At times in Los Angeles, the rival CBS broadcasters didn’t even seem to be listening to each other. Dan Rather recalled the teaming as the epitome of everything to be avoided in broadcasting: “long pauses, awkward things, battle for the microphone.” Jack Gould, The New York Times television critic whose praise for Huntley and Brinkley continued to be generous, declared that “the pre-eminence of CBS in news coverage, which has been something of a tradition in broadcasting, no longer exists.”
Don Hewitt, who paired them in the first place, admitted in retrospect that it had been “a terrible idea, a complete disaster.” He recalled, “I mean, if there were two chemistries, two personalities, that didn’t blend, it was Murrow and Cronkite.”
For the network news departments, the political conventions arose every four years as a showcase, an Olympiad in gathering and delivering news. For CBS, the 1960 season was a turning point of the most disheartening kind. Not only did the network come in second that August, but it was a distant second, with NBC pulling 51 percent of viewers to CBS’s 36 percent. The internal numbers showed, moreover, that over the course of the Republican convention, CBS lost viewers to ABC—then a flyweight in the bruising sport of televised politics. Everyone in CBS’s news department was touched by the sense of failure afterward—or, nearly everyone. “Strangely,” wrote CBS correspondent David Schoenbrun, “Cronkite was not blamed at all. Paley felt he had done his usual good job, but the chemistry in the CBS coverage was not good, and that must be the fault of the news director.”
Stanton had wanted Cronkite to conduct breaking-news interviews with John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in the spring of 1960, giving CBS News momentum leading into the summer conventions. Kennedy was the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party when Cronkite caused a ruckus. On the evening of the Wisconsin primary—on April 5—CBS persuaded Kennedy to appear as a commentator from Milwaukee. Unbeknownst to Cronkite, though, JFK’s brother, Robert F. Kennedy, had cut a deal with some producer at CBS with the precondition that no discussion of Catholicism be allowed. Nobody informed Cronkite of this deal (if there really was one). “In the course of the interview [with JFK], I naturally asked his opinion of how the Catholic and non-Catholic vote was going,” Cronkite recalled. “He was obviously upset by the question.”
After the CBS broadcast a brouhaha ensued between the Kennedy campaign and CBS News. The sheer intensity of it was astonishing. Cronkite, for his part, grew indignant at JFK for insinuating he would ever play the quid pro quo game. There were rumors that Kennedy was going to denounce CBS publicly; instead, he called Stanton, full of fury at Cronkite’s intransigence. What a hardball player Kennedy could be, Stanton realized, when he felt double-crossed. Feeling betrayed by CBS, the presumptive Democratic nominee reminded Stanton that if elected to the White House, he would be selecting leaders of the FCC, the governmental regulatory agency to which radio stations and television networks were beholden. “Dr. Stanton courageously stood up to the threat,” Cronkite recalled of his brush-up with Kennedy, “as he did on so many other occasions in defending television’s free press rights.”
Not long after the Wisconsin primary, Don Hewitt bumped into JFK. “Walter Cronkite’s a Republican, isn’t he?” Kennedy asked. “No,” Hewitt said, “I don’t think so.” Kennedy, not buying it, said, “He’s a Republican. I know he’s a Republican.” Holding his ground, Hewitt again denied it. “He’s always with Eisenhower,” Kennedy insisted. “Always having his picture taken with Eisenhower and going somewhere with him.”
Given the helter-skelter nature of broadcast news, Cronkite couldn’t afford to hold a grudge against the Kennedys for too long (and vice versa). Following the summer conventions—with Kennedy and Nixon becoming the nominees—Cronkite hatched an idea that would involve both politicians. CBS News was promoting a thirteen-week series modeled on Pick the Winner titled Presidential Countdown, aimed at taking an in-depth look at the presidential and vice presidential candidates through interviews. Presidential Countdown’s first telecast would be on September 12. The program would run for nine weeks, in half-hour segments on Mondays at 10:30 p.m. EST, until October 31. While Cronkite had done this in 1952 and 1956 with Pick the Winner, the popularity of the show reformatted as Presidential Countdown grew with Kennedy and Nixon being in such a tight electoral race. “I came up with the idea that during these interviews I would ask questions deliberately aimed at bringing out their personalities—or that was the idea,” Cronkite explained in the 1990s. “Up to that time, we’d been talking entirely about issues. That seems so strange today because we’ve gotten so far away from talking about issues. The concentration today is far too much about personalities. So I guess I have to admit to some complicity in helping that unfortunate development. But I wanted to find out what makes these people tick.”
