“I saw your daughter Nancy,” Walter Winchell said to Cronkite.
“Where?”
“Carrying a Scranton sign with a Goldwater page,” Winchell said. “She tells me she isn’t for Scranton. Her heart belongs to LBJ.”
It was already believed within journalism circles that Cronkite was pro-Johnson in 1964. But it was also understood that his personal bias wouldn’t affect CBS News’s convention coverage. Cronkite knew how to play it down the center. The CBS executives planning the convention coverage selected twenty-two newsmen for the reportorial team, among them the company’s hungriest reporters to cover the floor. These included Dan Rather, Roger Mudd, Mike Wallace, and Martin Agronsky. The durable Robert Trout, who had been broadcasting political conventions since FDR-Landon in 1936 on CBS Radio, would preside over radio coverage and appear with Cronkite occasionally on TV. Harry Reasoner would be on hand to keep the anchor chair warm when “Iron Pants” needed a quick break. The plan also called for Theodore White, writing The Making of a President 1964, to offer punditry. “All of us have been the beneficiaries of a new form of political journalism that Teddy White brought to us,” Cronkite believed. “He was the one who began digging into the mechanics of campaigning.”
White had been living on the campaign trail for months in early 1964, attending the same fund-raisers and county fairs as the candidates. Politics was a serious business to him. This didn’t mean, however, that he was dull. Both on TV and in print he brought a novelist’s flair for the arcane world of the electoral college with insouciance and wit. Cronkite had immense respect for White’s print journalism background; he had cut his chops at Henry R. Luce’s Time-Life empire. He was not only a true double-source reporter but also one with a historian’s big-picture sense of what mattered in the long run. Whenever Cronkite sat in on CBS convention coverage meetings from 1960 to 1980, he always had one request: for Teddy White to be his sidekick, for both on- and off-air advice.
By the time the San Francisco conventions rolled around, Cronkite had filled his binders with election 1964 research material. He had five volumes bulging with statistics, newspaper clippings, and succinct anecdotes. Because it was summer, Cronkite had Betsy and the kids accompany him on the trip to tourist-friendly San Francisco. Cronkite hoped to take his family to Fisherman’s Wharf, Chinatown, Muir Woods, Seal Rock, and other Bay Area tourist sights. It was yet another sign of his hubris—this attitude that the covering of the GOP Convention at the Cow Palace was a slam-dunk. After the Kennedy assassination coverage, watching Goldwater, Rockefeller, and Scranton in action would be a yawn to Cronkite, easier than tying his wingtips—or so he thought.
The GOP Convention was expected to be a no-holds-barred clash among Republican Party factions. The party had been around for about a hundred and ten years and had been actively in search of an identity for the last fifty. Eisenhower had served as something of a placeholder in the debate from 1952 to 1960 because he was not, at heart, an ideological politician. Nixon, his vice president, had won the party endorsement in 1960 and ran a losing campaign. In 1964 the Republicans were more than ready for their long-awaited new era to begin. The driving movement of the campaign had been the ultraconservative juggernaut led by Goldwater. Rockefeller represented a more progressive approach. Scranton was the moderate, hoping to lead the party back to the centrist days of Wendell Willkie and Thomas Dewey. Going into the convention, the nominee-apparent Goldwater had a substantial lead in the primary vote, but a tough floor fight was expected. Any convention would be exciting enough for network news divisions, but the Cow Palace gathering was going to be one for the history books, and everybody knew it.
On July 10, Cronkite arrived at San Francisco International Airport with his family in tow. As Betsy took the kids to the Mark Hopkins Hotel, Walter met Fred Friendly to share a taxi to the Cow Palace. They were going to reconnoiter the CBS facilities specially constructed for the coming coverage. What seemed like a pleasant chore turned into a nightmare. Cronkite was “appalled” at the primitive plywood treehouse-like facilities. Far from being a command center, the setup looked like a gutted Mojave Desert motel room with a single phone. Where were the desks for his staff? Where was the fantastic maze of phone lines? The radical diminution of the anchorman’s role had not been presented to Cronkite according to CAFOC protocol. Mickelson hadn’t told Cronkite of the new roving-correspondent system in advance. “Walter exploded,” Bill Leonard recalled. According to the plan, Cronkite was supposed to have less to say, so that the weight of the coverage would be spread among more commentators and reporters. He negotiated small concessions, such as one regarding the physical proximity of the seating for himself and Sevareid, but as the convention began on July 13, Cronkite was wounded and angry, his volcanic emotions close to the surface. In a rare flare-up of envy, he thought Huntley-Brinkley had better digs.
