Cronkite

by Douglas Brinkley

  In April 1964, CBS aired a far-searching documentary often overlooked by scholars, Vietnam: The Deadly Decision, hosted by Charles Collingwood. It aired to anemic ratings. Later that year, Collingwood would write and host an overview of U.S. involvement in Vietnam since the 1950s for CBS Reports titled “Can We Get Out?” Those pioneering documentaries reached only a modest share in the Nielsen ratings. On the CBS Evening News, Cronkite, Friendly, and Hewitt duly aired excerpts and reported news of Vietnam, but a full commitment was lacking. The pictures and the words, often prophetic, had yet to outrage the general public or the anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News.

  Two months after the broadcast of “D-Day Plus 20 Years,” on Tuesday, August 4, 1964, Cronkite was by chance in the CBS newsroom when word came over the UPI and AP wires of a supposed attack on a U.S. destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of Vietnam. It was the second report in three days of an act of aggression against a navy ship. Frustrated with military activity emanating from North Vietnam, Johnson prepared his response to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, a speech later that evening calling for military action in retaliation. This event triggered preplanned American bombing raids on North Vietnam. That same day, the bodies of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman were finally found in Mississippi. Two of the major stories of the year had broken on the same day. Cronkite led the CBS Evening News with a headline regarding the alleged Tonkin attack, but he turned immediately to a full report on the case in Mississippi.

  Just after 11:30 that night, President Johnson went on the air to give the American people a disturbing description of the Gulf of Tonkin incident as a justification for “military action.” He rushed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution through Congress the next day in what Cronkite later denigrated as a “nimbus of patriotic fervor.” Some Washington observers had already cast doubt on the story’s veracity and bemoaned the rush to retaliate. Cronkite was not among them. He acknowledged “supporting” Johnson’s decision. Usually obsessive about checking facts before they were aired, Cronkite accepted Johnson’s version of events without question.

  In The Powers That Be, reporter David Halberstam recounted an interview with Fred Friendly, who admitted that he’d received a phone call from Murrow on the night of Johnson’s Tonkin speech. Ailing but intense as ever, Murrow was infuriated by CBS’s complacency. The facts regarding the attack by North Vietnam were murky and uncertain. “What do we really know about what happened out there?” Murrow fumed. “Why did it happen? How could you not have Rather and the boys do some sort of special analysis?”

  In that early period of the Vietnam War, though, Cronkite was in effect still the UP man attached to the Mighty Eighth in England, circa 1943. “I was still living with my old feeling of sympathy for the original commitment,” he said, “in line with Kennedy’s promise that ‘we shall support any friend to assure the success of liberty.’ ” As a Main Street patriot, he had also been born and bred to believe the U.S. president during international flare-ups such as the Tonkin incident. So had the vast majority of the American viewers to whom he delivered the news at night. Somehow Cronkite couldn’t swallow the premise that the U.S. military establishment was lying to Johnson for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Call it naïveté or brainwashing or wishful thinking. Although Cronkite later cringed at the allegation, he was in fact behaving in 1964 like a rubber-stamp sycophant for LBJ—and, it should be added, as a reliable spokesman for NASA, with top-security clearance credentials, and as an ardent foe of the Soviet Union since being based in Moscow under Stalin for the United Press, with a myopic cold war worldview.

  Cronkite’s “private feeling” after the Gulf of Tonkin incident was that the United States needed to stop the domino effect that would have Southeast Asia topple into Communist hands. He tried to maintain objectivity in keeping with the CBS credo (and his own conviction) that the news anchorman should not comment or editorialize upon Vietnam. “I won’t say he was hawkish,” CBS News reporter Morley Safer recalled of Cronkite. “But I would say he was in World War II frame of mind. We were the good guys, and the North Vietnamese were the bad guys. Vietnam wasn’t like that.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Paley’s Attempted Smackdown

  HEIL GOLDWATER—AVUNCULAR FACTOR—HARD NEWS-MAN—EMPEROR OF CBS—LAUGHING TO SUCCESS—CARE AND FEEDING OF CRONKITE CLUB—NANCY CRONKITE IS FOR LBJ—CHEERS FOR TEDDY WHITE—COW PALACE DEBACLE—WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO WALTER?—WORM’S-EYE VIEW—ATLANTIC CITY HUBRIS—SURVIVING THE END GAME—BARTLEBY THE CRONKITE

  Every day in the early summer of 1964, Cronkite grew worried that the Arizona senator, Barry Goldwater, could actually capture the presidential nomination of the party of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. Like Walter Lippmann, whom Cronkite admired, the CBS anchorman thought Goldwater’s appeal was covertly racist, a coded rallying cry of “white resistance�� to Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent movement.