All Cronkite’s formidable energies in the fall of 1960 centered on his political interview show catching fire. It would help erase his middling failure at the conventions. CBS had persuaded Westinghouse to be a sponsor of Presidential Countdown, which was a financial boon. Cronkite befriended campaign managers and pollsters. His programming vision was based on not leaking questions to the candidates in advance. It was to be a mano a mano exercise. For dramatic effect, Cronkite imagined he would confidently enter from one side of the room, and Kennedy, Nixon, Johnson, or Lodge, depending on the day, from the other side. They would meet in the middle, shake hands, sit down, and the no-holds-barred interview would begin. The candidate would do the Q&A cold turkey. No preparation. No handlers serving as pre-interview interlopers. While in principle Cronkite’s Presidential Countdown program sounded good, all the top CBS brass (minus Stanton) scoffed at the idea that any candidate would allow himself to be so vulnerable; Cronkite rose to the challenge of proving management wrong.
To jump-start Presidential Countdown, Cronkite went to see JFK at his Senate office. Kennedy was still miffed that Cronkite kept being quoted in the press about the burden of Catholicism for a presidential candidate. Everyone knew that Kennedy was incredibly suave and comfortable around the press. As a young man, he had even longed to be a reporter for a spell after his service in the Navy in the Second World War. Furthermore, because of his youth and inexperience, he needed TV exposure more than a two-term vice president such as Nixon. But the Wisconsin primary incident had left him annoyed with Cronkite. “You must think I’m crazy,” Kennedy told Cronkite when presented with the Presidential Countdown scheme. “I’m not going to do that. You can forget it.”
“Well,” Cronkite snapped, “if I got Vice President Nixon, you’d almost have to do it then, wouldn’t you?”
Kennedy just stared fixedly at Cronkite with disdain. “You’re not going to get him,” he said dismissively. “That’s not my problem.”
Refusing to be flummoxed by Kennedy, Cronkite hunted down Nixon, who was at his campaign headquarters at Sixteenth and K streets. Nixon listened intently to Cronkite’s pitch for the new CBS program. He kept nodding his head up and down at all the ground rules. “Sure. I think that’s fine,” Nixon said with good-natured warmth. “That’s a great idea. I’d be glad to participate.”
Cronkite claimed he was “dumbfounded” that Nixon had agreed to go along with the Presidential Countdown guidelines while Kennedy had balked. Go figure. Off Cronkite went, flagging down a taxi to shuttle him back to Kennedy’s office at the Russell Senate Office Building. Suddenly he had a panicked thought: Who would go first? Whoever went last on the show had the strategic advantage of studying the interview format. Cronkite asked the taxi driver to swing back to K Street. Up the elevator he went, to be greeted again by a cheerful Nixon. To Cronkite’s astonishment the former vice president was nonchalant about the pecking order. “I don’t care,” Nixon said. “I’ll be glad to go first if it’s any problem.”
For the only time in his life Cronkite felt like kissing Nixon’s ring. He now headed back to Kennedy’s office. When told that Cronkite had gotten Nix
on to sign up for the series without hesitation, Kennedy blanched. His eyes barely concealed his utter contempt for Cronkite. Kennedy now felt hemmed in. “I suppose if you’ve got Nixon,” the senator snapped, “we’ll have to do something. You talk to my campaign manager.” That was a reluctant yes, but a yes nevertheless. Cronkite, his luck holding, headed over to CBS’s Washington, D.C., bureau to gloat about his impending triumph.
Thus was born Presidential Countdown. Nixon, as promised, taped the special first. As choreographed, Cronkite and Nixon each marched into a studio from different doors and shook hands on the center mark. Then, following a few formalities, they were off to the races. Cronkite’s first question was direct: “Mr. Vice President, you’re a skilled politician,” he began. “You certainly can’t have missed what people say about you. Many of them say, ‘I don’t know what it is about the man, I just don’t like him.’ What do you think it is they just don’t like about you?”
