Cronkite

by Douglas Brinkley

  Downhill skiing, ice hockey, bobsledding—Cronkite boned up on sports in preparation for his Squaw Valley broadcasts. Doing homework was one of his strong points. It fascinated him that for the first time—he was obsessive about firsts—speed skating, figure skating, and ice hockey would be held on artificial ice at an Olympics. And he studied up on the competitors from thirty-three nations, memorizing factoids from more than six hundred capsule biographies of athletes. Somehow Cronkite made the CBS viewer feel that he was a former gold medalist himself, enjoying the abundant snowfall while explaining the Nordic combined competition. He talked knowledgeably about downhill plunges, challenging pistes, frostbite, and snowcat climbs. Wearing blocklike boots, a fur-hooded parka, and mittens that made it awkward to hold his hot-chocolate mug, Cronkite looked like a rejected model auditioning for an L. L. Bean catalog. But nobody held it against him. Playing the man of all seasons, he metamorphosed into a hybrid athlete, reporter, spectator, cheerleader, humorist, worrywart, and good-time Charlie. While he served as anchorman for the Winter Games, his on-air color men included former Olympic stars Dick Button and Art Devlin and sports reporters Chris Schenkel and Bud Palmer.

  The CBS ad campaign promoting the multisport Winter Games was bold. A Madison Avenue firm had designed an edgy-looking display ad with a downhill skier floating in midair holding an Olympic torch with a giant CBS eye logo over his head. A quick look through the TV guide section of The Washington Post showed that Cronkite’s name appeared right after the 7:30 p.m. time slot announcement. This was significant. CBS sports in 1960 was under the umbrella of CBS News. Sig Mickelson was building Cronkite up as the star broadcaster of special events, news, and sports.

  Squaw Valley, the smallest locale in the world ever to host the Olympic Games, a one-stoplight hamlet high in the Sierra Nevadas, was an ideal stage set for Cronkite. The village environment worked in CBS’s favor because camera crews didn’t have to roam all over Placer County looking for remote shots; all the competitions were within a few miles of one another. Not only did Cronkite get wonderful reviews for his Olympic broadcasts, the first held in North America in twenty-eight years, but also the prime-time ratings were robust. Cronkite was accorded some historical credit for making the Winter Games a popular four-year TV ritual in America. And he was the quarterback of a newfangled technology developed in Squaw Valley that forever changed sports broadcasting: In the men’s slalom event, Olympic officials, unsure if an athlete had bypassed a gate, asked CBS to review its tape. That simple request gave CBS the pioneering idea of instant replays—a mainstay feature for nearly all subsequent televised sporting events.

  Rewarded for the Squaw Valley success, Cronkite was assigned to anchor the Summer Olympics of 1960 (held in Rome from August 25 to September 11). Because there was no satellite transmission, CBS couldn’t broadcast live. Instead, sitting in the broadcast center in New York, Cronkite served as the connective tissue for the Rome games, announcing that Cassius Clay had won the gold medal for light-heavyweight boxing and former polio patient Wilma Rudolph had won three gold medals in track and field.

  What Cronkite did brilliantly was parlay his Squaw Valley–Rome work, which received glowing reviews in a dozen newspapers, into a larger win, setting himself up as the anchorman to tune into for the 1960 political conventions. Asked that June what his concept of an anchorman was, Cronkite said, “We think of him as the on-air editor and coordinator of an event which by its nature is in several parts. For the Olympic Games in Rome this summer I will stay in New York as the anchorman, tying together the segments. For the Olympics, it’s almost a host job. For the conventions, it’s an on-air editing job, keeping a running story going.”

  As he continued anchoring the overall coverage of special events throughout 1960, it became clear that Murrow and Edwards were being replaced by Cronkite. He was the new Lowell Thomas, the master juggler of egos, the number-two guy from Safe Corner, U.S.A., who always seemed right in the number-one person’s broadcast chair even when dealing with astrophysics or pole vaulting. He had come to personify the CBS eye even more than Murrow, and was anointed by the TV viewers as America’s most likable and professional eyewitness to the twentieth century. More than anything else, he wanted to be seen as a Horatio Alger type, a scrappy wire service reporter who had made it by dint of hard work and long hours—and who had done it on his own terms. “Of the great men of television,” Theodore White, author of The Making of the President, 1960, observed, “only Walter Cronkite had not been moved forward by an assist from Murrow somewhere along the line.”

