Cronkite

by Douglas Brinkley

  The unlikely Richard “Dick” Salant was appointed by Paley to replace Mickelson. Sensing his neck was next in the noose, Cronkite was “shocked” and “alarmed” that Salant—a Harvard-trained corporate lawyer from New York City without any journalism experience—had been chosen over the hard-news veteran Mickelson. The mismatch was self-evident. “We were naturally terribly worried,” Cronkite recalled years later of Salant. “A nonprofessional, a man who as far as we knew had never set foot in a newsroom.”

  During World War II, Salant had served in the navy as a lieutenant commander. Because he was a Harvard Law School graduate (class of ’38) with great promise, the prestigious Manhattan law firm Rosenman, Goldmark, Colin & Kaye hired him. CBS News was a client. Paley stole Salant away from the firm in 1952. A stickler for detail, allergic to controversy, and a fervent advocate of First Amendment rights, Salant, given the title of vice president of CBS News, was anti-glitz, the exterminator of hyperbole in reporting. For CBS on-air reporters such as Cronkite, Sevareid, and Collingwood, Salant was too legalistic, nitpicking adjectives out of scripts, always bare-knuckling down to basics. At a luncheon, the three broadcasting talents pleaded with Dr. Stanton not to empower Salant. The on-air talent insisted that the middle-aged lawyer was a legalist sponge who would drain all the journalistic drama from their broadcasts to avoid legal controversy. Stanton disregarded their concerns. “We were,” Cronkite recalled, “all depressed.”

  With Salant as president, Cronkite feared that the Edwards post might be given to someone unexpected. Cronkite didn’t know whether his paranoia proved his sanity or pointed to the edge of psychosis. The grapevine hinted that forty-three-year-old Mike Wallace, whose gritty experience as a newsman dated back to the 1940s, when he was a reporter for the Chicago Sun, would be Salant’s Anointed One. Somehow Cronkite construed that Wallace’s having been born in President Kennedy’s hometown of Brookline, Massachusetts, was a feather in the cap with Salant for covering the New Frontier on CBS News. Utter nonsense. Otherwise, Wallace’s résumé was loosely similar to Cronkite’s own: a naval communications officer in World War II; a news reporter for WMAQ in Chicago; and an on-again, off-again broadcaster for CBS News since 1951. But Wallace was also the most aggressive newsman Cronkite had ever encountered. Only when Wallace got his own TV shows—Night Beat (1956–1957); The Mike Wallace Interview (1957–1959); and PM East (1961–1962)—did Cronkite realize how starkly opposite their core personalities were. Cronkite used the butter knife when conducting interviews with politicians, while Wallace had a penchant for wielding the double ax. If Cronkite was squeamish about blood, Wallace was a regular Count Dracula. Another plus for Wallace was that he had hosted a radio show in Detroit with Edwards in the 1940s. The program was sponsored by the Cunningham Drugstore, and the Wallace-Edwards team became fondly known as the “Cunningham Aces.” A paranoid Cronkite thought Salant might try to spark an Aces reunion to butt heads with Huntley-Brinkley.

  CBS News correspondent Charles Kuralt was also a contender of some dimension. He favorably reminded many people of Brinkley, a fellow Tar Heel whose life script had a Thomas Wolfe–esque follow-the-lonesome-train-to-New York halo about it. In 1948, at the age of fourteen, Kuralt was named one of four National Voice of Democracy winners. It had all been uphill for him ever since. In later years, Cronkite used to joke that if a folksy-a-thon were ever held, Kuralt would win hands down. Kuralt, ever the Tar Heel, even wrote a book titled North Carolina Is My Home. Blessed with a warm bass voice, Kuralt was a resonant figure with CBS affiliate owners. From an aural perspective, he was like lightning in a bottle for Salant. But CBS News correspondent David Schoenbrun explained why Kuralt was passed over: he was “bald and heavy, not the right image for an anchorman.”

