Cronkite

by Douglas Brinkley

  On NBC, McGee took the lead, while Huntley and Ryan were on hand to add to the discussion. ABC’s coverage was in the able hands of Cochran and Silverman, though ABC also used one or two feeds from Barker of KRLD-TV. However, even as Cochran emphasized that all reports regarding Kennedy’s condition were unconfirmed, the president’s name and “1917–1963” appeared on-screen. That tombstone-like R.I.P. graphic drove home the reality of Kennedy’s death in a visually visceral way.

  Missing from CBS News’ coverage of the Kennedy assassination that November 22 was Edward R. Murrow. Rumor had it that Murrow, unhappy at USIA, might return to CBS in early 1963 to do documentaries. But in fact he had undergone emergency cancer surgery to remove his left lung. The three-hour operation left him weak and feeble, horizontal in bed throughout the autumn, mired in depression. The radiation he had endured discolored his chest to a coarse leathery brown shade. “Whoever said talk is cheap,” Murrow quipped, “had two lungs.” When Murrow’s wife, Janet, told him Kennedy had been shot, he felt nauseous. He watched Cronkite’s commentary that dark day, calling it one long, flawless note.

  With his hair slightly tousled and black horn-rimmed glasses on, Cronkite actually looked supremely unpolished during his broadcast. A man somehow in need of a shave, eventually he had no whiskers. At least the air-conditioning system kept him from sweating under the hot lights. “I was really just a disreputable character up there on the air,” he later said, “as far as my appearance went.” That characterization was overdrawn, but Cronkite’s unpowdered face and work-grunt attire indeed added to the urgency of the moment. As he described the unsettled atmosphere in Dallas during the weeks preceding the president’s trip, setting the stage for JFK’s visit, he was interrupted by someone off-camera handing him yet another piece of paper. He quickly absorbed the note’s contents. His eyes became wells of sadness. Removing his glasses, fidgeting with them, he shot an intense look at the camera—at the viewer—as though to warn people to prepare themselves. He put his glasses back on and tried to speak. Pulling himself together, Cronkite read the newest dispatch with pained authority:

  “From Dallas, Texas, the flash apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1 o’clock p.m. Central Standard Time, 2 o’clock, Eastern Standard Time, some thirty-eight minutes ago.”

  The wall clock now drew Cronkite’s attention. Assuming the role of historian, he wanted to record the exact time of the momentous announcement. “We knew it was coming,” Cronkite recalled of the death flash, “but still it was hard to say.” With eyes affixed to the big-and-little-hands, Cronkite didn’t talk for two or three seconds. He was mute, searching for meaning in a world turned absurd. He pursed his mouth, a recognition of shock and sorrow that nearly every viewer shared simultaneously. “It was touch and go there for a few seconds,” he later explained, “before I could continue.” Decades later, speaking to the Archive of American Television, Cronkite explained that “the psychological trauma didn’t touch him” until he “hit that punch line that he’s dead.”

  Unbeknownst to Cronkite, Vice President Johnson had been whisked by the Secret Service to Air Force One, parked at Love Field; he was hungry for accurate information about the extent of the assassination plot. Immediately Johnson ordered the shades drawn. The lack of air circulation made the 707 feel like a swamp. Johnson walked briskly down the aisle to Air Force One’s little communications room where agents, wearing headsets, were actively gathering intelligence. Johnson, demanding answers more quickly, hurried to his private stateroom to watch Cronkite. “Shhh . . . shhh,” Johnson said with his finger to his mouth, hoping to learn new details about Dallas from CBS News. Cronkite—dispatching his roving detectives Rather, Wood, Benton, and Pierpoint—was already ahead of the FBI in finding out biographical information about the bizarre misfit named Lee Harvey Oswald.

  To Cronkite’s amazement, Oswald, the alleged assassin, had quietly walked away from the Texas School Book Depository after the shooting and ridden a public bus to the neighborhood where he shared a flat at 1026 North Beckley. There, he grabbed his loaded .38 caliber pistol and walked back out into the bright afternoon. When Dallas police officer James Tippit, who had heard a Wanted Man description of the assassin on the radio, stopped Oswald and asked for his identification, Kennedy’s murderer pulled out his pistol and shot and killed him. Oswald then sought sanctuary in the nearby Texas Theatre without paying, prompting the terrified cashier to call the police. With War Is Hell, starring Tony Russel, playing on the big screen, the Dallas cops scuffled with Oswald briefly before arresting him.