Instead of being rattled, Nixon wrapped himself around the question with self-evident glee, gazing fixedly at the CBS reporter’s face. “Well, I think it’s three things, Mr. Cronkite,” Nixon said. “I think the first is my physiognomy. I have a rather heavy beard and a dark complexion and between those things, I just can’t shave closely enough. I always look a little blue in the face, like I have a little growth of beard, and that’s unfortunate. The second thing is those campaigns for election to the U.S. Senate against Helen Douglas and to the Congress against Jerry Voorhis, which I would probably do a little differently. I wouldn’t take back any of the charges I made, because I think they were perfectly justified, but I would handle it a little differently with the experience I have now. And third is my leadership in the House Un-American Activities Committee. I’m not one bit ashamed of that, but that created a body of propaganda . . .” And on and on, Nixon answered with great skill. It was quite an acrobatic performance for the Californian known for robotic stiffness. Cronkite threw unexpected questions at Nixon about his Irish ancestry and Quaker background, and he in turn hit them over the fence. By Cronkite’s closing question about Nixon’s fitness for the White House, it was clear that, surprisingly, the Presidential Countdown format worked in the vice president’s favor.
A week later, Cronkite interviewed Kennedy at his Federal-style Georgetown home at 3307 N Street NW. The house had been a gift from Kennedy to his wife, Jacqueline, after the birth of their daughter, Caroline, in 1957. Cronkite recalled the handsome Massachusetts senator being, at best, a “reluctant guest” on Presidential Countdown. Unlike Nixon, Kennedy blew the entire CBS interview. It was clear that he hadn’t properly boned up for the program, confusing even his own résumé on film. Once the camera rolled, Kennedy was all hems and haws. Every other line was a clumsy “Well . . . uh . . . I think, well . . . I believe, I, well . . . uh . . .” Not only was he unfocused and dithering, but also, the entire hour, he seemed to be grasping at straws. If this had been his opening night on Broadway, he would have gotten the hook. “When it was over, we thanked him, and he was kind of mean about it,” Cronkite recalled. “He gave me a rather perfunctory good-bye.”
While Cronkite was watching Kennedy’s botched interview in the CBS truck outside the candidate’s house, the producer of Presidential Countdown, Warren Abrams, came barging in, clearly panicked.
“We’ve got to do the program over,” Abrams said.
“What’s the matter with it?” a perplexed Cronkite asked. “It’s all right in here. I’m looking at it.”
“Well, the senator says we have to do it over,” Abrams said.
“But we don’t do it over again,” an incredulous Cronkite sputtered, his muscles taut. “That’s part of the deal.”
“Kennedy insists,” Abrams shot back. “He won’t let it be shown this way.”
“Well,” Cronkite fumed, “what right does he have?”
Abrams considered. “I don’t know,” he said. “His complaint is that we had him sitting in a big soft sofa, and he didn’t look right.”
“Oh come on,” Cronkite scoffed. “We know better than that. It’s because he blew that last question. Where is he?”
“Up in the bedroom,” Abrams said.
“Well,” Cronkite said, hurrying out of the truck, “I’ve got to talk to him.”
Fueled by his righteous indignation, Cronkite stomped up the stairs of Kennedy’s home to encounter a startled JFK lying on one twin bed and Ted Sorensen—his best friend, speechwriter, and special assistant—on the other. Sorensen recalled that Cronkite had frightened them by walking stealthily up the stairs, and that he hadn’t knocked. Kennedy and Sorensen both saw “a fire in Walter’s eyes that they didn’t know he had.” For his part, Cronkite was surprised at how young and petulant Kennedy and Sorensen looked, like a couple of graduating prep school kids sleeping off a hangover on a rainy Sunday. “They had their shoes off and their ties undone,” Cronkite recalled. “There was this big Harvard banner up on the wall, and football pictures; it looked like a college dorm room. They were lying there, dangling their feet.”
Suddenly Kennedy, looking straight at Cronkite and, clearing his throat ominously, said, “Tell me when you’re ready.”