  The bad blood between Cronkite and Goldwater started during the JFK assassination trauma. Goldwater had been in Muncie, Indiana, attending the funeral of his mother-in-law that fateful day when Cronkite was handed a note from a CBS staffer while on air. Nodding his head in thinly veiled contempt, Cronkite reported that Goldwater, when asked about the Kennedy assassination, had callously said, “No comment.” The implication was clear to Cronkite: the Dallas tragedy didn’t bother the deeply insensitive Barry much.

  Goldwater was rightfully mortified by Cronkite’s snide interpretation, calling such liberal claptrap “a dad-burned dirty lie.” A rewatching of Cronkite’s CBS News broadcasts from April to August 1964 confirms that Goldwater was often treated as a kind of neo-Nazi freak by the network, the horn-rimmed face of the John Birch Society, a sagebrush reactionary even more unfit for White House command than Joe McCarthy. To the Goldwater campaign staff, Cronkite was a relentless liberal crusader like Murrow, constantly wanting to break stories, slinging arrows at conservatives, rifling through his gold-star Rolodex to hunt down a lead that would embarrass the Arizona senator. Most of this was overdrawn by the Goldwater campaign, but there were elements of truth in it. “They haven’t even the decency to apologize,” Goldwater complained to KOOL-TV in Phoenix about a series of CBS News insults. “Now I have no respect for people like that. I don’t think these people should be allowed to broadcast.”

  Feeling unfairly picked on by Cronkite, Goldwater complained to Bill Small (Washington, D.C., bureau chief for CBS, and later NBC News president) that the CBS anchorman didn’t even know how to pronounce Republican properly on air. “No, Barry,” Small said to Goldwater. “It’s February that he can’t say.” (At CBS, Cronkite’s “February problem” was very real; he’d pronounce it “Feb-yoo-ary.” Every last week in January, producers forced Cronkite to rehearse February over and over again. “And it would work,” Sandy Socolow recalled, “for a day or two, but then there was a relapse.”)

  As the July 1964 GOP Convention in San Francisco approached, the CBS Evening News continued to portray Goldwater as harboring fascistic views. A deeply perturbed Cronkite, worried that Goldwater would use low-yield atomic weapons against North Vietnam if elected president, thought he had an obligation to expose the senator’s right-wing extremism. “Goldwater was a fervent hawk who believed that nuclear weapons would help bring victory in Vietnam,” Cronkite explained years later. “If that sounds extreme today, it sounded extreme then, too. But he said it.”

  As managing editor of the CBS Evening News, Cronkite seemed to relish pricking Goldwater from time to time for sport. In late July, he introduced a report from CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr, a hard-and-fast liberal working from Munich. With an almost tongue-in-cheek smile, Cronkite said, “Whether or not Senator Goldwater wins the nomination, he is going places, the first place being Germany.” Schorr then went on a tear, saying, “It looks as though Senator Goldwater, if nominated, will be starting his campaign in Bavaria, the center of Germany’s right wing.” The backstory was merel
y that Goldwater had accepted an invitation from Lieutenant General William Quinn for a quick holiday at Berchtesgaden, a U.S. Army recreational center in Germany. But Schorr made the takeaway point that Berchtesgaden was once “Hitler’s stomping ground.” Goldwater, trying to show off his NATO bona fides, had granted an interview with Der Spiegel in which he mentioned a possible trip to Germany soon. Some Democratic opposition researcher floated the idea that Goldwater was infatuated with the Nazis. It was ugly stuff. What was even uglier was the way Cronkite and Schorr elevated the story to CBS Evening News status. Cronkite, clearly disgusted with Goldwater’s German stunt, next introduced a report about an African American church burning in Mississippi, smack on the heels of the Berchtesgaden revelation. “The Germany story,” historian Rick Perlstein explained in Before the Storm, “hit San Francisco like a freight train.”

