) with a cast that included Governor Averell Harriman (D-N.Y.) and U.S. senators William Knowland (R-Calif.), Hubert Humphrey (D-Minn.), and Karl E. Mundt (R-S.D.). The Pick the Winner series ran for eight weeks on Wednesday nights. It paid off. On Election Night, November 5, as Eisenhower beat Stevenson by a whopping 457 to 73 electoral votes, CBS whipped the competition with a 25.3 rating, compared with NBC (13.8) and ABC (13.1).
Cronkite’s fine Election Night performances guaranteed he’d remain CBS News’ first-string anchor for live-events coverage. He nevertheless felt like second fiddle. With the political season over, he looked for a special-events angle that could grab him some precious prime-time real estate. He needed a hit show like Murrow had in Person to Person (which aired from 1953 to 1961 and consisted largely of the legend interviewing public figures in casual settings). “In the fall of 1957,” Cronkite complained, “my presence on CBS was confined mostly to reruns of a waning series called You Are There and one newscast a week, the Sunday News Special.”
He inventoried his options, making an honest appraisal of the threat Huntley and Brinkley posed. He thought about loosening up more on air. He might easily have tried to meet Brinkley head-on, giving his news copy piquant turns of phrase and his on-air banter the humor of Poor Richard’s Almanac. Yes, Cronkite had ideas about changing news broadcasting, but they didn’t run toward aping someone else’s style. His fascination with broadcast journalism wasn’t with the delivery so much as the selection and organization of the news. By 1958, CBS News had restructured into two major operating divisions: the CBS TV network (with 243 affiliates) and the CBS TV stations (with five CBS-owned stations). The business of the medium was in boom mode. All Cronkite wanted, in the end, was to help shareholders win a fair share of the pie.
It wasn’t just Huntley and Brinkley whom Cronkite had to keep his eyes on in 1957. The up-and-coming Roger Mudd was already creating a lot of noise at CBS headquarters. Although Mudd’s primary job in Washington was doing the 6:00 a.m. radio newscast and the local news inserts on the TV morning show Potomac Panorama, his star kept rising. Before long, Mudd—a native Washingtonian who had begun his career as a reporter for The Richmond News Leader—was hosting a 6:00 p.m. newscast on WTOP that he wrote himself (including a weekly commentary piece). By May 1962, Mudd had joined the CBS News Washington bureau as a congressional correspondent. Whenever Cronkite had a lackluster performance on some special—which wasn’t often—rumors circulated among CBS employees that newbie Mudd (the network’s future) would take over the plow.
Somewhat ironically, Mudd developed an easy friendship with Cronkite. The Murrow Boys were attracted to Europe and New York. Cronkite and Mudd, political junkies, liked the official Washington beat. In his fine memoir, The Place to Be, Mudd told how the younger men at CBS News used to scoff at how awful Cronkite’s pop culture knowledge was. Mudd laughed when Walter confessed that he didn’t know who balladeer Woody Guthrie was (when hosting an episode of The Twentieth Century called “The Dust Bowl”). “Although we all snorted about his gaffes behind his back,” Mudd explained, “what mattered to us was that Cronkite believed that almost everything that happened in Washington was important.”
What Cronkite and Mudd had—since they both came out of the print media world—was an always-rigid determination of what constituted real news. But they weren’t in charge. In 1957, CBS Entertainment division was rather inexplicably given the right to decide what was news. To Cronkite, this power was an abasement of sorts. Yet Cronkite played along. On October 17, CBS broadcast remotely from Madison Square Garden a party thrown by Hollywood producer Mike Todd for eighteen thousand guests. Cronkite was assigned to report on Todd’s promotional extravaganza—choreographed to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the release of his Academy Award–winning film Around the World in Eighty Days—for CBS’s Playhouse 90. The promo literature claimed that music from Boston Pops conductor Arthur Fielder and a procession of one hundred elephants (there were only ten elephants deceptively re-costumed and marched out again to the unsuspecting crowd) would launch the party-to-end-all-parties.