  Cronkite’s hunch was that the 1960 presidential election would be a historic cliffhanger. Everyone would be tuning in. Advertisers, he intuited, liked being part of history; they salivated at being in sync with the zeitgeist. Everyone had known in 1952 and 1956 that Eisenhower was going to win. But in early 1960, the next president was anyone’s guess. And no longer did the election season begin with the gavels of the summer conventions; the springtime primary and caucus systems were now important stepping-stones for presidential aspirants. Cronkite, as reportorial beneficiary, had a yearlong opening to break political news and get CBS News in the front-page mix.

  There was a steep downside to the intertwining of campaign politics with television. As primaries and caucuses swelled in number, so too did the cost of running for the White House (for example, TV ads had to be purchased in dozens of local markets). The age of television caused presidential candidates to fund-raise nonstop so their campaigns could become Rockefeller rich. In 1948, President Truman needed to pass around a fedora to afford to move his “Whistle Stop” train out of an Oklahoma depot. By 2012, in the age of Obama, candidates for president would need to raise an astonishing $1 billion for a campaign to survive. But even by 1960, it seemed that raising money had become what politicians did more than legislating.

  A few serious-minded journalists, following Murrow’s lead, also worried that having electric wagons loaded with cameras, microphones, and other paraphernalia on political convention floors actually discouraged participatory democracy. But their protests soon got muted. Whenever the red light went on, the politician being filmed spoke in phony-baloney, overly cautious sound bites. A whole new breed of TV image makers was introduced to the conventions—media consultants, makeup artists, and public relations experts. TV cameras had made political conventions more superficial affairs. It was Cronkite’s determination in 1960 that CBS—no matter what—would whip NBC in the ratings with historic special-events coverage of the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles (from July 11 to July 15) and the GOP one in Chicago (from July 25 to July 28).

  By 1960, presidential aspirants had learned how to use TV in their favor. (Vice President Richard Nixon had pioneered this eight years earlier, during his famous “Checkers” speech.) John F. Kennedy advanced the unsettling art of TV manipulation during his campaign for the presidency when he spoke to the Protestant Ministerial Council in Houston about his Catholicism; the event was televised only locally, in east Texas. Even so, the Kennedy campaign had cleverly procured a copy of the Houston tape and ran highlights as commercials all over America before the candidate arrived to speak. The Big Three networks themselves pushed the idea of presidential debates, which forever changed U.S. election politics. But before there could be televised debates in 1960, the two candidates first had to be chosen, still the job of the political conventions. And Cronkite needed to have his CBS team beat NBC in the convention ratings to prove his staying power as a special-events wizard.

  There wasn’t much inherent drama in Chicago in 1960 for Cronkite to capitalize on to earn another Teddy White callout. Vice President Nixon was guaranteed to win the GOP nomination, and it was fairly obvious that the blueblood Henry Cabot Lodge, the former Massachusetts senator and ambassador to the United Nations, would be Nixon’s VP choice. Cronkite at least scored a major interview with Lodge; that was something. But the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, by contrast, was
thick with subplots and subterfuge. JFK didn’t like Senator Lyndon Johnson, but many pundits believed the wheeler-dealer Texan had to be on the ticket as VP if Nixon was to be beaten. There was also the real possibility that Kennedy would choose Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri or Adlai Stevenson of Illinois over Johnson.

  Every major CBS News affiliate in the nation sent a reporter to the convention to get baptized in the new era of TV journalism. Dan Rather, a twenty-nine-year-old Texan, arrived at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena in July, excited just to be covering his first national political convention for the CBS station KHOU in Houston. It wasn’t until 1954 that Rather had even seen a TV. “I remember the scene,” he recalled. “We were on a shopping trip, ambling through the appliance section of a department store, and we were bowled over by a stunning sight. People were watching a ball game on a tiny screen.” Now, as news director for KHOU-TV, Rather found himself covering Lyndon Johnson, the Senate majority leader who was challenging John F. Kennedy for the Democratic nomination as delegates gathered in downtown Los Angeles.

