Cronkite

by Douglas Brinkley

  Fred Friendly and Bill Leonard flew out to the San Diego yacht basin, where Cronkite was vacationing with his family at Hotel Del Coronado. They had come all the way from New York to inform him of his demotion from the approaching Atlantic City convention, and of the promotion of Bob Trout and Roger Mudd as co-anchors. Cronkite was devastated. Reporter Tom Wolfe, in a New York Herald Tribune article, wrote that Friendly and Leonard had “expressions on their faces like the college-liberal doctors at the cancer clinic who believe every patient is owed the simple human dignity of being told the truth.” Cronkite also found out from a mole that CBS’s ad agency, Batten, Barton, Durstine, & Osborn, was told to pull his name from the print ad campaign that fall season. A gutting was taking place, and he was the fish. He couldn’t believe that Paley had the audacity to sideline him. All Cronkite was offered by Fred Friendly for Atlantic City were a few interviews with a random U.S. senator or housewife from Peoria; he rejected that humiliating toss of a bone. Cronkite tried to stand up straight when Friendly told him the news, but inside of him everything was painted black. Newsweek ran a comical photo of the ascendant Trout with Cronkite next to him under the caption: “The anchorman was hoisted.” When Benchley asked Cronkite if he was going to fulfill his recent nine-year commitment to CBS, Cronkite responded affirmatively, but with the arch qualifier that “any contract is breakable.”

  The news that Paley had deposed Cronkite from Atlantic City blew up into a major news story itself. Newspapers across the country carried long pieces full of trenchant commentary and analysis. No one wrote about the incident more succinctly than Wolfe, exclaiming, “Walter Cronkite—demoted!” Adding insult to injury, Friendly told The New York Times that Sevareid and Reasoner would also play larger roles in Atlantic City while Cronkite stewed in the doghouse. The common assumption was that if Trout and Mudd were a hit, Cronkite would next lose his job on the CBS Evening News. In fact, Friendly feared that Cronkite would move first and quit the network altogether.

  During the last week of July, Cronkite was inundated with interview requests. Though in low spirits, he held his emotions in check. “We took a clobbering in San Francisco,” he told Robert J. Williams of The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin with appealing frankness, “and it seems perfectly reasonable that management at CBS would like to try something else to regain the audience.” Privately, Cronkite was far more irate. The Times ran a leaked story saying that Cronkite might not be allowed to anchor Election Night in November and that Paley was thinking about firing him. Americans had revered Cronkite in the wake of the Kennedy assassination and now he was headed toward obscurity like Douglas Edwards. What saved Cronkite was his loyal viewership. Letters came pouring into CBS headquarters by the thousands, saying Don’t you dare fire Walter. A Cronkite counterinsurgency was underfoot. Doing damage control, Friendly spun an old cliché for public consumption: “We’ve got a team here—the best team in electronic journalism. We just change the batting order from time to time.”

  Cronkite recognized that, in those terms, he was still batting cleanup: anchoring the CBS Evening News and hosting The Twentieth Century. He astutely saw that he had an opportunity to solidify his power if he moved his CBS Evening News to Atlantic City during the convention, so he and Hewitt could broadcast their regular 6:30 p.m. EST show there. Retreat was not an option. CBS producer Ernest Leiser had the temerity to tell a New York Times reporter that Cronkite, like Bartleby the Scrivener in Herman Melville’s short story, had decided he preferred to broadcast from Atlantic City instead of New York. Talk about hubris. “I’m not bitter yet,” Cronkite said. “But I might be later.”

  When Paley heard about the Cronkite plan to broadcast the half-hour CBS Evening News from Atlantic City, he grew choleric. While Leonard tried to defend Cronkite, Paley would have none of it. When Leonard threatened to quit CBS, Paley said, “Well you can quit or not quit, but I want Cronkite out of the anchor booth in Atlantic City.” Leonard tried to tell Cronkite to go zen, not Bartleby. Cronkite rejected the advice. Chris Wallace was horrified: if Cronkite squared off against Leonard, his stepfather, and Paley, Chris couldn’t keep making romantic progress with Cronkite’s daughter. “From my worm’s-eye view of history,” Wallace later joked, “I kept thinking this is really going to screw up my relationship with Nancy.”