On air Cronkite gamely commented on the excess and inanity for the full ninety minutes, holding CBS’s lame coverage together. Todd’s wife was actress Elizabeth Taylor, and she played the grand dame hostess at the party; Cronkite suffered from star-struck distraction. He later felt he had “breached the shallow wall” between entertainment and news, and squandered “a bit of journalistic authority” for the sake of Mike Todd. It can’t be said that Cronkite lent the occasion any dignity—that would be asking too much of any mortal. True to the job description of reporter, though, he spouted off statistics and the names of products in what he later recalled as the world’s first and most well disguised ninety-minute infomercial. It was Entertainment Tonight meeting reality TV before the advent of either. “Even the smooth-as-silk Walter Cronkite,” wrote critic Fred Brooks, “lost his aplomb. Halfway through the show, he sensibly gave up trying to describe the hodgepodge.”
Cronkite might have wriggled free of such silly Playhouse 90 assignments, even without going so far as to refuse them—although that would also have been understandable. He didn’t refuse, though. As if in explanation, he was later quick to point out that just one week after Todd’s garish stunt, CBS News broadcast the first episode of The Twentieth Century, a program of modern history narrated by Cronkite that replaced You Are There. The Twentieth Century—which aired from October 1957 to May 1961 and was sponsored by the Prudential Insurance Company of America—concentrated on recent topics and presented them in a straight documentary format. The first show, airing on October 20 and titled “Man of the Century,” was a video biography of Sir Winston Churchill that had a heavy emphasis on his World War II leadership. After that success the episodes immediately took a turn toward the futuristic. The Twentieth Century, produced by Burton Benjamin, became a kind of primer on cold war technology. The next six shows after “Man of the Century” were “Guided Missile” (the development of Nazi Germany’s V-1s and V-2s at Peenemunde during the 1930s and 1940s), “The Story of the FBI” (law enforcement under J. Edgar Hoover), “The Flight of the X-2” (rocket technology), “Mach Busters” (the air force’s supersonic pilots), “Brainwashing,” and “Vertijets” (experimental aircraft). During its first three years on the air, The Twentieth Century was the sole regularly scheduled fifty-two-weeks-a-year news and public affairs documentary on network television (twenty-six weeks of new shows, twenty-six weeks of reruns of the previous season).
The narrow focus of The Twentieth Century’s early broadcasts wasn’t an accident. On the contrary, the show’s content was a direct response to the opening of the space age with the Soviet Union’s Sputnik 1 launch on October 4, 1957. With this successful satellite mission, the Soviets appeared to have an edge in missile technology over the United States. How did the Kremlin pull off such a feat? The Twentieth Century was determined to provide answers to post-Sputnik angst. Cronkite later called Sputnik 1 “a surprise attack against something believed invulnerable: American confidence. . . . We had lost the space race before we knew we were in it,” he reflected years later. “It hurt badly.” The Twentieth Century—which was sold in twenty foreign markets by 1960—was almost an informercial for the U.S. Air Force, the CIA, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
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There was about the Cronkite of The Twentieth Century a lot of Lowell Thomas–style reporting. The TV viewer never knew which exotic location Cronkite would visit next. In the 1959–1960 Emmy Award–winning season, for example, Cronkite and Benjamin journeyed down the Atlantic Shooting Range to Ascension Island, reporting at a handful of the Caribbean tracking stations en route, for the episode “Down Range.” For the first shoot of “Minuteman at Cape Canaveral,” Cronkite was on hand with breathless space reporting that predated his historic Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo broadcasts. Taken collectively, The Twentieth Century was like a novel, showcasing the newest weaponry the United States had contracted from Boeing and McDonnell Douglas to win the cold war. Although You Are There ended up being remembered as Cronkite’s signature show of the 1950s, The Twentieth Century really represented his best work. What The Twentieth Century did was remind people that Cronkite, no matter what the goofy Huntley-Brinkley boys were doing, was winning every award imaginable (including Emmys and Peabodys) and becoming, along with Murrow, one of the premier action journalists and eyewitnesses of modern times. Considered the finest half hour in television, the series foreshadowed the plethora of weekly compilation documentaries that would eventually populate both network and cable TV.
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