Cronkite

by Douglas Brinkley

Walter Cronkite interviewing Gerald and Betty Ford in the mid-1970s. Gerald Ford took office August 9, 1974, upon the resignation of Richard Nixon, but failed to win reelection in 1976. Betty Ford sometimes expressed opinions that contradicted those of her husband, making their joint interviews more unpredictable than those of most presidential couples. (Whitehurst Photos)

  Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat with Cronkite at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, Israel, in November 1977. As a result of what was called “Cronkite diplomacy,” Sadat flew to Israel for the historic and ultimately significant meeting. (Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin)

  Cronkite speaks with Jimmy Carter. As president, Carter presented Cronkite with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on January 16, 1981, saying, “And when our nation has been in trouble or made mistakes and there was a danger that our public might react adversely or even panic on occasion, the calm and reassuring demeanor and voice and the inner character of Walter Cronkite has been reassuring to us all.” (Whitehurst Photos)

  Walter Cronkite stands aboard his beloved Wyntje shortly before the announcement of his retirement as anchor of the CBS Evening News. The Wyntje, a sixty-four-foot sailboat, was built for Cronkite and took him through American waters and those beyond. (Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin)

  Walter Cronkite listening to Cuban president Fidel Castro on February 14, 1980, during a highly coveted interview. On the same day, Cronkite announced his plans for retirement from the anchor desk at the CBS Evening News. (Whitehurst Photos)

  Cronkite in his office on March 6, 1981, his last day as anchorman of the CBS Evening News. (CBS Photo Archive)

  The famous All Laughing photograph by Diana Walker. President Ronald Reagan, Walter Cronkite, Jim Brady, David Gergen, Ed Meese, Vice President George Bush, James Baker, and Bud Benjamin laughing at a 1981 White House party. (Diana Walker)

  Cronkite on the set of Walter Cronkite’s Universe, a summer series that premiered in 1980. Devoted to scientific topics, the prime-time show seemed to be a natural progression for Cronkite after he left the anchor chair. The program failed to find an audience, though, a situation Cronkite blamed on the network’s lack of promotional support and its failure to keep the show in a single time slot. (Whitehurst Photos)

  Walter and Betsy toast each other near Alaska’s Mount McKinley during a break from filming Universe (undated). The couple traveled together extensively over the course of their sixty-five-year marriage. Betsy was known for her sense of irony, which helped them both maintain a sense of perspective as Walter’s fame made them national celebrities. Betsy Cronkite died in 2005 after fighting cancer. (Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin)

  Cronkite holding three kittens. A lifelong animal lover, he was incapable of hunting, or even killing insects that came into his house. (Whitehurst Photos)

  CBS newsman Andy Rooney listening to Cronkite at Arizona State University in Phoenix on November 6, 2003. The two had been friends for sixty years, colleagues at CBS, and tennis partners for many of them. Rooney was set to receive the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism that day. (AP)

  Broadcast journalists Brian Williams, Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite, and Tom Brokaw in New York City on March 16, 2004. (Getty)

  Walter Cronkite in 2004. (Getty)

  A collage of photographs spanning Cronkite’s career in journalism. (Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin)

  PART IV

  Anchorman

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Anchorman of Camelot

  FREQUENT FLYING—KENNEDY MAGIC—THE AMERICA’S CUP GOES NEWPORT—CAPTAIN CRONKITE—WHO SPEAKS FOR BIRMINGHAM?—JOCKEY FOR ANCHOR—BOTCHING THE CLOSE—WHIPPING NBC—THE EDWARDS ERA ENDS—ENTER RICHARD SALANT—CRONKITE TAKES THE HELM—DON HEWITT TAKES CHARGE—APRIL 16, 1962—TELSTAR REVOLUTION—BILL SMALL ARRIVES IN D.C.—VOICE OF THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS—MARTIN LUTHER KING’S DREAM—THE THIRTY-MINUTE EXPERIMENT—INTERVIEWING JFK IN HYANNIS PORT—BIGFOOTING ROBERT PIERPOINT—THAT’S THE WAY IT IS

  To Cronkite, daring was the vital element of being. Once, when he left New York for Cape Canaveral to film a space-themed episode of The Twentieth Century, he ended up instead on remote Ascension Island, located off the coast of Africa in the equatorial waters of the South Atlantic Ocean. When Cronkite got situated on the island, he called home and spoke to Betsy.