  On March 15, 1962, CBS News finally announced that Cronkite—nicknamed “one-take Walter” by Salant—was Edwards’s replacement as CBS’s evening news anchor. The determining factor was Cronkite’s universally celebrated coverage of John Glenn. Edwards, nursing his disappointment, asked to be released from his CBS contract, but Salant, who had recently endured Smith’s defection to ABC News, refused to let his Peabody Award–winning on-air talent go. Edwards, ego in check, soon let the matter drop. He remained with CBS until 1988, quietly going about the job of delivering midmorning and other news reports. Kuralt was named CBS News’ chief West Coast correspondent the following year. That spring Collingwood won the plum task of hosting the one-hour show A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy, which was met with off-the-charts ratings of over 70 million viewers, and took over Eyewitness (though Cronkite got to keep the America’s Cup story).

  It was murmured that Paley himself had chosen Cronkite as the anchor, managing editor, and new face of the CBS Evening News. What management liked about Cronkite was his cogent character: the conjunction of hard work with an uncommon judicious sensibility of what constituted headline news. He promised a return to the mandates of Paul White (that is, news would have a point . . . but not a point of view). “We didn’t pick Walter to anchor the Evening News because of his hairdo—he didn’t have one,” Salant joked at a Museum of Television and Radio dinner in 1988. “We didn’t pick Walter because he was beautiful—he wasn’t. We didn’t pick Walter because a focus group, wired up to a machine, palpitated at the sight of him. They didn’t have things like that in those prehistoric days, so we were on our own. We picked Walter for the only sound reason to pick an anchor: He was a real pro, a superb reporter—a newsman who always gave his audience an honest account, no matter what his personal beliefs. It was the right assignment.”

  At 6:30 p.m. (EST) on April 16, 1962, Cronkite anchored the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite for the first time.* It was an agile fifteen-minute recitation of facts distilled from the AP and UPI. No longer was he the utility player. Cronkite closed that broadcast with, “That’s the news. Be sure to check your local newspapers tomorrow to get all of the details on the headlines we’re delivering to you.” Paley, who had just injected a couple million dollars into modernizing CBS’s five-hundred-thousand-square-foot broadcast center on West Fifty-seventh Street, was watching, and fumed. Cronkite, he charged, was telling CBS News shoppers to go buy elsewhere. “The suits—as we used to call them—went crazy,” Cronkite’s longtime producer Sandy Socolow recalled. “From their perspective, Walter was sending people to read newspapers instead of watching the news. There was a storm.”

  David Brinkley, taking the high road, closed his April 16 edition of The Huntley-Brinkley Report by welcoming Cronkite and his footmen to the fast-paced world of evening news. If NBC News had been a little less secure or a little less confident, it undoubtedly would have been a lot less generous with its nemesis. As ratings kingpin, Brinkley could afford to be magnanimous. Just before signing off on the night of Cronkite’s debut, Brinkley told viewers, “Over on CBS tonight Walter Cronkite takes over their nightly news program after some years of doing special weekly and other programs of various kinds and doing them well. We’d like to welcome him to the thin and battered ranks of news broadcasters who have to work every night.”

  Viewers who took Brinkley’s cue and tuned in to see the revamped CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite were not likely to be terribly impressed. Aside from a simplified set, the production quality of the Cronkite show looked about the same as before. And so did Cronkite, whose trustworthy face was known to anyone who owned a television set. Being the maestro of the political conventions since 1952, Cronkite earned an edge as an inside-the-Beltway guy because he had started at WTOP-TV. “He was the father figure of television journalists; he had no rival except for maybe Brinkley,” Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee recalled. “But Cronkite had a kind of paternal quality that made him different from David, and that is what set him apart. He was a great-white-father type—not quite that, because that connotes doddering, which he never was—but he was the dean. He was the big cheese.”

  Cronkite’s first assignment as ancho
rman, perhaps the only one, was to whip NBC News in the ratings. While not an impossible task, it would be an uphill climb. Although the transition had been abrupt, the dismissal of Edwards having ruffled some feathers, Paley was committed to the new Cronkite show. Spurred by NBC News into head-to-head competition, CBS News had money to burn because of the success of the network’s entertainment division. In 1962, CBS’s prime-time shows—led by the resounding successes of The Andy Griffith Show, Candid Camera, and The Lucy Show—topped the ratings all seven nights of the week. And CBS’s daytime programming was such a powerhouse—especially As the World Turns, which ran time-slot supreme from 1956 to 2010—management chest-beat they invented daytime TV. In the early 1960s, CBS, in fact, had all top ten daytime programs. “Doug Edwards used to brag that he had the highest rated newscast in the business,” CBS scriptwriter Merv Block recalled. “That was because it followed the wildly popular soap operas.”

