In the aftermath of the 1964 convention experimentation by Friendly, Leiser was, if anything, anti–show business regarding the CBS Evening News. He tended to share Cronkite’s core philosophy that the first obligation of the dinnertime news was to produce a crystal-clear communiqué, neither sanctimonious nor sluggish, more courtly than anything else, ensuring that viewers were aware of the day’s events. Leiser considered Cronkite’s great strength his tone: rigorously unpretentious. Cronkite viewers wanted an unslanted broadcast. “I never pretended that we could do anything more than be a headline service,” he explained. “I felt that the headlines, that is 15 or 20 seconds of information on all the news of the day, were more important than covering some of the news of the day and then an in-depth look at one or another of the story of the day. And that created a tension. This dialogue went on constantly.”
The tension existed because the 1960s, more than other decades, presented bullet-holed news stories that couldn’t be explained in a couple of fast paragraphs or even in a couple of minutes. Southeast Asia, most pointedly, was more than a series of military actions that could be defined by battles, casualty counts, and the give-and-take of territory. What to do in Vietnam, which was then covered by Bernard Kalb of CBS in Tokyo, led to confrontations throughout American society—including the Cronkite home. Kathy and Nancy, in their late teens, became involved with the antiwar youth movement, protesting escalating U.S. involvement in Vietnam and lashing out at their parents’ indifference. Cronkite, as CBS’s leading newsman, cautious and watchful, was tardy both at CBS and in his own household in recognizing the depth of the Vietnam story as a reflection of American values and the government’s cohesion with the citizens it served. “Having survived the 1964 convention brush-up, Walter was in the throes of a long, hard slog to overtake Huntley-Brinkley,” Rather recalled. “Because CBS did well with the Kennedy assassination and space—special events—they wanted Cronkite to own big stories, to flood the zone with them; that would be our franchise. Only when the Vietnam War became a CBS franchise did Cronkite pay keen attention to the happenings in Southeast Asia.”
As news, the civil rights movement circa 1964 was ideal drama for CBS News to be following raptly. Ernie Leiser had set up CBS bureaus in Dallas, Atlanta, and New Orleans primarily to cover the freedom struggle. For a decade, starting in 1954, television had led the way in presenting the problems of race in the United States and, as Cronkite saw it, in unlocking the closed society of the Old Confederacy. Once the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite and The Huntley-Brinkley Report on NBC went to a half hour in the fall of 1963, television covered the civil rights movement with greater intensity. Throughout the segregated South, CBS in particular was denounced by white supremacists, who labeled the network communist. A defiant CBS wanted to own the civil rights franchise, to scoop the great NBC reporter John Chancellor, who was on the beat with stories from Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama. The CBS affiliate in Atlanta, WAGA, stoutly refused to feed civil rights stories to New York. Leiser had assigned the strong-willed Rather, to run the southern bureau in New Orleans, twenty-three states (plus Mexico and Central America). A sense of awe welled up in Rather over everything Dr. King did. Rather, serving as a friend to the movement, helped King understand which nonviolent protest stunts would make the CBS Evening News broadcast and which wouldn’t; Cronkite never knew about this. “I couldn’t do feeds from Dallas to Atlanta,” Rather explained about the tension. “New Orleans was the only dependable city. WWL took our civil rights feeds. It was owned by the Catholic Church, and they were sympathetic to us.”
The net effect of CBS News—both radio and TV—on the freedom struggle proved immeasurable. Dr. King had a genius for setting up foils such as the brutal Sheriff James G. Clark Jr. of Dallas County, Alabama, who used cattle prods, bullwhips, and clubs on protesters. Ditto for Bull Connor, commissioner of public safety in Birmingham. “If anyone got manipulated by King,” reporter Jack Bass noted, “it wasn’t the media—it was Bull Connor and Sheriff Clark.” CBS News became a powerful agent in conveying to the world the horrors of the Jim Crow South. These CBS segments were excruciating theater, the high drama of frenzied dogs, tear gas, and billy clubs causing viewers to wince in shame and disbelief. To Dr. King, the CBS eye represented the cavalry coming to the rescue. He staged marches, sit-ins, and demonstrations timed to get maximum television coverage. “To the movement,” Julian Bond recalled, “Cronkite was the voice of God on TV. Murrow, Howard K. Smith, Rather, Rudd, Cronkite, and Sevareid helped wake America up to the problems in the South.”