“Senator,” Cronkite replied. “I don’t think we ought to do this again.”
“I’ve already discussed it with your producer,” Kennedy retorted. “We’re going to do it.”
Overwhelmed by the unremitting tension, filled with the desire to assert himself as the superior power, Cronkite tried a sly new angle. “But you know,” he told Kennedy, “we’re going to have to carry a disclaimer. We’re going to say that Nixon’s was unrehearsed but that you requested to do yours over.”
“I can live with that,” Kennedy said.
“I don’t think you understand the impact of that disclaimer,” Cronkite continued. “I don’t think it’s going to make you look very good.”
“I’m not concerned about that,” Kennedy said, holding his ground.
“All right, Senator,” Cronkite said in disbelief. “We’ll do it over. But I’ve got to tell you, I think it’s the lousiest bit of sportsmanship I ever saw in my life.”
Suddenly Kennedy turned gray with embarrassment. Cronkite, in a thespian gesture, turned around and started heading down the stairs.
“Wait a minute,” Kennedy shouted, sitting up in bed with pronounced dislike on his face. “Let it run!”
Because Cronkite had bagged his big Kennedy and Nixon interviews that fall and a ratings bonanza for Presidential Countdown, his place as a CBS broadcaster was secure. That was important, because shake-ups were imminent at CBS, but not just because Jack Gould of The New York Times had publicly mocked the news division. NBC was now the established ratings leader: CBS had been running second to the Peacock Network in the evening news for more than two years. The convention ratings showed all too bluntly the same thing. And then, in the fall of 1960, NBC shed its former runner-up humility once and for all by launching an attack directed at the very heart of CBS News: investigative documentaries via the program NBC White Paper. Frank Stanton was genuinely shaken by NBC’s forward-driving hubris. Five years before, NBC would have had neither the talent nor the budget to produce hard-hitting documentaries.
What worried CBS executives the most—why they had tried making Cronkite and Murrow compete with Huntley and Brinkley—was that NBC had a knack for creating successful new TV formats. After all, NBC had introduced the desk-and-sofa talk show (Today, Tonight), the TV special, the prime-time movie showcase, the made-for-TV movie, the Sunday press conference (Meet the Press), and, later, free-form comedy shows (Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In and Saturday Night Live). You couldn’t blame Stanton for not wanting to be left in the dust by Huntley-Brinkley as Election Day approached.
CBS News had a special problem to face in the fall of 1960 as it tried to regain the top spot in broadcast news: the eminent Ed Murrow, the one employee who couldn’t be fired.
He was the news division’s greatest asset, a tall, chain-smoking, handsome icon who still demanded the respect accorded a statesman or a war hero, both of which he had been. At the same time, Murrow was barely accommodated by CBS management, treated as an antiquated pariah figure best kept at arm’s length. After the widespread protests from U.S. agribusiness over his program “Harvest of Shame,” a documentary that showcased the dire situation of migrant workers in the United States, Murrow’s dark brow seemed increasingly furrowed as he paced the halls of CBS. He was always fatigued and displayed teeth marred by nicotine stains. Paley often complained that he was sick and tired of controversial news shows such as those that Murrow regarded as worthwhile for CBS Reports. They literally made Paley sick to his stomach, already aggravated by ulcers, as he anticipated the viewer backlash that typically resulted. If Murrow were to be given any more leash, Paley fretted, CBS News would become a doomed sinkhole as corporate advertisers held a quiet boycott. “CBS is not the Ministry of Justice, not an avenging angel,” Paley carped. “We are a big business and we are being hurt.”
Paley’s position was not based entirely on expediency. Trained as a financier, he had learned much of what he knew about journalism from Paul White, whom he had hired as CBS’s first news director in 1935. At the time that White and Paley introduced serious journalism to radio, newspapers—the only other time-oriented news media—were mired in partisan viewpoints. Nearly every paper in the nation was understood by its readers to tilt in one political direction or another. (The major wire services were far more evenhanded, catering as they did to a variety of papers; United Press, Cronkite’s alma mater, was regarded as the least slanted of them all.) White convinced Paley that for a number of economic reasons, CBS radio was in a position to start fresh and assert itself as a wholly objective news medium.
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