  A Madison Avenue governing truth was that Fortune 500 companies purchased commercials on a network as much as on a show. Part of Cronkite’s job was to encourage companies to choose the CBS eye over the NBC peacock and the ABC circle. In the days before remote control devices, viewers tended to leave their televisions on one channel all evening. Television was different from radio in that way. Listeners often sat right next to their radios, but viewers were at least six feet from their black-and-white TV sets. The Big Three networks fought hard to control that stretch of carpeting or hardwood in the American living room, anxious to keep viewers from breaching it. One program needed to lead seamlessly to the next so that viewers would not feel the compunction to channel-surf. CBS couldn’t afford to be hobbled from the start of each evening at 7:00 p.m. by conceding a huge majority of the audience share to Huntley-Brinkley. Seventy-five U.S. cities aired the CBS Evening News; Cronkite was tasked with making it closer to one hundred. A bigger audience and more out-of-town bureaus meant commercial advertisers would come knocking at Mr. Paley’s door. Public approval via high ratings translated directly into increased revenue for CBS. “Walter,” said Fred Friendly, the superstar producer at the network, “knows the future of CBS news is riding on him.”

  Behind the scenes, Don Hewitt was the uncompromising puppeteer of the Evening News. He instituted news teasers before commercial breaks and the hyping of featured stories. He produced CBS’s nightly news through the entire Edwards era. Just as he did for Cronkite in the 1952 and 1956 conventions, Hewitt masterminded major live events for CBS during the Kennedy era. Short, dark-haired, imbued with the idiosyncratic instincts of a Reno dice-roller, he could be uncouth without losing a certain likable Borscht Belt appeal. Full of threats and bluster, he worked the telephone at CBS News like some manic switchboard operator. No one was better at news gathering and news deciding than Hewitt; by the time he created 60 Minutes in 1968, he was in a carny league all his own.

  Having collaborated with the docile Edwards for fourteen years, Hewitt was wary of Cronkite and of the supposed influence he hoped to exert as “managing editor.” Hewitt’s central impulse was to be a lone wolf. What really separated Cronkite from Huntley and Brinkley was his insistence on continuing to work as a reporter on his own show. From Hewitt’s perspective, on-camera personalities like Cronkite needed to focus exclusively on the off-camera prompters—not on the program’s management. Hewitt saw himself as the arbiter of what constituted nightly news; he was merely continuing the Edwards tradition. This arrangement didn’t last long. Cronkite, as managing editor, was contractually the boss, no matter what Hewitt thought. What Cronkite possessed that Hewitt didn’t was a reliable instinct for the oncoming headlights of major news stories. Hewitt thought in terms of that day’s programming; Cronkite was telepathic about next year’s trend. Cronkite knew the Mercury Seven astronauts were bigger than Sinatra before CBS management and producers did. “Again and again,” CBS News producer Ron Bonn recalled, “Cronkite would foresee the Next Big Story and gear us up for it.”

  That summer of 1962, while gearing up for the America’s Cup, Cronkite participated in an unprecedented milestone moment in communications history. On a hot day in mid-July, at the NBC studios in Rockefeller Center, Cronkite took a seat at the anchor desk next to Chet Huntley of NBC and newly hired Howard K. Smith of ABC News. The twenty-minute occasion was the first live TV link-up relayed between the Big Three networks of the United States and Eurovision, the television branch of the European Broadcasting Union. As Cronkite saw moving pictures from Europe flooding his black-and-white monitors at the NBC facilities, courtesy of Telstar, the first active communications satellite (albeit just in low Earth orbit, not high geosynchronous orbit), he was in awe. BBC’s Richard Dimbleby, in Brussels, appeared on the monitor and called out, “Hello, Walter Cronkite. Hello, United States.” Keeping his wits about him, Cronkite spoke for posterity, “Good evening, Europe, this is North America Live, via ATT Telstar, July 23, 1962, 3 p.m. Eastern Standard Time in the East.” During the Glenn mission, just four months earlier, the United States didn’t have the technology to provide Europe with even intermittent live transatlantic pictures of Friendship 7; now the Kennedy administration did. Cronkite’s profession had been revolutionized with the transmission of images to Europe that included the Statue of Liberty, a major league baseball game in Chicago, President Kennedy’s news conference, buffalo roaming the Great Plains, and a boy admiring a Sioux chief in South Dakota. The American broadcasters were treated to such sights as the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, and reindeer in the Arctic Circle, among other iconic images. “The reality of live telecasts to Europe seemed so unbelievable,” Cronkite recalled, “it was as if we had to keep telling ourselves it was happening.”