To Bond’s point, John Hendricks, the future founder of the Discovery Channel, grew up in Huntsville, Alabama (a.k.a. Rocket City), in the 1960s. Having hailed from West Virginia, a United Mine Workers stronghold (and where President Kennedy was warmly embraced as the new FDR), Hendricks was startled to encounter a neo-Confederate culture fueled with bigotry toward blacks. His solace from all the local hatemongering he experienced at school was to watch the enlightened CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. “My father was very much a liberal in his thinking,” Hendricks recalled. “We felt totally out of sync with the racism in Alabama. Television was our way to connect with a large national community who clearly knew [that] what George Wallace was doing in Alabama was repugnant. Because of Walter Cronkite, I didn’t feel isolated. Every night, we watched Cronkite, including when he turned to the thirty-minute news format, to follow the civil rights struggle in our own state.”
Just how much power Cronkite had to sway public opinion became self-evident when the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was firebombed on September 15, 1963. Four young black girls were murdered. Eugene Patterson, the editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial page, wrote a heartrending column that lambasted the “sick criminals” and “politicians who beat the kettle of heat” and “little men who have their nigger jokes.” Cronkite thought Patterson had written an evergreen column for the ages and directed a CBS crew to film him reading it aloud as a camera scanned the church rubble. Patterson thought that the CBS Evening News might run a five- or ten-second sound bite of him. But Cronkite went to town on his telecast, giving Patterson full say:
I tuned it in and, sure enough, Cronkite had given up a huge chunk of his time for me, just sitting at my desk [reading] the column from beginning to end. That was the beginning of my education as to the impact of television. Within a week or two I received close to two thousand letters, telegrams, or phone calls from all over the nation. When a newspaper editor gets 20 letters he usually feels he has scored big with a column. The magnified reach that television brought to this piece bewildered me. For every one who felt moved to communicate there must have been a hundred or a thousand who responded [in spirit] but stayed silent.
The CBS reporter whom Cronkite tapped into most on civil rights issues was Hughes Rudd, a native of Waco, Texas. Cronkite hired the thirty-eight-year-old Rudd away from UP in 1959 to be his writer. Rudd had attended the University of Missouri from 1938 to 1941 before enlisting in the U.S. Army during World War II. Cronkite was awed by Rudd’s bravery in flying Piper Cubs as an artillery spotter in Africa and Europe. He was awarded a Silver Star, a Purple Heart, and six Air Medals. After the war, Rudd wrote for The Kansas City Star and The Minneapolis Star; that’s when Cronkite poached him from print journalism. Sardonic and a marvelous raconteur, Rudd was tasked by Cronkite with serving abroad in Moscow, Bonn, Berlin, and Vietnam. At Cronkite’s suggestion, the gravelly voiced Rudd also opened CBS News’ southern bureau in Atlanta, spearheading coverage of protest marches and sit-ins. “Back then you were really on your own,” Rudd recalled of CBS in the early 1960s. “You told New York what you were gonna do. You didn’t have to run all over hell because somebody in New York got up in the morning with a bright idea. You didn’t have any of this nonsense with ‘bureau managers.’ You just had a reporter . . . and a camera crew.”
Without question, Cronkite belonged in the pantheon of
pro–civil rights reporters who made a historic difference in ending institutionalized racial discrimination in the South. Cronkite’s CBS Evening News stage manager was African American vaudevillian Jimmy Wall, who eventually became known to schoolchildren of the era as Mr. Baxter on CBS’s Captain Kangaroo. Wall joined Captain Kangaroo as a stage manager in 1962, and from then on he worked as the stage manager on several other CBS shows, including the Evening News, for nearly fifty years. Cronkite depended on Wall to count down the minutes to airtime in his rich baritone voice five nights each week. “TWO MINUTES TO AIR,” he would shout out, all the way down to “IN FIVE.” Wall, in essence, was the eyes and ears of Cronkite’s director. A natural-born storyteller, Wall regaled Cronkite over the years with stories of bootlegger stills during Prohibition, USO shows in Europe, and hanging out with Jackie Robinson in Brooklyn. They were almost the same age and shared a long and prosperous history at the Tiffany Network.