  When Paley learned that Cronkite and Schorr had double-teamed Goldwater, he hit the roof. Paley had financially backed Governor William Scranton of Pennsylvania to be the Republican nominee and didn’t want the Goldwater campaign to attack him for conflict of interest. This was no simple matter. Paley ordered Cronkite and Schorr to repudiate . . . pronto . . . to make it clear that Goldwater hadn’t spoken to Der Spiegel about Berchtesgaden to “appeal to right-wing elements.” Paley became so irate about the way Cronkite and Schorr had behaved in using the CBS Evening News to take digs at Goldwater that he decided to go to San Francisco himself to see what the hell was going on. “A lot of people at CBS blew a gasket about the Goldwater-is-Nazi thing,” Dan Rather recalled. “That was Schorr’s report. Cronkite, however, was the conveyor belt. Walter was sore at Schorr. But Cronkite became the target of CBS management.”

  None of this controversy helped Goldwater. The DNC photocopied the Cronkite-Schorr broadcast transcript and disseminated it in San Francisco to the gathering press pool and to people on the street. Cronkite’s dear friend from wartime London, Herb Caen, the popular San Francisco Examiner columnist, had a field day linking Goldwater to Hitler. “You can say what you want about Goldwater’s conservatism and right-wing views,” Caen joked, “but personally, I find him as American as apple strudel.”

  While the Goldwater campaign viewed Cronkite as a Lyndon Johnson reelection stalking horse, the public relations department at CBS News marketed Cronkite as a Father Knows Best type, making $150,000 a year, married for a quarter century, with three cookie-cutter-perfect children. When Cosmopolitan (pre–Gloria Steinem) decided to profile Betsy Cronkite, she uncharacteristically played dutiful Scarsdale wife whose hero was Mamie Eisenhower. Instead of Betsy’s trademark sarcasm, the reader of Cosmo got saccharine pap worthy of a former Hallmark publicist. In an “At Home with . . . Mrs. Walter Cronkite” story in the New York Post published a few years after the Cosmo piece, Betsy told how her bibles were the Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book and the Joy of Cooking (Walter’s favorite dish was veal stew). Life had treated Betsy well; her only beefs were that Walter didn’t have enough time to build model airplanes, run electric trains, downhill-ski, and sail his recently purchased twenty-two-foot Electrica around Long Island Sound. “Everybody including the trash man calls him Walter,” she told the reporter. “He likes that. He’s always been famous for knowing everybody. There isn’t a remote corner of the world where Walter doesn’t know somebody.”

  Around the shop, at CBS, Cronkite kept to a narrow path, that of a serious fact-stickler whose stock-in-trade was breaking news nightly. That was how deferential correspondents such as Dan Rather, Harry Reasoner, and Bob Schieffer saw him. Sig Mickelson, whom Murrow disdained, had sold Cronkite to the CBS affiliates as a what-constitutes-news expert, a field marshal, an asset to the company, and, aside from that, a rising star like Ed Sullivan, Lucille Ball, and Lassie. With blind faith, Mickelson believed that what differentiated Cronkite from other broadcasters was his tyrannical demand for answers. Other colleagues of Cronkite agreed. “He had this great curiosity,” Schieffer explained. “If there was a car wreck and Walter saw it, it would be like the first car wreck he’d ever seen in his life. He’d want to know all about it.”

  A major “Walter Want” that staff religiously adhered to was letting the anchorman read his viewer mail, which was delivered regularly to his office. No prescreening. He liked keeping his ear to the ground. As producer Les Midgley and vice president of CBS News Blair Clark both noted, Cronkite, unlike most TV performers, liked his praise and criticism straight-up. What Cronkite adored about producer Sandy Socolow was that, unlike either the CBS correspondent pool or the corporate executives, he delivered rotten news without a candy-coated veneer. When employees got shy about approaching Cronkite with an idea or problem, they used Socolow as a sounding board. Out of the thousands of letters Cronkite received daily, he picked favorites to answer. The front runner was from two little girls in Atchison, Kansas, around the time of John Glenn’s epic orbit: “Dear Mr. Cronkite, What do the astronauts do when they gotta use the bathroom? Yours truly, Pam and Margy.”