  Regardless of the Telstar excitement, Cronkite’s Evening News broadcast was still a work in progress, victim to the truest maxim in television: “In news an audience is slow to grow and fast to go.” Cronkite was very good, very clear, very quick, and very second place. CBS had increased budgets, such that it topped the other networks in the number of reporters, producers, cameramen, and script writers, but not in the number of viewers tuning in. Cronkite managed to stop the Evening News from hemorrhaging viewers, but that wasn’t enough of an accomplishment for Paley. CBS had to be first. The public knew Cronkite mainly as “Iron Pants” or “Mr. Space.” To be successful, he would have to become “America’s Anchor,” quite a tall order. “He’s nervous,” Fred Friendly said, “No. Not just nervous. I think Walter is running scared. And that’s good. That’s healthy.”

  Just a couple of months after Cronkite became the CBS Evening News anchorman, William Small, a news director at WHAS-TV in Louisville, Kentucky, became the news director and bureau manager of CBS News in Washington, D.C., leapfrogging over a stable of more obvious candidates for the prestigious, high-octane job. Before moving from Louisville to Washington, Small spent an arduous couple of weekdays in New York City getting to know Cronkite and other bigwigs at CBS corporate headquarters. They got along splendidly from the get-go. Small learned a secret about Cronkite’s modus operandi: if you were a brand-new hire he treated you like a prince. Grooming newbies at CBS, helping the rookies machete through the weird thicket of Mr. Paley’s world, was de rigueur behavior for Cronkite. It was how you turned staff into your stable.

  Hanging around Cronkite all day had made Small mistakenly think that CBS News was a genteel place. When Cronkite left the studio to use an electric razor, the abrasive Don Hewitt, chewing a cigar, banished Small from the high-tech studio. Dutifully following instructions, Small headed up to the glass booth overlooking CBS Studio 42 in Grand Central Terminal to watch the Cronkite telecast. The countdown had started. Usually the sequestered holding tank was reserved as a courtesy zone for corporate sponsors of the CBS Evening News. That night, Small was left alone with an elderly woman counting down the minutes before broadcast. When Hewitt entered the dugout in full cock-of-the-walk mode, he pointed to the granny in the booth sitting next to Small. “Who is that old bitch?” he blurted
out. For a split second Small was mortified. After dropping such a word bomb, Hewitt then scurried back to his control room seat. It was Helen Cronkite, the anchorman’s mother, whose tongue could be pretty raucous.

  “Are you really going to run the Washington bureau?” Helen asked Small incredulously.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he replied.

  “Well,” she said, “you’ll have a lot of influence.”

  “Suppose so,” he answered.

  “Well, look,” she said. “When the press does profiles on Walter they often mention my age—they make me feel undateable. You make sure they leave my age out of it. Okay?”

  Small felt as if he had walked into the New York City version of the popular CBS show The Beverly Hillbillies—he was an outsider, for sure. “Turns out Helen was a swinger,” Small recalled. “She dated retired naval admirals and the like. She wasn’t kidding about her known age hindering her dating life.”

  The network relentlessly publicized Cronkite’s unmatched Soviet-analyst experience in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis that October, presenting him as the cold war anchorman to trust at a time of anxiety. For thirteen days, President Kennedy dueled with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev about Soviet missile launch sites in Cuba. And for thirteen days, Huntley-Brinkley beat Cronkite in the ratings. Instead of firing Cronkite, Paley doubled down. In December 1962, Salant proposed that the CBS Evening News be expanded to a half hour. (At the time, all network news shows were only fifteen minutes long, patterned after radio news.)