When Cronkite learned that Sevareid would be getting a fair share of face time, he kicked the floor in disgust and let out a long, low moan. He felt that Sevareid, prone to break out in hives from nervousness when the red camera light went on, was ill suited to live convention television. To Cronkite, Sevareid was an albatross around his neck. Paley and Stanton didn’t agree. That November Friendly named Sevareid a national correspondent based in Washington, D.C., who would appear on the CBS Evening News nightly (instead of two or three times a week). Friendly went so far as to say that Sevareid—not Cronkite—was the James Reston or Walter Lippmann figure at the network. “The only time Walter was difficult was in dealing with Sevareid, whom he didn’t care for,” Small recalled. “Walter wasn’t happy about Sevareid getting to do a minute commentary at the back end of the Evening News. Eric was supposed to be used sparingly. When, for some breaking-news reason, Sevareid was bumped, Walter would say, ‘Good.’ ”
The major producing decisions about the convention coverage were slated to be made in the control booth, where Fred Friendly and Bill Leonard followed developments on the floor and then fed cues to Cronkite through an earphone. Paley didn’t often appear at conventions, but the 1964 coverage was crucially important to his network. Looming over the Cow Palace like Godzilla, Paley inevitably added to the tension for CBS staffers. A lot of concerned RNC bigwigs questioned Paley—a Republican—about Cronkite’s disdain for Goldwater. All Paley could say was that nobody did “story-line” coverage with the skill of Cronkite. He was the gold standard.
The CBS News protocol went as follows. When one of the floor reporters, such as Mudd, garnered a piece of breaking news or captured a key figure for an interview, he would tell the control booth. Hewitt would then cue Cronkite to turn and introduce the reporter. If it was a news spot, Cronkite would typically question the reporter to bring out certain points in view of other developments. Cronkite was adamant about doing the same with interviews. At the hub of news in the anchor booth, he often knew things that a reporter wouldn’t. For that reason, one of Cronkite’s techniques was to tell the reporter, on live television, to hand his earphones to the interviewee. Cronkite would then conduct the interview while the reporter stood aside holding the microphone and feeling stupid. It didn’t endear Cronkite to the team. Once, he directed Hughes Rudd, whom he brought to CBS News from UP in 1959, to surrender the earphones on the convention floor. “If the old son of a bitch does that to me one more time,” Rudd carped, “I’m going right up to the anchor booth and put the earphones on him and tell him to interview himself!”
Rudd’s comment reflected the rap against Cronkite within the CBS family following the JFK assassination: he was an air hog. Cronkite—“Iron Pants”—could stay on the air until the cows came home. He didn’t need or seem to want anyone else. In the glory days of radio, CBS’s Bob Trout had demonstrated the same ability to wax eloquent by the hour or the whole day. Cronkite, too, considered himself a storyteller as much as a newsman, pacing the presentation of the events. Empty distractions and dead-end digressions were as annoying to him as they presumably
were to the viewer. At times, though, in San Francisco, he took this vestige of his former anchor chair discretion one step further. Even as Hewitt cued him to introduce one correspondent or another for a floor report, Cronkite ignored the cue until, for one reason or another, it was too late for the report. He had done the same thing at other conventions, but then he was accorded the power to make decisions over content. At the Cow Palace, he was not. Needless to say, squabbles erupted during commercial breaks, an unprecedented occurrence on a Cronkite broadcast.