  “Say,” he said, “don’t you realize where I am?”

  “No,” she said. “Where are you?”

  “I’m in Ascension,” he answered, pleased to show off his intrepid daring.

  “Wonderful,” the space-minded Betsy replied. “How many times have you been around?”

  Cronkite wanted to be the go-to guy who orbited all things JFK. Working with CBS producer Les Midgley on Eyewitness, he understood that any Kennedy-tinged story generated excellent ratings for the network.* In the early 1960s, every verbal aside, press conference, camera zoom shot, and line of give-and-take dialogue that President Kennedy uttered was gobbled up by millions of curious TV viewers. Cronkite hoped his Friday show, which aired from 10:30 to 11:30 p.m. EST, could showcase the Kennedy family. Not only was Robert F. Kennedy the U.S. attorney general, but Edward M. Kennedy had been chosen to fill his brother’s vacated seat in the U.S. Senate. “Walter wanted to ride on the Kennedys’ coattails,” Andy Rooney recalled. “Every time Kennedy was on Eyewitness, the ratings went through the roof. If he did something on Alabama tenant farmers or Charles DeGaulle, nobody seemed to care.”

  David Halberstam, in The Powers That Be, rightly called Kennedy the “first television president.” Kennedy’s charismatic breakthrough in the 1960 presidential debates had made him an electronic superstar, one Cronkite planned to capitalize on. All White House galas, foreign trips, holiday parties, and yacht outings were shot by CBS News cameramen. Ever since NBC News broadcast the JFK inaugural parade in color, CBS News had grown determined to dominate the ongoing Kennedy story. Cronkite knew that if he wanted to eventually replace Douglas Edwards, whose position was tenuous as long as CBS News was second to NBC News, as anchorman, he would have to win the Kennedy scoop sweepstakes.

  During the Kennedy years, not all U.S. viewers lived in a city with three network television stations. If you lived in Aroostook County in Maine or Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana (or thousands of rural areas like them), you didn’t choose CBS over NBC, for there was no choice available. You took what your rabbit-eared antenna could pull in, which, in the case of those two areas, was CBS. Advertisers wanted to sell hair products and first cars to the all important eighteen- to twenty-five-year-old demographic. But as TV reception improved, consumers could choose a network brand in the same way they chose a car model or soda. Young people, polls showed, liked Kennedy far better than stiff GOP types like Richard Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller. The CBS snag was that Cronkite, a network broadcaster since 1950, wasn’t considered “Kennedy cool” in 1962; he was still Eisenhower plaid, seemingly believing that what was good for General Motors was good for America.

  As Cronkite became a serious contender for the anchorman job of the proposed CBS Evening News in 1962—in competition with four or five others to replace Douglas Edwards—he retired from his longtime hobby, auto racing. CBS management didn’t like having Cronkite, who had gotten in a car wreck in Tennessee, unable to even carry a life insurance policy. You couldn’t build a TV franchise around a corpse. Paley might have tolerated Cronkite’s speed racing hobby if it brought him White House access, but the blue-blooded Kennedys preferred yachting around Martha’s Vineyard and Rhode Island Sound to the smell of diesel at the Daytona 500. With his physician telling him speed racing was bad for his heart, and possessing far too much energy for golf, the universally accepted pastime for upper-class white men, Cronkite needed to excel
at a different sport. Maybe, he thought, his passion for sailing—first developed in Carmel, New York—could grow into the more challenging sport of yachting from Maine to Cape Cod to Newport on the Atlantic Ocean à la President Kennedy. His friends the William F. Buckleys and James Micheners and Bill Harbachs had already taken to mother ocean . . . why not the Cronkites?

  Cronkite and Midgley understood that the Kennedys had turned Cape Cod into a lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous playground. Their challenge was finding a way for Eyewitness to capitalize on what became known as Camelot.

  Born in Salt Lake City, Midgley was first hired by CBS News in the mid-1950s. A gangly Ichabod Crane–like character, Midgley, a Mormon, was a close friend of tycoon Howard Hughes—no one understood why. He championed the idea of the Kennedys becoming part of a proto-reality show. His thinking went as follows: President Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier had been married in ultra-exclusive Newport, Rhode Island, and held their reception at Newport’s Hammersmith Farm. In the fall of 1962, the America’s Cup race was to be held off Newport. The challenger was Gretel, a twelve-meter sloop owned by Sir Frank Packer, an Australian media mogul. Its skipper was Jock Sturrock. The New York Yacht Club would defend the Cup with the Weatherly, captained by Bus Mosbacher. The America’s Cup defenders in those days were all wooden twelve-meter sloops, about sixty feet long, built at the Minneford Boat Yard in City Island, New York.