  Murrow used to tell his Boys that any self-respecting journalist who vigorously investigated stories and challenged bosses should always be willing to clear his or her desk in twenty minutes flat. To Cronkite, who had three children to support, that notion was arrogant bravado. The key to broadcast journalism, he believed, was survival. His strategy was public contrition followed by the stubborn refusal to play a minor role in New Jersey. Cronkite admitted to having been too hard on Goldwater. And then he bore down to stick it out like Bartleby the Scrivener, to weather the storm. Instead of clearing his anchor desk, Cronkite set up in Atlantic City and proceeded to deliver the CBS Evening News in martyrdom even though he had lost the convention assignment to Paley’s underlings, Mudd and Trout. Taking aim at both Huntley-Brinkley and Trout-Mudd, Cronkite opined that a “two-man team is less efficient than one.” He also admitted that he had “fifth person feelers” headhunting a new job for him away from CBS.

  When Gould of The New York Times praised CBS for shelving Cronkite even before the Mudd-Trout debut, Paley smiled. Cronkite was about to be left behind like an old junker, encrusted in the old-style UP wire journalism and solo-flight anchoring to which he clung out of habit. The assumption was that he would soon be replaced on the Evening News by the surging duo of Trout-Mudd. At best, Cronkite would revert to hosting The Twentieth Century and covering space launches, which no one could take away from him post-Shepard, Grissom, and Glenn. Paley now envisioned his news division with Cronkite gone: Trout-Mudd would be carried by the critical momentum of the Atlantic City convention to ratings victory on the Evening News.

  Right before the Atlantic City convention began on August 24, Don Hewitt, in an act of solidarity with Cronkite, asked to be relieved of his duties helping Trout and Mudd. He would instead work only with Cronkite, whom Lady Bird Johnson had agreed to do a Person to Person–style exclusive interview at the Texas ranch (she willingly shared personal details of her First Family life like never before, creating buzz). Dick West of UPI helped the Cronkite cause by lambasting the Mudd and Trout performance on day one of the convention. West detected on-air jockeying for supremacy between the CBS co-anchors, something he’d never seen with ABC’s duo of Howard K. Smith and Edward P. Morgan. Nor did Trout-Mudd pull off the warmth of Walter Cronkite flying solo. “Once after Mudd had given the viewers some information,” related West, “Trout responded with some contradictory tidbit of his own, which he described as ‘the exception that proves the rule.’ ” Critic Richard Martin of The Salt Lake Tribune likewise thought that Mudd’s “rather desperate attempts at being funny were contrived. . . . This preoccupation with showmanship, I feel, tends to cloud, rather than clarify convention proceedings.” A whole line of critics, in fact, countered Gould’s view that Trout-Mudd had “stylish punch”: Cronkite had anchored seven previous presidential nominating conventions and three presidential elections and there was no good reason to sideline the still-blooming legend in 1964.

  With the power of the dial, TV audiences had a similar reaction. According to results provided by Arbitron, CBS garnered its highest share in the first half-hour of the first night’s coverage. That figure dropped as the evening and the week wore on. Overall, NBC walked away with its highest convention ratings ever. CBS’s woeful numbers were even lower than they had been in San Francisco with Cronkite as helmsman. Paley, in retreat, not wanting Cronkite and Hewitt to defect, quietly dissolved the team of Trout and Mudd. He had buyer’s remorse. Friendly, Leonard, and Midgley later claimed that they had been reluctant participants in Cronkite’s 1964 unseating. These were ahistorical claims of convenience, a distancing from a failed coup. Feeling hung out to dry, Mudd considered
a career change, perhaps teaching journalism at a university. While he served as scapegoat for the “Cronkite loyalists,” of whom there were suddenly many, the blame actually rested on Bill Paley’s shoulders. Brooks Atkinson, critic-at-large for The New York Times, wrote a column ten days after the Atlantic City convention, castigating CBS for its lousy treatment of Cronkite. “By brutally dumping and publicly humiliating its ablest newsman,” he wrote, “it equated [political] conventions with the box office.”

  Paley, in his 1979 memoir As It Happened, didn’t mention the abrupt change in convention anchors, but he did pay tribute to Cronkite as “the stalwart kingpin,” choosing to forget how he neutered his star anchorman in 1964. “Walter is so objective, careful, and fair in his presentation of news,” Paley said, “that he has been characterized—if not immortalized—with the oft-heard line: ‘If Walter says it, it must be so.’ ” Paley’s change of opinion was understandable; by 1979, Cronkite was his North Star, blazing a way through a galaxy of lesser lights. Yet other news anchors contemporary with him were just as objective and as fair. Others shared the qualities Paley praised in Cronkite, his “sheer hard work, attention to detail, and a sense of journalistic honesty, integrity and fairness.”

