Cronkite discovered clever ways to stay ahead of NBC News on space and missile technology. A space nut, he started collecting missile information in a CIA-like fashion from U.S. government sources. It was easier than it sounded. He would neatly type out a request to the Martin Company or McDonnell Aircraft or the Department of Defense, usually to someone in public relations, and a week later reams of information would arrive. He also frequently went to Cape Canaveral on reconnaissance missions. Space exploration combined Cronkite’s love of military aviation with cold war politics. It also gave him a rare chance to distinguish himself at CBS. Frequenting the Gotham Book Mart on Forty-seventh Street, he purchased the visionary science fiction novels of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. In early 1958 he journeyed to Los Angeles to cover the unveiling of the X-15, an aircraft that was part plane and part missile. Having read an astounding amount of technical jargon about ICBMs, he was knowledgeable about the stunning capabilities of America’s cold war defense system. “From the beginning [Wernher] von Braun’s team dreamed of sending men into space,” Cronkite recalled, “I began to dream with them.”
The key to The Twentieth Century was producer Bud Benjamin, who became Cronkite’s Svengali. An Ohio native with movie star looks and a sense of adventure, Benjamin earned a BA at the University of Michigan in 1939. Like an arrow, he was ready to make his mark on journalism. Calm, always organized and methodical, never known to curse or lose his temper, Benjamin started in journalism at United Press’s Cleveland bureau. A lot of UP reporters knew how to gather solid facts for a story, but Benjamin was the quickest story closer Cronkite had ever encountered. He joined the U.S. Coast Guard during World War II, rising to the rank of lieutenant. After the war, he joined TV news because it paid more than radio. To Benjamin, classic television documentaries like The Plow That Broke the Plains (1939) and A Diary for Timothy (1945) were high-art endeavors as valuable as the realist photography of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. Cronkite, who later wrote a foreword to Benjamin’s self-effacing memoir, Fair Play, considered his The Twentieth Century producer the “finest” documentarian he was “ever privileged to work” with.
Besides being a real gentleman, Benjamin also had a good sense of TV news as business. If he hadn’t joined CBS News, one could have easily imagined him as CEO of a medium-sized company in Ann Arbor or president of a small New England college. He knew how to spend money, but he also knew how to raise it. The Twentieth Century wasn’t a moneymaker for CBS per se, but it was brilliant educational television of an unprecedented kind. Benjamin found ways—international rights, classroom distribution, movie house showings—to make the show profitable. It was Benjamin who helped Cronkite realize that his armchair appreciation of aerospace technology could become a huge asset.
What made The Twentieth Century such important television was the commingling of rare film footage and amazing scripting. Cronkite and Benjamin hired a knot of brilliant writers, including Hanson Baldwin (military editor of The New York Times), Emmet John Hughes (chief of foreign correspondents and editor for Time), Merriman Smith (former United Nations correspondent), and John Toland (historian) among them. Benjamin’s assistants—particularly Bob Asman and Isaac Kleinerman—were like safecrackers when it came to unearthing rare, previously unseen historical footage of everyone from Buffalo Bill to Hitler to Gandhi.
Cronkite wasn’t the only newsman hoping to dominate the TV space franchise. Two days after Sputnik 1 was launched, Douglas Edwards hosted a half-hour special (produced by Don Hewitt): Sputnik One: The Soviet Space Satellite. The CBS documentary included commentary from Howard K. Smith in Washington, D.C., Daniel Schorr in Moscow, Alexander Kendrick in London, and Richard C. Hottelet in New York City’s Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. But no Cronkite. Just two months later, the U.S. Air Force scheduled the launching of the Vanguard satellite from Cape Canaveral, and CBS gave the plum assignment of covering it to Harry Reasoner. Cronkite was miffed. “In those days . . . I was temporarily one of the chief CBS authorities on the space program,” Reasoner wrote in Before the Colors Fade. “We worked out an elaborate plan to ensure that, while Russia may have beaten the United States, no one was going to beat CBS News.”