With Cronkite usurping interviews, refusing to encourage Sevareid, and rejecting some floor reports, he began, as Roger Mudd recalled, “swallowing up great chunks of air time for himself.” Being an air hog might not have been bad if Cronkite had been at his broadcasting best. He wasn’t. Momentum proved elusive to him. “Our convention coverage was the shambles I expected it to be,” Cronkite admitted in A Reporter’s Life, “and I certainly contributed to it by sinking into a slough of hopelessness as the week developed.” Like a circus juggler unable to catch his pins, Cronkite was a regular fumbling machine that July. It was awful to see a broadcaster of Cronkite’s pedigree tumble down a drainpipe in front of forty million viewers. “I was one of the correspondents who came to San Francisco wanting to beat NBC,” Rather recalled. “None of us did well from the convention floor. We got clobbered. To watch our old tapes of that convention is painful.”
Cronkite had other problems at the Cow Palace besides GOP leaders in San Francisco demonizing the press, especially the television news, to memorable effect. Angered by what they perceived as a biased media, taking cues from Goldwater, the conventioneers were openly antagonistic to correspondents. Lapel buttons critical of Huntley and Brinkley as well as Cronkite (“Stop Cronkite”) were hawked on the sidewalks outside the Cow Palace. A chorus of young men and women wandered around loudly singing a song with the refrain “The hell with Walter Cronkite.” NRA gun owners, bank presidents, small-town councilmen, churchgoers, corporate executives, John Birchers, military heroes, engineers, and oilmen all cried foul against CBS News (and other outfits). The bile of the right-wing movement was directed toward CBS News; the animosity grew out of Murrow’s going after McCarthy and Cronkite’s dissing Goldwater. It grew out of the standoff in the Deep South, where segregationists resented the New York City–based networks for using the power of television to reveal the ugly Jim Crow side of race relations. When Goldwater said at the convention, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” a few conservatives turned toward the CBS booth and flashed Cronkite the middle finger.
But Cronkite wasn’t alone in getting heckled. In San Francisco, David Brinkley and Chet Huntley were routinely threatened by a curious assortment of GOPers as they journeyed from their hotel to the Cow Palace, and took to speaking in loud tones about an omnipotent (if nonexistent) security detail awaiting them nearby. The NBC News duo almost needed it when Eisenhower—at the time a credentialed and highly paid commentator for ABC—uncharacteristically vilified “sensation-seeking columnists and commentators” from the podium. The phrase from Ike transformed the delegates into an angry mob, hollering in what Brinkley called “a deep, hoarse roar of hatred.” It was unlike anything he—or nearly anyone else since Marie Antoinette—had ever seen. “The delegates,” Brinkley wrote, “left their chairs and rushed over to the edge of the convention floor just below where Huntley and I and the other networks’ news people were working high up in glass booths over the floor, several of them in their anger and haste stumbling past the chairs, shouting at us and waving their fists. . . . I don’t know what they would have accomplished had they been able to get to us, but they were furious enough to do anything.”
Chris Wallace, the son of then–CBS Morning Show host Mike Wallace who would go on to host a highly successful Sunday-morning talk show for the Fox News Channel in 2003, was an eyewitness to the anti-media furor. Cronkite had hired Chris as his personal assistant. Besides having Mike Wallace as his dad, Chris Wallace had Bill Leonard, head of CBS News’ Election Unit, and Cronkite’s direct boss, as his stepfather. Only sixteen years old at the time, Chris worked diligently at the San Francisco convention. It was a perfect fit. Cronkite had known Chris since he was a little kid interested in his Triumph TR-3 races at road rallies in Westchester County. The Wallaces and Cronkites also sailed together around Long Island Sound. Adding to the familial element, Chris Wallace was dating Nancy Cronkite. “She was my first girlfriend,” he recalled. “You know, those were the days when everyone used to bring their families to these events. So I got my first convention job with Walter while dating his daughter.”