  The CBS News team grew determined to help Cronkite own the Kennedy assassination coverage. Rather, Pierpoint, Wood, and Benton would shuttle in and out of KRLD-TV all day, catching Cronkite between location shots. Wood went to Oswald’s rooming house to interview his landlady and film its interior. From all over the world, so-called journalists streamed into Dallas to be part of the crime of the century. Everyone wanted a little exclusive about Oswald. Transmission of such information was difficult; back then there were no two-way radios, video cameras, or cell phones. “I think we just kind of intuitively knew what to do,” Barker recalled. “You rise to the occasion.”

  Although Wood had all of this great visual material, Cronkite was nervous about airing it. His heart opened toward the Kennedy family. He became impresario of the American post-assassination mourning. CBS News became the meeting hall, the cathedral, the corner bar, and the town square—wherever people went when they wanted the healing comfort of a group. Television became the national grief center, with Cronkite, sipping strong tea throughout the weekend to soothe his sore throat, the philosopher of congruent counsel. Cronkite never pretended to process JFK’s death—his broadcast was a lesson in humility. “When the news is bad, Walter hurts,” explained Fred Friendly. “When the news embarrasses America, Walter is embarrassed. When the news is humorous, Walter smiles with understanding.”

  With straightforward reporting, never leapfrogging ahead of the unfolding narrative, Cronkite steadily held the air for four more hours after the shooting. Sensing that “Iron Pants,” the nickname given to Cronkite by Unipressers and now being used at CBS, was showing strain and noticing that his anchorman’s neck was stiff, Hewitt made the executive decision to bench Cronkite for a spell. Like a good coach, he saw his star pitcher needed relief help in the ninth inning. Dutifully and without complaint, Cronkite turned his chair over to Charles Collingwood. Away from the three cameras, Cronkite headed into his glass-walled office, only a few paces away, to commiserate with Betsy and his children on the phone. As a father, the shock of the JFK murder now made him angry. In what kind of America was he raising his children? But as Cronkite entered his office sanctum, hoping to decompress, his telephone rang incessantly. An annoyed Cronkite grabbed the receiver and barked out a cold “Hello.” A thistleish Manhattan liberal was on the other end, full of double-distilled complaints from her Park Avenue penthouse.

  “Is this CBS News?” she asked.

  Cronkite confirmed it was.

  “I just want to say,” she snapped, “that this is the worst bad taste to have that Walter Cronkite on the air when everybody knows he hated the president.”

  “Madame,” Cronkite said, “what is your name?”

  “Mrs. Blank,” the woman snapped.

  “Mrs. Blank,” Cronkite said, “this is Walter Cronkite, and you’re a goddamn idiot.”

  Years later Cronkite recalled to interviewer Oriana Fallaci of Look how embarrassed he was that the Park Avenue shrew, whom he called Mrs. Blank, had caused him to lose his cool. How trivial his disputes with JFK about Catholicism and with Pierre Salinger over Vietnam on his first thirty-minute CBS Evening News broadcast seemed in hindsight. “Unfortunately, that Park Avenue lady drove me mad,” Cronkite told Fallaci. “I am not proud to have invoked the Lord’s name in losing my temper.”

  Both Wood and Pierpoint were at Parkland Memorial Hospital when
White House press secretary Malcolm “Mac” Kilduff (filling in for Salinger, who was in midflight over the Pacific, accompanying Robert McNamara on a trip to Asia) informed the press that JFK had died of a severe gunshot wound to the head at 1:00 p.m. A senior surgeon soon offered more gruesome details. What Cronkite wanted to know from his roving CBS News southern bureau correspondents was, how the hell could Oswald have made the bull’s-eye shot from the Book Depository window?

  Rather, always brazen, came up with the novel idea that Wood borrow a rifle at a Dallas pawn shop (not difficult in Texas) and re-create the Oswald shooting for the CBS Evening News. You had to admire Rather for his gumption. Dutifully, Wood rented a Mannlicher-Carcano .30 (or 7.62) caliber rifle (a very similar model to the one Oswald used) from a nearby shop. He had it fixed with a four-power telescopic sight and “waltzed” into the Book Depository with it slung over his shoulder, film crew in tow. “We were not challenged,” Wood recalled. “The Secret Service had not even sealed off the building, but they had scoured it after the shooting, discovering the discarded rifle and empty cartridge cases.”