  Whenever Cronkite thought a CBS Evening News viewer made a salient critical point, even if it meant admitting error on behalf of CBS, he replied. When the CBS Evening News accidentally misrepresented a comment that Governor George W. Romney of Michigan made regarding the Black Power movement, Cronkite quickly ate crow. “Your complaint was justified and our handling of the story was not,” Cronkite wrote to Romney’s press spokesman. “It is neither justification nor rationale but only by way of explanation that the news service copy which carried the Governor’s statement buried the full text of the pertinent remark and our writer and editor missed it. I hope we made amends by seeking an interview with Governor Romney, which was used yesterday with the full text of his observation.”

  Because President Johnson was a shoo-in to be the nominee at the Democrats’ Atlantic City convention, to be held August 24–27, all eyes were fixed on the GOP Convention in San Francisco, which was scheduled for the previous month, on July 13–16. The Goldwater-versus-Rockefeller drama was being promoted by CBS, NBC, and ABC as a club fight for the heart and soul of the party. Still furious about the Berchtesgaden story, the Goldwater campaign refused Cronkite any access to the candidate. If possible, Goldwater’s lawyer would have gotten a court-issued restraining order against the CBS News anchorman. It was reminiscent of the way Cronkite and Hewitt had angered Taft (the conservative) in 1952 by giving Eisenhower (the moderate) preferential treatment.

  Bill Leonard, a friend of Cronkite’s since 1952 who had served in the U.S. Navy during World War II before being hired by CBS as the radio anchorman of This Is New York, was the head of the special Elections Unit, formed by Fred Friendly in the aftermath of CBS’s disappointing convention coverage in 1960. Cronkite was delighted when he heard that Leonard would be overseeing 1964’s conventions. Leonard felt much the same way; he regarded Cronkite as his closest friend on the news-gathering side of the network. They had worked well together on various CBS Reports. But that was before the two were thrown together into the cauldron of the 1964 convention mayhem. For starters, Goldwater was the big interview catch in San Francisco, but that bridge had been burned for CBS. “By the time the Republican Convention rolled around,” Leonard wrote in his memoir In the Storm of the Eye, “Bill Eames, Bobby Wussler and I were charter members of the CAFOC—Care and Feeding of Cronkite—Club. We met daily, sometimes late at night. The trick was to get Walter to do what we wanted him to do and thought was good for the broadcast or the news division—and to keep him reasonably happy in the process. His trick was generally to resist suggestions that involved change—Walter was, by nature, a tad superstitious, skeptical of people who professed to do things for his own good, particularly if it might alter his role in the proceedings and even more particularly if it threatened to reduce his role.”

  Brushing Goldwater off as a weird aberration who would get crushed by LBJ come Election Day, Cronkite didn’t bother to rev up for San Francisco. In his mind, Goldwater lived on some far-ri
ght-wing side of the planet that he never cared to visit. If he got blacklisted by Goldwater, it would only endear him to President Johnson at the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. And once Johnson got elected in November, which polls suggested was likely, he would have the best access to the White House. He was set to preside over CBS’s extensive convention coverage, to wear his two hats simultaneously, anchoring and newsroom managing. He saw himself as being the star quarterback and coach combined: one part of his brain could carry on talking, even as another part sorted through the possibilities for the next segment. Executive producer Don Hewitt and others certainly had input into arranging those possibilities on the fly, but Cronkite had the system arranged so that he made the final decisions on the air. With his well-trained (and fast-writing) assistants holding signs out of camera range to update him on unfolding events, his earphone keeping him abreast of the audio from the dais, and an array of monitors at his side showing him the “feeds,” Cronkite didn’t have to fret. He was at the top of his game.

  But he had a Day-Glo problem. His animosity toward Goldwater had brought him unwelcome scrutiny by the gossip columnists. He had become part of the story. There was tabloid gold in trying to document Cronkite’s bias for LBJ. The powerful Drew Pearson wrote a troublemaking item in his Merry-Go-Round column about Nancy Cronkite, the anchorman’s fifteen-year-old daughter, and her covertly infiltrating a Goldwater hospitality suite to put up “Scranton for President” signs. Pearson also intimated that Nancy was flirting with Michael Goldwater, the Arizona senator’s son. Joining Pearson in the let’s-out-Cronkite-as-a-liberal game was the always-probing Walter Winchell.