  It took some kind of magic to get eighty-sixed by Paley only to become a broadcasting folk hero because the public missed your mug and the First Lady rallied in support of your cause. The Cronkite game plan was to outlast all the Mudd-Trout commotion, in a defiant act of refusal, then massacre his in-house rivals when they weren’t looking. He believed that for all of the spectacle and entertainment in TV news, there was still a flickering hunger for Main Street authenticity. “Walter said, ‘I’m a newsman and I’m going to cover the story,’ ” Chris Wallace recalled. “This was a masterstroke. Because the scuttlebutt was that Cronkite, in truth, was a serious print newsman at heart. His defiance in Atlantic City, his refusal to throw in the towel as a newsman covering a story, endeared him to all the print reporters who still saw TV as a playing field for pretty boys.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Civil Rights and Project Gemini

  COLOR TV—RAISKY’S TOUCH—THE GOLDEN HOUR—TRUST OF SOCOLOW—PALEY WANTS RESULTS—COVERING CIVIL RIGHTS—EQUAL RIGHTS AT CBS—TAKING ON BULL CONNOR AND SHERIFF CLARK—GIVE AIRTIME TO MLK—HUGHES RUDD GOES SOUTH—ONWARD TO CAPE KENNEDY—LOVING GEMINI—THE GEE-WHIZ FACTOR—DEATH AND DESTRUCTION AND APOLLO II—BOMBINGHAM—DEATH OF MURROW—BEFRIENDING VON BRAUN—RATTLING AND ROLLING AT CAPE KENNEDY

  The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite ran its first color broadcast on August 19, 1965, and switched to color permanently on January 31, 1966. “No one has a larger stake in going into color than I have,” Cronkite told a New York Daily News media critic with a smile. “I’m much slenderer in tints than in black and white.”

  A huge effort was undertaken at CBS News to make the Cronkite set appealing to the viewer for both special events and the Evening News. The talented set designer Hugh Raisky, who started out in the mailroom in the late 1950s, was hired to give CBS’s space coverage a “solar system” look. He even took astronomy courses that taught him how to pioneer in space art. More than any other person, Raisky was the visual guru at CBS who gave Cronkite the modern set design that proved so durable and fetching. “A lot of New York designers steered clear of the newsrooms,” Raisky recalled. “But I had wanted to be a political cartoonist, so getting to be in the Cronkite newsroom, designing sets for everything from the 1964 political conventions to the 1992 debates, became my calling.”

  All day long Cronkite’s Evening News team careened around him like moths to a flame. Whatever Cronkite’s top five stories were, right down the pecking order, become America’s top five stories of each and every weekday. “There are no back pages,” Cronkite explained to Time magazine, “for our type of journalism.” And there was zero tolerance for error. The young Twentieth Century series writer Jon Wilkman recalled what a grueling taskmaster Cronkite could be. He’d make Wilkman cough up his research, making him prove that Atlanta was in Georgia and Rome was in Italy. “You better have it right,” Cronkite snapped one afternoon, “because it’s my face hanging out there.”

  The CBS workplace was notably small—the newsroom just paces away from Cronkite’s own glassed-in, venetian-blind-covered cubicle. The pipe-puffing Cronkite liked feeling in control of the news organization, typing copy, scribbling notes, working the phones, cracking lighthearted jokes through a haze of smoke. As the day advanced, the tension became palpable, and a NASA-like countdown ensued. Moments before airtime, Cronkite would take a quick glance in a handheld mirror, making sure his hair was slicked back properly. While getting a dab of powder on his face, he slipped on his suit jacket with just ten seconds left on the clock. Order miraculously emerged from broadcast center chaos. A lockdown now occurred. Nobody would make a peep. Cronkite would move his chair an inch, sit up straight, and glance down at his notes. At first gander, he looked like a well-intentioned midwestern newspaper editor preparing to inform out-of-town visitors about that day’s local happenings. The camera zeroed in on him.

  “Good evening,” Cronkite said, and the broadcast began.