  Midgley decided that CBS, riding the wave of Cronkite’s Squaw Valley and Rome Olympics coverage in 1960, could cover the America’s Cup for Eyewitness by spicing it up with Kennedy magic. Together Cronkite and Midgley developed a concept for the Friday show that combined the America’s Cup drama with the public’s fascination with the Kennedy family, one that would look at picturesque Newport and its famous “400” families—including the Vanderbilts and the Astors—and their mansions. Because Midgley knew that Lew Wood—a former U.S. marine from Indiana who started broadcasting for WDZ radio (the third-oldest station in America) in Decatur, Illinois, after graduating from Purdue University—loved sailing, he got the assignment to work with Cronkite for the Eyewitness episode to air in September.

  Wood, with ace cameraman Walter Dombrow in tow, traveled to Newport numerous times to do advance work on the race. If Eyewitness could turn the America’s Cup into a sporting event as popular as the Kentucky Derby or Indianapolis 500 every year, CBS News would have an advertising cash cow on its hands. Dombrow and Wood chartered a Bertram Moppie powerboat and filmed B-roll shots of sleek yachts and sunsets. Back in 1962, there was no bridge between Jonestown and Newport, so it was necessary to take the ferry across. Having given up auto racing, Cronkite began to seriously eye sailing as a new recreational activity for him to master. “Once Cronkite came to Newport with his director Vinny Walters, he fell madly in love with the whole yachting life,” Wood recalled. “I met them at the Newport side of the ferry, got them settled in our rooming house, and provided press passes for them for the next day to get on the Press Boat to watch the race.”

  Wood later boasted that he “turned Cronkite onto the yachting world”; that perception was true enough. Born with a profound appreciation of the sea, Cronkite told Wood that once he was financially sound, with $100,000 in his savings account, he was going to gallivant around Cape Cod like a Kennedy. Eventually, he would own one of the most handsome ketches on the Atlantic seaboard. For the time being, however, all he could afford was a twenty-two-foot Electra sloop to sail on Long Island Sound he named Chipper. He had purchased it at a New York Boat Show. Cronkite claimed that if he became CBS News anchorman—replacing Edwards—the pay raise would allow him to upgrade his modest vessel to a twenty-eight-foot Triton, then a mauve double-ender. And who knew? Maybe one day he could commission his own magnificent yacht, built to his personal specifications, and name it Wyntje (WIN-tee), in honor of a lovely Dutch ancestor and “all the women who’ve made Cronkite men happy in the New World—in whatever capacity.”

  CBS News producer-director Don Hewitt was hungry to have a post-Edwards anchorman with grit, one bloodthirsty for combat against the dreaded NBC News; the analogy he liked emanated from the rope-line tug-of-war where you put your biggest and baddest dude at the far end to anchor the defense. The soft-spoken Edwards didn’t fit the billing. Having started out in radio broadcasting at age fifteen in Alabama, he rose to work side by side with Murrow in London from 1943 to 1945 and became the host of Douglas Edwards with the News. But in early 1962, his CBS superiors were ready with the hook. The big question at CBS News was not just who would replace Edwards at the city desk, but also Murrow on the freedom march.

  A queue of talented broadcasters formed while Edwards logged his last weeks as anchor. Cronkite assumed that Howard K. Smith would get the nod. When President Kennedy summoned Murrow to run USIA, Smith was dispatched to Birmingham, Alabama, to work on a searing CBS Reports exposé about Jim Crow bigotry. While Cronkite had latched on to NASA, Smith was all about Montgomery, Birmingham, Little Rock, and the Freedom Rides. On May 18, 1961, Smith had seen Birmingham sheriff “Bull” Connor’s police force pummel civil rights workers with clubs. An incensed Smith lashed out at the segregationist bullies responsible for the bloody melee. In late 1961, he replaced Murrow as host of the documentary Who Speaks for Birmingham?