  The assassin’s window was still wide open. All the cartons of books that Oswald arranged to create a sniper’s nest were still in place. “The target sight picture was a going-away target, not a crossing target, so while moving, it remained in the sights,” Wood remembered. “The range was no more than 100 yards. The president’s head (judging from other passenger cars that morning) must have appeared as big as a melon through the telescopic sight. Some have questioned how Oswald could have fired three shots in such a few seconds. Remember, one round was already in the chamber of the bolt-action rifle. Once he squeezed off the first shot, he only had to bolt twice more. Take my word for it. It was an easy shot.”

  Cronkite, Hewitt, and Bliss nixed Wood’s stunning re-creation segment, believing it unfit for the CBS Evening News. They also refused to run Wood’s footage of the bloody Parkland Memorial Hospital operating room where trauma surgeons Dr. Charles Carrico and Dr. Charles Baxter had worked on Kennedy. It was determined that airing those pieces would have been insensitive to the Kennedy family’s feelings during their time of grief. But CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite made history by airing a two-hour telecast that Friday, and a one-hour broadcast on Monday (both apparently network TV firsts).

  For four straight days, until the body of President Kennedy, a World War II hero, was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday, November 25, all the networks ran largely uninterrupted coverage of the events surrounding the president’s death. Donning his canonicals to reassure the world, Cronkite steadied the 70 million friends of CBS News, who almost felt his reassuring hand on their shoulders. On Sunday morning, though, CBS goofed: it didn’t show live footage of Oswald being transferred from Dallas Police Headquarters to the sherriff’s county jail. NBC News president Robert Kintner, watching from the array of monitors at his home, instinctively called the studio at 30 Rockefeller Center and told the director to switch coverage to Dallas. Moments later, NBC viewers watched as Jack Ruby killed Oswald with a pistol shot to the stomach.

  CBS News did have a camera at the Dallas police department basement, but it wasn’t airing the feed because Roger Mudd had gone live with a stand-up report from Washington, where Kennedy’s coffin was being moved to the Capitol Rotunda to lie in state. After Jack Ruby shot Oswald, CBS News immediately cut to Dallas. ABC didn’t broadcast Oswald’s death because they didn’t have a live camera present at the police headquarters. “One of the great misfortunes at CBS was that we were off the air when Ruby shot Oswald,” Cronkite later recalled. “I watched it on one of the competing networks. We got on the air pretty quickly thereafter, but we missed the drama of that moment.”

  Tom Shales of The Washington Post declared that the JFK assassination coverage proved TV had become “the national hearth.” One of America’s worst hours ever had produced CBS News’ finest moment. According to Nielsen, an astounding 93 percent of U.S. homes with televisions were tuned in to Big Three coverage. Over half of those viewers watched the drama unfold for thirteen consecutive hours that November weekend. Viewers in twenty-three countries saw some segment of Cronkite’s marathon coverage.

  Every CBS News frame from Washington—the flag-draped coffin; 250,000 mourners paying their last respects; six gray-white horses; three riders pulling the caisson; world dignitaries such as President Charles de Gaulle of France, Chancellor Ludwig Erhard of West Germany, Queen Frederika of Greece, and Haile Selassie of Ethiopia weeping (a CBS cameraman had shouted into Cronkite’s earpiece, “I’ve got a whole bunch of kings!”); and the final eulogy of Philip M. Hannan, auxiliary bishop of Washington—manifested what media theorist Marshall McLuhan called the power of TV “to involve an entire population in a ritual process.”