Wallace was the gofer for Cronkite’s CBS booth at the Cow Palace, getting coffee and sharpening pencils for the famed anchorman. But nothing seemed to go well for Cronkite. Wallace recalled being in the CBS booth when Eisenhower denounced sensation-seeking columnists and commentators and all the Republicans started stomping the floor and shaking their fists at the anchor booths. Eric Sevareid, sitting in the CBS booth, was the target of epithets hurled from the conservative crowd. Making matters even worse, Wallace felt he was stuck in the middle of a feud between his stepfather and Cronkite. “Walter would just ignore directions and keep talking,” Wallace recalled. “He was kind of infamous for that anyway—I mean he was a great correspondent and a great journalist, but he was something of an air hog. And there was quite a power struggle between my stepfather and Cronkite about this. In any case, the convention ended and the ratings were poor.”
The convention was indeed a ratings disappointment for CBS News. Some sadistic NBC executive scotch-taped CBS News’ paltry Nielsen ratings to Cronkite’s convention booth door. Cronkite found no humor in the gesture. The Tiffany Network was an embarrassing distant second to NBC. Nevertheless, the presumption was that the same CBS lineup would go to Atlantic City, where the Democrats would hold their convention in mid-August, to fight a new match. Trying to cheer everybody up, Cronkite said that with flashier graphics and a better workstation, CBS could beat NBC the next round. President Johnson would surely give Cronkite preferential treatment. The CAFOC crew of Leonard and his assistants would work assiduously with Cronkite in the intervening weeks to iron out all the kinks.
All of that might have happened, except that the problems at San Francisco were serious enough to concern the chairman of the corporation. Paley was out of patience with CBS News’ second-place position in convention coverage and appalled by Cronkite’s boorish behavior. Why had Cronkite brought his family to San Francisco, as if the convention were a Disneyland vacation? Couldn’t his anchorman have tried to make peace with Goldwater over the German flap? Why had Eisenhower—his ultimate hero—seemingly turned sour on CBS? Paley called Friendly and Leonard to a meeting in late July, back in New York City. Frank Stanton asked the first question, as Leonard recalled in In the Storm of the Eye:
“What the hell happened to Walter?”
“Walter wasn’t quite himself,” Friendly offered weakly.
“Why not?” snapped Paley. “Was he sick?”
“No,” I said, “I don’t think so.”
“Well,” said the chairman, “I thought the idea was that Walter was going to do a little less, and you were going to spread the load around, so the pace would pick up. Wasn’t that the idea, didn’t you tell me that’s what you all had in mind, Fred?”
Fred looked at me, as if to say, You tell ’em.
“Well, sir, that was the idea, but Walter sort of . . . I guess you could say . . . resisted it.”
“What does that mean?”
Leonard described how Cronkite would sometimes ignore instructions to go to a floor report from Mudd or Rather. He continued, in his recollection of the conversation:
The chairman’s voice rose perilously. “You mean he would get what amounted to an order and he wouldn’t obey it?! Is that what would happen? Did you actually give him orders and he wouldn’t carry them out?”
I realized we were sinking fast.
“I wouldn’t put it quite that way,” Fred interposed. “You know, Walter is Walter.”
“I don’t know anything about ‘Walter is Walter,’ ” snapped the chairman. “It sounds to me as if Walter wouldn’t do what he was told and you weren’t able to do anything about it!” Paley had hit the nail on the head.
Friendly and I fell silent, praying that his outburst might put an end to the matter.
It was just the beginning.
“Who do you think could replace Walter?” Paley asked a few minutes later.
Paley, brooding angrily, knew about media stars and their egotistical conviction that they had a unique understanding of the TV audience and thus had to have their own way. In the recent past, Paley had tangled with Jackie Gleason, Arthur Godfrey, Lucille Ball, and Jack Benny—and while he would have liked to win every time, he often had to capitulate to their diva demands. The difference was that each of those stars had top-rated shows; Cronkite didn’t. The tooth-and-claw dictates of television therefore made Cronkite expendable. Paley didn’t want to hear about what a great job Cronkite had done during the JFK assassination drama. That was eight months ago. He’d blown San Francisco. “One trouble with this business is it’s like Hollywood,” Cronkite grumbled to Peter Benchley of Newsweek a day after the news broke that he was being dropped as the CBS anchorman for the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. “No one tells you—you can’t get an exact reading of what’s going on.”
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