  There was nothing objective about Smith’s excellent documentary of the white-black divide in Birmingham; he clearly championed civil rights activists over the Big Police. He had put his finger on many Southern boils, larded with hatred, and then lanced them. It was painful television. Smith, quoting British philosopher Edmund Burke, ended Who Speaks for Birmingham? by saying: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

  CBS News president Frank Stanton, CBS News vice president Blair Clark, and other executives were livid over Smith’s one-sided reporting. The provocative Burke line—a powerful documentary close—was deleted from the TV broadcast. An intransigent Smith, refusing to be bullied by Dr. Stanton and insisting that moral judgments were imperative in broadcasting news in a democracy, defiantly read his uncensored text on his CBS radio show. A confrontation with CBS management ensued. Who the hell did Smith think he was? Martin Luther King Jr.? The new Murrow?

  Smith wrote a high-minded memo for CBS management about the need for subjective morality in journalism. It was the ultimate indictment of Paley as a money-driven millionaire. The finical Paley dismissed Smith’s argument, saying, “I have heard all this junk before. If this is what you believe, you had better go somewhere else.” When push came to shove, CBS News needed bigoted Southerners and fair-minded northern viewers alike. Paley, like any corporate owner with stockholders, didn’t want to alienate either vast demographic. Objective journalism was about not pissing anyone off.

  Smith’s forced resignation from CBS News in late 1961 served notice to all of Paley’s headstrong news employees that the high-and-mighty days of Murrow’s ACLU-infused mania were over. Getting Smith out of the way was, ironically, a tremendous career booster for Cronkite. A popular story that circulated around CBS News held that Cronkite once called in sick on an Election Night (midterm) with one of his colds. Howard K. Smith was chosen to take his place. “Within fifteen minutes,” Smith wrote in his memoir Events Leading Up to My Death, “Walter was in the studio sucking on cough drops and sending me back to the Southern boards. Murrow told me that as author of his recovery I should send him a doctor’s bill.” Now Smith, his primary competitor in the race for the anchor job, had dropped like a fly.

  With Smith gone, Eric Sevareid aimed for Edwards’s job. Craving Murrow-like fame and the quantifiable ability to be heard and heeded, Sevareid undoubtedly had the stature for the post. The problem was that Sevareid—nicknamed “Eric the Red” by GOP conservatives—was star-crossed. No one went after Joe McCarthy on CBS Radio with the verve and vengeance of Sevareid. And career-wise, no media personality paid for it more. There was about Sevareid the aura of an elitist in a country
that honored Lowell Thomas and Walt Disney, not fourth-estate hauteur. If Sevareid was perceived as a Minnesota know-it-all who read too much Camus and Dostoyevsky to be trusted in the Edwards chair by conservative CBS affiliate owners, then Cronkite was the prototypical Middle American straight from the pages of Sinclair Lewis.

  As the viable candidates for anchorman dwindled to a few, Charles Collingwood—the model for the Joel McCrea character in the 1944 Billy Wilder movie Foreign Correspondent—was also considered by Dr. Stanton to replace Edwards. The CBS foreign correspondent’s wardrobe proved problematic, though. While Cronkite always dressed like a Missouri businessman who shopped at Harry Truman’s favored off-the-rack Kansas City haberdashery, Collingwood usually dressed like the Gieves & Hawkes–tailored Prince of Wales. Some colleagues were quizzical about Collingwood’s showboating style. Others were even rude—he clearly had never spent any time picking Iowa corn or working on a Detroit assembly line. Depending on how the stars were aligned, Collingwood would dress in eye-catching Vincent Price capes or gray kid gloves or even wear jazz age spats on his shoes. In a perfect world, it wouldn’t matter if the TV anchorman were something of a Beau Brummell. But in Collingwood’s case, his dapper clothes hinted toward his love of Russian caviar and French espionage. To an average CBS affiliate owner in Toledo or Topeka, he just was not relatable.

  While the anchorman guessing game went on at CBS News that February, seismic shake-ups were afoot at the network. Paley fired Sig Mickelson (Cronkite’s original CBS cheerleader) and his news director, John Day; it was a brutal double dismissal attributed to NBC News’ clobbering of CBS News in the ratings at the 1960 conventions. All Cronkite could do was duck for cover as it rained pink slips. “Sig had begun at ground-zero and built a very good, worldwide television news organization,” Howard K. Smith explained. “He had not yet been able to get Cronkite named anchorman on the evening news in place of Douglas Edwards, which would bring a new day at CBS, but he would later be credited as ‘the man who invented Walter Cronkite.’ ”