Usually distinguished-looking, with a calm voice, Reasoner blared out, “There she goes!” at the Vanguard liftoff on December 6, 1957. Cronkite took notice of his informal style. Then the rocket blew up into tens of thousands of pieces of fiery debris. If the Vanguard hadn’t exploded on takeoff, it’s reasonable to surmise that Reasoner would have become CBS News’ go-to space reporter; it wouldn’t have been Cronkite’s beat. In the late 1950s the U.S. government was very secretive about launches, but Reasoner—like Cronkite—had been embraced by the government as a trustworthy correspondent. From a ratings point of view, along with technical production, CBS was beating ABC and NBC. But the Vanguard flop caused CBS to time-delay its coverage of Explorer 1 (the first successful U.S. satellite) a few months later. “It’s difficult to remember now how impossibly dangerous space flight seemed,” Cronkite recalled to Newsweek in a 1998 cover story. “The stakes couldn’t have been higher, nor the risks greater; we were in a Cold War space race, we thought then, for the heavens.”
One of the most beneficial things about Sputnik 1, from Cronkite’s perspective, was that it motivated Democrats like Senators John F. Kennedy and Stuart Symington to warn against a missile gap with the Soviets. By the late 1950s, Cronkite had become an anti-Soviet cheerleader, helping lead a national charge to win the space race. In January 1958 he hosted a ninety-minute edition of The Twentieth Century devoted to explaining exactly the situation vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, “Where We Stand,” comparing the military might of the United States with that of its main cold war opponent. The Soviets had argued convincingly that Sputnik was a scientific program, not a military one. Cronkite rejected that stand and warned Americans not to be naïve.
Cronkite’s outstanding work on “Where We Stand” was a far cry from his Playhouse 90 gig describing the melee of Mike Todd’s Madison Square Garden party four months prior. This stark contrast became known as High Cronkite and Low Cronkite. He not only liked the role of space reporter, he also needed it. Whether it was almost crashing in a Curtiss-Wright plane with his father in the 1920s, breaking the “Lochinvar of the Air” story in the 1930s, or embedding with the Eighth Air Force in the 1940s, aviation was Cronkite’s bailiwick. His relationship with military aviation was a comfortable beat, the one that came most naturally to him. As the once-forlorn Cape Canaveral was being developed as a rocket launch center, “Walter saw The Twentieth Century as a sly way to build the best space Rolodex in the business,” Andy Rooney recalled. “He simply out glad-handed Harry Reasoner at the Cape to keep the space beat away from him.”
The space program and the U.S.-Soviet technological competition related to it were appealing for another reason, one more sinister and more serious. Cronkite needed to find a safe perch in the cold war. CBS was putting pressure, directly and indirectly, on its staff to take a stand against communism. In 1950, employees were forced to sign a loyalty oath disclosing any affiliation with communist or fascist organizations. CBS employees were investigated officially and unofficially in the early 1950s. That was true for people in a variety of industries, but broadcasting was under special scrutiny, for the simple reason that it wielded the astonishing power to reach millions of people and perhaps influence them. In those pre-1957 NASA days, the U.S. Air Force was running the space program, with all experiments kept top secret. Cronkite’s security clearance, even with the air force, wouldn’t allow him near a rocket launch. But by promoting the new U.S. military hardware on The Twentieth Century, Cronkite became a salesman for the Department of Defense, showing the American people what the Pentagon was doing for them in a futuristic infomercial-type way.
In various theaters—China, Korea, Hungary, the United Nations, and even the Olympic Games—the United States had transferred the fer
ocious passions of the Second World War to another us-versus-them mentality. For a long time, Cronkite was on the sidelines, missing out on the cold war intrigue as he chugged along with You Are There and The Morning Show. Avoiding controversial news topics might have been a brilliant career decision, but it wasn’t brave. Too settled a family man to be a foreign war correspondent, not ideological enough to stir paranoia on the home front, Cronkite had used You Are There as his coy way of challenging McCarthyism. But that wasn’t the same as owning an important news beat or making history. He now realized that his passion for rocket technology could easily be translated into episodes of The Twentieth Century. The early launches might have been at the outer edge of the cold war, but for Cronkite the space job was his opening to please everybody except the hard-left (sympathetic to communists) and hard-right (anti–federal government) factions.