  Along with Cronkite and Hewitt, the other essential facilitator of the Evening News was thirty-five-year-old Sandy Socolow, who knew the anchorman’s likes and dislikes better than anybody at CBS. The buoyant, round-faced Socolow, who was raised in rural Connecticut but spent his teenage years in New York City, was an odd mix of small-town reporter and big-city editor. While attending the City College of New York and editing The Campus student newspaper, Socolow moonlighted as a copy boy at The New York Times, alongside soon-to-be legendary journalist extraordinaire Gay Talese. Drafted into the U.S. Army during the Korean War, Socolow ended up serving with the Voice of the UN Command, working to dissuade Asian listeners from the lures of Communist totalitarianism. “We tried beaming propaganda into North Korea and China from Tokyo,” Socolow recalled.

  After the war, he worked all over the Far East for the International News Service (the Hearst wire service that later became the “I” in UPI). Then, in 1957, his résumé impressed CBS, and the network hired him as a stringer. It was while working as a studio producer with Cronkite on the 11:00 p.m. Sunday News Special that their lifelong friendship blossomed. By 1962, Socolow (or “Soc” as his nickname went) was Cronkite’s all-purpose alter ego. He would remain Cronkite’s right-hand man until 1974, when he took over CBS News’ Washington bureau.

  On November 3, 1964, Cronkite shelled out state-by-state projections that proved to be accurate. (He had pollster Lou Harris to thank.) The Huntley-Brinkley Report, on the other hand, that beloved Laurel-and-Hardy news act, fumbled over the importance of the many different election numbers they were being fed over the wires. The predominant call, that Johnson would be victorious over Goldwater, was one of the easiest to make in U.S. history (the eventual electoral vote count was 486 to 52), but CBS, at 9:01 p.m. EST, was first to say it on television. In fact, it was the first to announce most of the important races during the evening. Cronkite, adrenaline racing, told a CBS reporter at the Election Night scene in Austin, Texas—where LBJ had voted and was now following the results—to hand his earphones to the president-elect. Lyndon Johnson gladly took the earphones when he was told, “Walter Cronkite wants to say hello.”

  Although Johnson’s KCBS-Austin was in trusteeship, Cronkite knew that the president would rather give the big “I won” interview to the Tiffany Network than to either NBC or ABC. Johnson and Cronkite spoke casually with each other, like a couple of ranch hands leaning against a fence. Cronkite’s LBJ interview was a coup for CBS News and an indication that Cronkite, a reporter central to his times, was back full strength. Gossip columnist Walter Winchell, a long-standing Cronkite fan, beamed, “LBJ’s phone chat with CBS News star newsman Walter Cronkite (from Austin) certified the respect Americans have for the commentator.” The headline for Jack Gould’s review of Election Night
coverage in The New York Times was music to Cronkite’s ears: “CBS by a Landslide: Network’s Coverage of the Election Is Called Far Superior to Its Rival.”

  Not all journalists were impressed with Cronkite’s ability to score exclusive interviews with powerful players such as President Johnson by “hale yeah, fine fellow” tactics and various quaint ways. Many CBS reporters—especially Alexander Kendrick in London and Daniel Schorr in Berlin—resented Cronkite’s bigfooting anchorman routine. Robert Pierpoint remained suspicious of his cozy relationship with the Kennedys and the Johnsons. Whenever a colleague intimated that Cronkite was behaving like a sycophant of those in power, the anchorman stared back in surprise. He insisted that his interview style with everyone was the same: “fair play.” If CBS News thought it needed a knockout smear artist to anchor the news, then he’d quit the network. “We used to call Walter ‘Mr. Softball,’ ” Pierpoint explained. “If you were a president or a general, Walter turned submissive.”

  Following the LBJ exclusive, the unanimous conclusion in the media world was that Cronkite wasn’t the problem with the CBS Evening News. Paley concurred. During the last months of 1964, the always-insistent Don Hewitt was replaced by Ernest Leiser as executive producer–director of the program. Hewitt moved to a newly created position—as executive producer of “developing and innovating a new kind of news broadcast—the ‘live documentary.’ ” In 1968 this “live documentary” premiered as the phenomenally successful 60 Minutes (airing Sunday evenings). Leiser, who began his career with Stars and Stripes during World War II, was a former correspondent with Collier’s Weekly and the Overseas News Agency and a longtime executive with CBS. And he was a Cronkite crony. While Dan Rather thought Leiser had a blunt, Broderick Crawford–like manner, Cronkite treasured him as the ultimate foxhole companion with more than twenty years’ experience as a foreign correspondent, editor, and producer.