Nobody thought Cronkite harbored prejudice. Although Cronkite was an ally of Dr. King, some liberals were irritated by how the term negro was used on the network. This came to a head in 1966, when CBS correspondent Steve Rowan reported on “negroes” in Vietnam and then generically referred to them as “men,” rather than giving their surnames, as was done with white soldiers. One of Cronkite’s assistants flagged the Rowan report as discriminatory. Cronkite, embarrassed by the accusation, blanched as he read an irate letter from Mrs. Allie F. B. Stanford in Willingboro, New Jersey: “The CBS Evening News on this date [August 3, 1966] is not yet over as a matter of fact, not half of it is over and I am sick, sick, sick! I am so infuriated that I am even nauseated,” she wrote Cronkite. “The report by Steve Rowan from Andrews AFB, MD referred to the Negro wounded only four (4) days ago as ‘this man.’ When two others—whites—were interviewed with their names and hometowns on screen. ‘This man’ happens to have been coming from the same place, wounded for the same purpose and in the same damn way as the whites were!”
The CBS Evening News was being accused of treating blacks, specifically Vietnam servicemen, as distinctly second-class citizens. A concerned Dick Salant ordered an overview of all CBS News broadcasts to make sure they were being, as the 1980s phrase puts it, “politically correct.” Mrs. Stanford had scored a policy change. (While Cronkite supported the major equal rights movements of the day—for women, gays, Native Americans, Hispanics, et al.—the idea of political correctness seemed to him a kind of language-police fascism.) CBS correspondent Ed Bradley, first hired to WCBS Radio in 1967, believed that Cronkite and Rudd were the “least bigoted guys in media.” And it wasn’t just because Cronkite aired broadcasts helpful to the NAACP, SNCC, and CORE. Or that he was an early promoter of Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a national holiday. “Black people can detect prejudice in a person,” Bradley explained. “We’ve got radar. When I ate lunch with Walter and Rudd, which wasn’t often enough, they didn’t think of me as a black correspondent. I was their friend and colleague, Ed. It was that simple.”
Anytime Cronkite did a pro–civil rights segment in the 1960s or 1970s, the CBS switchboard would light up with angry callers. Cronkite’s chief manager was a tough Brooklyn Jewish woman named Hinda Glasser. “You didn’t want to mess with Hinda,” CBS writer Ron Bonn recalled. “She’d peel off a couple layers of your skin if she got mad at you.” But when she took anti-black calls from the Deep South, a different Glasser emerged. “The content of the calls, invariably, was ‘nigger,’ ‘nigger,’ ‘nigger,’ with a couple of ‘kikes’ thrown in for good measure,” Bonn explained. “And Hinda, all sweetness, would tell the caller, ‘I’m sure Mr. Cronkite would like to hear your opinion in person; do you mind if I put you on hold until he can come to the phone?’ Well, no, the caller never minded.” The Bell System office phones had five buttons for different lines. From 7:00 to 7:30 p.m., Bonn, Socolow, Benjamin, and others would sit in the fishbowl watching the buttons from all those angry racist callers blinking, as they waited for their chance to tell Walter Cronkite off. “When we left to go home at 7:30,” Bonn later laughed, “most of those lights were still flashing.”
By 1965, Cronkite’s favorite beat, space, was satisfying in all the ways that other stories of the day, such as Vietnam and civil rights, were confusing. The Gemini program, the follow-up to Mercury, marked the return of manned space flight after Alan Shepard’s historic suborbital flight in 1961 and Glenn’s orbits in 1962. Gemini would test a wide variety of technological feats in anticipation of the first moon shot. The program began with unmanned flights in April 1964 and January 1965, hitting full stride in March 1965 when Gus Grissom and John Young went up in Gemini 3; there were four others that year. Five Gemini launches went ahead in 1966. Each shot was different from the one before, presenting its own engineering marvels and risks. Gemini had four primary and newsworthy goals that served as stepping-stones to the Moon: subjecting two men to a long-duration flight, working out the rendezvous and docking (linkup) technique, practicing “space walks,” and perfecting reentry from orbit and landing at predicted target areas.