Just as Cronkite did when he covered the U.S. air war in Europe against Germany, he established a rapport with officers and officials in the various agencies overseeing space and defense projects in the late 1950s. Emerging as CBS’s space race correspondent, he was, once again, practically a member of the team in terms of his tacit enthusiasm for the work of his new friends. Cronkite did not often evince his own opinions; that was not his style. Yet he could become part of the mainstream when he believed in the goal and the means of achieving it, providing coverage that was predictably supportive. Cronkite believed that the growth of technology was crucial to defense in the cold war, and he was all for it. The heavy truth about him in the late 1950s was that he had signed up to promote the U.S. Air Force, seeing space as a beat he could own.
NASA was founded on July 29, 1958, courtesy of the National Aeronautics and Space Act. Cronkite, from day one, was a huge cheerleader for NASA, always promoting America’s technological prowess. For CBS, he visited NASA research laboratories such as Langley Aeronautical, Ames Aeronautical, and Lewis Flight Propulsion. From the early Project Mercury launches through the groundbreaking Gemini missions to the subsequent Apollo moon walk of Neil Armstrong and the space shuttle program, Cronkite was an avid believer in what he called the “conquest of space.”
He got to enter the space race fun for CBS News in earnest on August 17, 1958, when the U.S. Army attempted to launch a scientific satellite from central Florida. However, the launch rocket exploded after being airborne for only seventy-seven seconds. CBS ran two reports of the rocket failure that afternoon—Cronkite broadcast the second one.
Throughout his career, Cronkite was far more outspoken off camera than he was on television. In the many lecture circuit speeches he delivered in the Midwest, he could be surprisingly opinionated about his desire to beat the Soviet Union in the cold war. For example, in the winter of 1959 he told an audience that in the critical new sciences associated with missile defense, the USSR was demonstrably superior. This Cronkite claim has been proved untrue. Meaning to deliver a wake-up call to the American public, Cronkite described the United States as a “second-rate nation” in its intercontinental missile (and space) capabilities. He intended the commentary as a form of prodding for increased U.S. efforts in those fields and to help pry loose more congressional appropriations for NASA research. It wasn’t a particularly controversial stance in 1959. But the on-camera Cronkite wouldn’t have been quite so blunt. There was too much risk involved. Pravda praised Cronkite as the man who called the United States a “second-rate nation.” Publicity like that, Cronkite understood, he could do without.
One of Cronkite’s heroes at CBS throughout the late 1950s remained the legendary radio broadcaster Lowell Thomas. Cronkite essentially studied under Thomas in the 1950s, learning how to be a reassuring voice instead of a sharp knife jab of hard truths. When he heard Thomas salute the nation every weekday with “Good evening, everybody,” he knew that was the guy he wanted to be. There was a folksy, reassuring, sometimes bland aspect to Thomas’s delivery of the news. But the listener trusted him. Maybe Thomas wasn’t a crusader like Edward R. Murrow—he called himself a “news communicator.” And that’s what Cronkite strove to be.
Cronkite had first gotten hooked on Thomas while at San Jacinto High School in the 1930s. He modeled his public persona after his boyhood idol. It was an easy fit. What Cronkite wanted to emulate was sounding as confident, knowledgeable, and breezy as Thomas, an obviously serious man of good humor. Distinguished in an ordinary way, Thomas exuded the romantic aura of Hemingway minus the bloodlust. With a mop of curly brown hair, penetrating blue eyes, and a thin mustache, he was a dashing figure. Thomas didn’t just think he was larger than life; he was. Somehow he persuaded leading figures from T. E. Lawrence to Mahatma Gandhi to Field Marshal Montgomery to grant him exclusive interviews. “His almost forty-six years of reporting the news nightly set a record for longevity,” Cronkite later boasted about his evergreen idol. “His total audience was once estimated at 125 million people.”
All this set Cronkite’s wheels in motion. While everybody else at CBS News was trying to be the new Murrow, he would aim to be the new Thomas. Everything Cronkite did in the 1950s was aimed at someday grabbing the intrepid Thomas’s crown. Cronkite used to read whatever Thomas wrote—and there were more than fifty books. His favorites were With Lawrence of Arabia (1924) and Hungry Waters (1937). On summer weekends the Cronkite family would vacation at Thomas’s home in Pawling, New York, sitting on the porch to discuss world events as the children went swimming. “Everybody he met, as far as I know, he made a friend of,” Cronkite said. “And he had a million of them around the world. . . . All walks of life. . . . If you spoke to Lowell Thomas, he spoke back, grabbed your hand and you were one of his followers from that point on.”