  With the nomination still undecided, the convention promised the kind of drama that live television news thrived on. The Huntley-Brinkley Report had surpassed the ratings of CBS’s Evening News show (hosted by Douglas Edwards) in 1958, and remained in front, with momentum at its back. It was not so much that Huntley-Brinkley had finally found its audience as that it had found its coast-to-coast affiliates, setting NBC up for a ratings showdown with CBS at the 1960 conventions. A lot of vengeful energy was circulating around William Paley’s office on Madison Avenue; he hated being number two in anything. “This was supposed to be comeback time for CBS in convention coverage,” Rather recalled. “Cronkite, having got a good start in ’52, had been creamed in ’56. Huntley-Brinkley were white hot.”

  The Democratic National Convention began on Monday, July 11. Team Cronkite was assigned a balsam-lined, air-conditioned little studio at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena from which to broadcast. Sig Mickelson, the director of CBS News, immediately perceived that his crew was off its A-game, that it “didn’t have the inner drive and enthusiasm” needed for riveting convention coverage. Viewers perceived the blandness, too. The overnight ratings gave the first day’s honors to NBC. Cronkite groaned to colleagues like a soldier, anxious and peeved, feeling ambushed. A frustrated Mickelson attributed CBS’s lackluster performance to a bloated corps of floor reporters, most of whom didn’t know enough about the political world to recognize the backroom strategies suddenly at play. It was far too late to change the correspondents, yet something dramatic had to be done to ratchet the numbers upward toward the sterling White Sox–Dodgers ratings. Two days into the convention, and still lagging behind NBC, CBS was floundering. A radical change was implemented by Mickelson in record time.

  Don Hewitt, the moxie-driven director of CBS News coverage, was fixated on the winning combination of co-anchors next door in the NBC booth at the Los Angeles arena. On Wednesday morning, as he recalled, “I panicked and went to Sig Mickelson and told him we had to team Cronkite with someone.” Hewitt, unafraid to whip up a firestorm, was so desperate to return CBS to its familiar place on top of the ratings, he decided to resort to the network’s magic bullet from the Second World War as Cronkite’s co-anchor. “Hewitt, whose judgment was normally impeccable, approached me before the opening of the Wednesday session,” wrote Mickelson, “and suggested that we try Murrow in the ‘anchor studio’ to work with Cronkite.” For all their traditional antagonisms and obvious stylistic differences, Hewitt was convinced that Cronkite-Murrow was the winning ticket. It made sense.

  When Brinkley and Huntley burst onto the national scene at the 1956 conventions, they were largely unknown broadcasters. When Cronkite and Murrow were paired in 1960, they were two of the most famous newsmen in America. Murrow, who had risen like a rocket in the late 1930s, was descending just as steeply twenty years later. At times, he was openly critical of CBS as a company, casting the same cold eye on it as he had on other institutions through the years. “One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising, and news,” he scolded colleagues in his brilliant 1958 speech to the Radio and Television News Directors Association (RTNDA). “Each of the three is a rather bizarre and demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles. The top management of the networks, with a few notable exceptions, has been trained in advertising, research, sales or show business. By the nature of the corporate structure, they also make the final and crucial decisions having to do with news and public affairs.”

  Paley was no longer impressed with Murrow’s high-handed opinions. They were the antithesis of TV populism in the extreme, where ratings mattered most. Through the long, lively years of their friendship, Paley had always been Murrow’s boss—and he had never had to remind Murrow of that fact. But as the relationship unraveled, there was little left for Paley to do except make clear to Murrow who was in charge of CBS. “Murrow thought he was a larger historical personage than rich old Paley,” Hewitt explained. “Paley had all the wealth and corporate power. But Murrow had the thoroughbred fame. They were both alpha males. But Paley was the hare while Murrow the tortoise. Ed knew he would win the history game.” Cronkite, even though he wasn’t a Murrow booster, thought his colleague’s 1958 RTNDA speech was brave. “I applauded it wildly, like all of us did in the news department,” Cronkite recalled. “I admired his courage for saying it. I said, oh boy, there’s our leader. Glad it was done. I was obviously sorry it got him in trouble with Paley, but I didn’t consider that entirely unexpected.”