Cronkite would be at Cape Kennedy for all the Gemini flights. This was not just news, it was history presented on a schedule so a CBS news crew could be camera-ready for liftoff. It was possible to prepare for Gemini missions. In the 1950s, when Cronkite had been the host of You Are There, he pretended to be a newsman on the scene at the high points of history. Now, in 1965, he was on a historic scene, this time a real one, as the rockets blasted off from Florida. With each liftoff, another chapter in space exploration began. Fuel sources, new docking, navigation, and propulsion systems were all initiated and mastered, as was long-term “station-keeping.” The most exciting flight was that of Gemini 4. On June 3, 1965, Edward White became the first American to walk in space, leaving the confines of the space capsule for a twenty-one-minute walk in the infinite void. (The first person to walk in space was a Russian cosmonaut, Alexey Arkhipovich Leonov, on March 18 of that year.) “Jules Bergman of ABC and Walter Cronkite of CBS were the iron men of the day in television,” Jack Gould of The New York Times wrote, “carrying the burden of running the report practically by themselves.”
Critics praised Cronkite’s relaxed cadence during the Gemini missions. He didn’t saturate the air with extraneous babble. He spoke only when his voice added to the outer space imagery. As he had learned in convention coverage since 1952, it wasn’t necessary to underscore what the viewer was seeing. The governing atmosphere during blastoffs on CBS was mostly prolonged silence. Then the stolid Cronkite would calmly pick up the storyline of the nerve-racking event. “One minute into the flight; she seems to be going well—very well,” he emphasized quietly on June 3. At times, he might have been providing hushed commentary on a golf match. “There’s the contrail that sets in at a given altitude. . . . It’s approaching Max-Q—that’s maximum dynamic pressure. Coming right now. Going through it right now. . . . Seems to be safely through.” Cronkite relaxed noticeably with that observation and brightened, though his tone was still muted. “Safely through the first dangerous point after liftoff and it looks like this baby’s going . . .”
Always exposing a vein of optimism, he was television’s best physics explainer, with an amateur’s grasp of the concepts and the terminology combined with a perfect understanding of the science deficit of the Tube-watching public. He knew when to be vague—“There’s the contrail that sets in at a given altitude”—so as not to dizzy the viewer with statistics or unnecessary detail. Viewers could see the muscles relax on Cronkite’s face when all the protocol necessary for a successful launch proceeded without a hitch. Before the first Gemini launch of 1965, The Chicago Daily News asked Cronkite how he prepared. “I don’t attempt to commit anything to memory, but somehow it gets there,” he said. “I learn by doing; I don’t learn by reading. I’ve been to the basic sources and tried to talk to people involved in the project. I’ve been to McDonnell Aircraft in St. Louis, where the capsule was made; to Houston, where the astronaut
s live; to the Martin Company near Baltimore, where the booster was built; to the Goddard Space Center. And I’ve been at Cape Kennedy for this week—talking, taking notes, reading. Then I sit down and write page after page of notes for my background material, organizing it chronologically—pre-launch, launch, orbit, etc. And then what happens is that after I’ve done all that, it’s all there in my mind. I haven’t consciously attempted to memorize anything. In fact, I have a lousy memory and a week later I can’t even remember the names of the astronauts. But I cram it in for the assignment, use it. After the job, it all flees.”
Cronkite thought that NBC News’ Huntley, Brinkley, and McGee were too dry when they bantered about space exploration. They were afraid of the gee-whiz factor (that is, they refused to say something like “Go, baby, go!” when a manned rocket was rising above the Cape). The Huntley-Brinkley Report team, in turn, thought Cronkite was pandering when he called rockets “baby”—like a patron encouraging a stripper at some Tenderloin District burlesque house. From a distance, the two networks might have seemed to be delivering much the same news in almost the same way. Up close, though, within the sausage factory of TV news, minor differences were meaningful. Just as Murrow owned the McCarthy era, Cronkite was the space age interpreter—nobody came in even a close second. In reality, he had more power than Murrow could have dreamed of, for in 1950, only 9 percent of U.S. homes had TVs. By 1970, that number was 96 percent. On TV he had defeated ABC’s Jules Bergman and NBC’s Frank McGee and Roy Neal for the heavyweight title of “Dean of Space.”
On April 29, 1965, Murrow lost his battle with lung cancer. Cronkite devoted much of that evening’s broadcast to recalling Murrow’s spirit of inquiry, repeating a large segment of the See It Now program of March 1954, which dealt with Senator Joseph McCarthy. Dr. Stanton lamented that “the first golden age of broadcast journalism” was now over. Eric Sevareid provided heartfelt commentary on the CBS Evening News, calling his mentor “incandescent.” There is no record or remembrance of how Cronkite felt. “He just didn’t say a word about the death,” Socolow recalled. “It was like it didn’t happen.”
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