By the late 1950s, Cronkite’s career trajectory at CBS had hit a plateau. Pulling down a good salary, he had stayed out of trouble during the Red Scare, never getting attacked for working with blacklisted writers on You Are There and pioneering with The Twentieth Century. His radio show “Answer, Please!”—which involved responding to mail queries on the air—was extremely popular. The specific questions were easy to answer. But sometimes CBS radio listeners wanted Cronkite to display psychic powers.
“Will we ever have war again?” one letter read.
“Will we ever get ahead of Russia?” read another.
Cronkite eased out by answering, “If I knew, I’d be working for the Pentagon instead of CBS Radio.”
Never before had America produced such a fast flood of media personalities as in the golden age of television. A lot of on-air reporters like Cronkite were now being asked for autographs, as if they knew the answers to war and peace. An appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation or The Twentieth Century guaranteed an immediate rise in popularity, with average citizens simply wanting to shake the hand of a personality beamed into that little five-by-eight Philco or RCA box in their living rooms. When he entered a Manhatttan restaurant, it was like Moses parting the Red Sea. Before long, Cronkite befriended the intellectual pundits Benjamin booked on The Twentieth Century—Robert Shaplen and Sidney Hertzberg among them. Ad-libbing with such experts, Cronkite believed, was the essence of smart television. But for all the fame Cronkite accrued from being a CBS News broadcaster, the instant recognition by the man on the street, the job seemed superficial, at times even farcical. As Cronkite told a columnist friend in Iowa, “It’s difficult for a celebrity to be a working newsman.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Torch Is Passed
BEYOND UBIQUITOUS—VOICE OF THE OLYMPICS—HIGH Q FACTOR—TOO MANY IMAGE MAKERS—THE EDUCATION OF DAN RATHER—WHY NOT GO CRONKITE?—LOCKING OUT MURROW—THE STEADY DR. FRANK STANTON—KENNEDY COVETS POWER—THE CHIPPER NIXON—PRESIDENTIAL COUNTDOWN—STANDING UP TO KENNEDY—WHO WON THE DEBATES?—KENNEDY WINS THE CLIFFHANGER—CRONKITE HOLDS HIS OWN
The CBS “eye device” logo was first unveiled on television in the early 1950s. Designed by graphic artist William Golden after he studied Pennsylvania Dutch hexes and Shaker drawings
, the eye device quickly became an iconic part of the television landscape, serving as backdrop for entertainers such as Jack Benny, Lucille Ball, and Rod Serling. The “eyemark”—as Walter Cronkite called the black-and-white logo—was ubiquitous by 1960, known the world over, even serving as cufflinks for the old Unipresser’s monogrammed WCL dress shirts. Logos hadn’t mattered on radio, but for TV logos were visual brands that could make or break a network. “Walter was the ultimate company man,” Andy Rooney recalled. “I regularly teased him that he should get the CBS Eye tattooed on his ass . . . he didn’t find it funny.”
If a television viewer turned the dial to CBS in 1960, there was a good chance that in addition to the eye device logo, Cronkite would be on the Tube. For The Twentieth Century series, Cronkite spent days in the Atlantic on aircraft carriers, destroyers, and submarines and then followed President Eisenhower around Ankara, Kabul, Tehran, and Delhi. CBS chartered a plane so Cronkite, producer Bud Benjamin, and seventeen technicians could bring what The New York Times called “unprecedented” TV coverage of a presidential foreign trip. Anytime there was breaking news, the public, it seemed, wanted to know what Cronkite thought. Whenever a foreign assignment came up, Cronkite, perhaps without much conscious involvement, reflexively said “Send me.” “Between anchoring and narrating various TV series and doing a Sunday news broadcast,” The Washington Post said about Cronkite’s commitments, “he trots the globe in pursuit of current history.”
Throughout the Eisenhower era, most newspapers offered only spotty coverage of the Winter Games; this changed in 1959, when CBS News purchased exclusive rights from the Olympic Committee for $50,000 to cover the eleven-day spectacle. When the marvelous CBS sports commentator Jim McKay suffered a nervous breakdown in early January 1960, Cronkite replaced him at the Olympic Winter Games, which were held in Squaw Valley, located along the California-Nevada border. Cronkite, filling in for McKay, quickly became the TV master of the global sports spectacular.
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