  Cronkite harnessed that power as he wrapped up his CBS Evening News broadcast on November 25, the day of President Kennedy’s burial at Arlington National Cemetery:

  It is said that the human mind has a greater capacity for remembering the pleasant than the unpleasant. But today was a day that will live in memory and in grief. Only history can write the importance of this day: Were these dark days the harbingers of even blacker ones to come, or like the black before the dawn shall they lead to some still as yet indiscernible sunrise of understanding among men, that violent words, no matter what their origin or motivation, can lead only to violent deeds? This is the larger question that will be answered, in part, in the manner that a shaken civilization seeks the answers to the immediate question: Who, and most importantly what, was Lee Harvey Oswald? The world’s doubts must be put to rest. Tonight there will be few Americans who will go to bed without carrying with them the sense that somehow they have failed. If in the search of our conscience we find a new dedication to the American concepts that brook no political, sectional, religious or racial divisions, then maybe it may yet be possible to say that John Fitzgerald Kennedy did not die in vain. That’s the way it is, Monday, November 25, 1963. This is Walter Cronkite, good night.

  What to make of Cronkite’s historic CBS broadcasts of November 22 to 25, 1963, when America turned to him for information and comfort? Was he the perspicacious communicator of news or an even-keeled pastor? Had he been wrong to not air Wood’s re-creation from the assassin’s perch? Ultimately, Cronkite was just a pro who wanted to whip NBC News in the ratings. “Walter was really in his element,” remembered producer Sandy Socolow, who rushed to the broadcast center from Millbrook, New York. “He was like an actor in the middle of his performance of a lifetime. It’s possible that the scene of him taking off his glasses was consciously staged. Any director would tell you that what Walter did with those glasses, the fidgeting, was a fine prop to convey both human emotion and an air of spontaneity. The performance worked. The proof is in the pudding—Walter’s glasses are constantly being replayed. Everybody knows it.”

  Since the advent of real-time Web journalism in the early twenty-first century, breaking news is disseminated differently, with a different—and less unified—experience than that of the millions of Americans synchronistically watching as Cronkite announced Kennedy’s death. Should there be such an event today, a huge population of citizens wouldn’t turn to their TV sets. They’d go immediately to their Apple laptop or BlackBerry or iPhone. Real-time information can now be found on the Web before it makes its way to the news bureau. In the age of Twitter and five-hundred-channel cable TV, it’s unlikely that any single anchorperson could pull Americans together the way Cronkite did in those dark days of 1963.

  In the wake of Dallas, President Johnson created the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy (known as the Warren Commission after its chairman, Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren). On September 24, 1964, after ten months of investigation, the final 888-page Warren Commission report was handed to Johnson. Cronkite devoured every page. CBS News, in fact, had asked the commission to publicly release supporting document
s and evidence. More than twenty-six volumes of testimony and depositions were released as part of the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald was the lone gunman. Lew Wood—who, after re-creating the Book Depository event, covered Jack Ruby’s trial for CBS News in 1964—may have been right all along in his conjecture that Oswald acted alone.

  After the Warren Commission Report was released to the public on September 27, CBS News received thousands of letters asking the network to further investigate the suspect claim that Oswald had acted alone. The pesky letters wouldn’t cease. Cronkite, along with the man in charge of CBS News’ prime-time coverage, Les Midgley, decided to make a four-part analysis of the Warren Report in 1966. Paley backed the Cronkite-Midgley film with a million-dollar budget—then an unprecedented amount of production money. “What fed the conspiracy notion about the Kennedy assassination among many Americans was the sheer incongruity of the affair,” Eric Sevareid recalled. “All that power and majesty wiped out in an instant by one skinny, weak-chinned, little character.”

  Following Cronkite’s instructions, CBS reporters put the Warren Commission Report under intense scrutiny, reconstructing the ballistics and audio tests. They watched all the film footage taken in Dallas on November 22, 1963 (including the Zapruder footage, a twenty-six-second home movie shot by Dallas dressmaker Abraham Zapruder, that Life magazine purchased after outbidding CBS News). Around one hundred witnesses were interviewed for CBS News Inquiry: The Warren Report. Few stones were left unturned. After a thorough investigation, Cronkite, in this four-part series that aired from June 25 to June 28, 1967, dispelled the notion of an octopus-like conspiracy to get Kennedy. “We concluded,” he said, “that nothing else could be proved beyond what the Warren Commission was able to establish. . . . It was perfectly possible with that particular rifle to get that kind of accuracy.” Rick DuBrow, the UPI media critic, called CBS News’ documentary, anchored by Cronkite (along with Rather and Sevareid), “a rare and important experience in television journalism.”