  Not long after the RTNDA speech, Murrow left CBS for a one-year sabbatical, a year of global travel that would allow him to try life without the network, and vice versa. Murrow ended his sabbatical early and immediately received job offers from academia and nonprofit organizations, but instead returned to CBS, going to work as a regular reporter—not a producer—at the documentary program CBS Reports. The most notable Murrow documentary became “Harvest of Shame,” a gut-wrenching, Peabody Award–winning look at the miasma of Mexican migrant farm labor in America.

  Hoping once again to excel at CBS, Murrow was on the scene as a reporter at the Democratic Convention in 1960 when he was suddenly reassigned to co-anchor the coverage with Cronkite. That’s where Rather encountered Murrow—his coming-of-age hero. Rather was an up-and-comer who had journalism in his blood. As such, he had been scheduled by the network to have a picture taken that morning with Murrow (his idol) and, rather indifferently, with Cronkite (a fellow Houstonian). “Walter was big,” Rather said. “But Murrow was like a god.”

  If Rather was surprised to hear that Murrow was to start co-anchoring with Cronkite, he wasn’t the only one. At the appointed morning hour for the photo session, well before the Democratic Convention went into session, Murrow and the network’s publicists appeared in a smoky anteroom outside the CBS anchor booth. “Murrow came and sat,” Rather said. “We waited a very long time and then Walter didn’t come.” The heavy atmosphere was flammable, and Rather half expected the grim-faced Murrow to throw a tantrum, the anger was so evident on his face. It was painful for Rather to see his hero being denigrated. Eventually, the photo session was canceled, and Murrow huffed out. “What had turned out,” Rather said, “is that Walter had locked himself in the anchor booth. Walter didn’t want to anchor with Murrow. He just locked himself in the booth and said, ‘To hell with it.’ ”

  Decades later, historian Don Carleton of the University of Texas at Austin interviewed Cronkite about his feud with Murrow at the Los Angeles convention, and Cronkite admitted that the two didn’t really click. But he blamed much of the friction on CBS management’s foolhardiness. “Who’s supposed to do what?” Cronkite explained. “What’s Murrow supposed to do? I don’t think they said anything about him doing analysis. They just said that he was supposed to
help me. They just wanted Murrow on camera to cash in on his popularity. . . . I think Murrow and I might have had chemistry that worked under different circumstances, but the management at the convention in 1960 was not one to create great chemistry.”

  For all the sleek corporate culture of CBS, for all the fast-cash TV boom profits, the network was essentially a herd, and in that respect, Murrow was a wounded animal. The younger bison were leaving him out to pasture. Paley and the other CBS executives in charge had hobbled Murrow, taking away his executive status and keeping him out of planning meetings. The Murrow Boys—including Collingwood, Schoenbrun, Sevareid, and Pierpoint—were still loyal to him, as far as their powers at CBS would allow. Youngsters such as Rather looked up to him with unadulterated reverence. But for Cronkite, never sycophantic toward Murrow, the situation was quite different. He didn’t feel compelled to suddenly start kowtowing at the 1960 convention.

  When Cronkite was abruptly informed that he would, indeed, not be an anchor but a co-anchor with Murrow in Los Angeles, he gasped. Cronkite believed that Murrow blossomed when he composed his on-air material carefully in advance. That was how Murrow had exposed McCarthy as being nothing more than a disingenuous paper tiger. Burrowing into mounds of documents, devouring information, Murrow liked to memorize his high-powered words or read them off a TelePrompTer. Cronkite was just the opposite. He crammed his mind with vetted facts about the cold war, inflation, government spending, the space race, sports, and integration, then let his preternatural ability to ad-lib take over the show. Cronkite and Murrow did not mesh professionally, possibly because they lacked a basic attribute of nearly any kind of professional partnership, especially one involving communication: neither appeared to care what the other was saying.