Cronkite

by Douglas Brinkley

  Hopes were high at the CBS Evening News on March 13 that Cronkite was about to earn the biggest scoop of his broadcast journalism career: getting RFK to announce his intention to run for president. The exclusive interview ended up being surprisingly flat. Cronkite led with a question to Kennedy on a potential run for the White House. Kennedy wasn’t biting. But he did leave the door wide open—a minor scoop. At one point, he commented on Nelson Rockefeller’s chances against GOP front-runner Richard Nixon. “I gather that Rockefeller will come into the primary in Oregon,” he said, and added that by that time, it probably would be too late to stop Nixon. Sensing he might have a scoop, Cronkite went off script, trying to find an ulterior motive. “Senator,” he said, “ I might trap you in a little word game there. You said ‘come into the Oregon primary’ not ‘go’ into it. Are you already in Oregon?” An amused Kennedy, charmed by Cronkite’s coyness, quashed the implication. But Cronkite was dutifully emphasizing for the audience what political experts already knew: RFK was indeed going to seek the White House. It now boiled down to a matter of timing.

  A transcript of the RFK-Cronkite interview was reprinted in The New York Times the next day. The paper also printed a full transcript of Cronkite’s subsequent CBS Evening News interview with Eugene McCarthy. In the news industry, the flow was typically from The New York Times to the broadcast networks. The scoops and the ideas were so easily picked from the pages of the Times, in fact, that its influence was a primary reason the network news broadcasts often ran the same stories in the same order. Their respective producers weren’t in collusion; they just read the same Big City daily. In the Vietnam War era, network news shows took greater initiative, and Cronkite actively steered CBS into the lead for breaking news. His nightly broadcast at 6:30 p.m. EST was itself news in the making.

  On March 16, RFK formally announced he was running for president. Instead of declaring it on the CBS Evening News, he did so in the Caucus Room of the Old Senate Office Building: the same place where his brother had announced his candidacy years before. All hell broke loose in the Democratic primary field. In the White House, the specter of Cronkite and his CBS Tet special seemed to have tamped out the fighting spirit of LBJ.

  Less than two weeks later, on Sunday, March 31, President Johnson scheduled a televised message about limiting U.S. involvement in Vietnam by declaring a partial halt to bombing missions. Few thought the speech was going to be historic. The Oval Office was set up with cameras for the speech. As Johnson entered, he muttered to a CBS technician he recognized, “Cronkite isn’t going to like this . . .” Millions of viewers tuned in, thinking LBJ was only going to give a report on Vietnam. As the telecast began, LBJ stared at the television camera, looked uneasily at the lens for a second or so, and then spoke with his Hill Country twang. As expected, the president began talking about the Vietnam War. But then, quite unexpectedly, he announced, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

  It was a shocking announcement. Cronkite, thinking the address would be nothing special, was not at the CBS broadcast center that night. Always wanting to be the voice of “breaking news” and ahead of the pack, he was embarrassed at being caught off-guard. Having been so focused on RFK that March, he hadn’t worked his White House sources properly. A question that immediately made the press rounds was whether “Report from Vietnam” had contributed to Johnson’s surprise decision to sideline himself. Johnson later insisted in a CBS News interview with Cronkite that he could have won a second full term in 1968, but that March he was a tired man, facing medical problems and a crisis of confidence across the country. Extricating the United States from the Vietnam quagmire would be a formidable job. His energies were needed at the White House, not for gallivanting around at Democratic fund-raisers. So, with the encouragement of his devoted wife, Lady Bird, the president abruptly bowed out of the 1968 presidential contest.

  “We had not expected,” Cronkite wrote Bob Manning of The Atlantic Monthly, “that the president himself would react like he did. No one has claimed, and I certainly don’t believe, that our broadcast changed his mind about anything. I do believe it may have been the back-breaking piece of straw that was heaped on the heavy load he was already carrying—doubts about the reports he had been getting on alleged military success in Vietnam, concern that the military was now asking for another considerable increase in troop strength to finish the job, increasing public outcry as the nation headed into a presidential election. I think that we may have given him the last push over the edge of a decision he was on the verge of making anyway.”

  CBS News was as unprepared as the other networks for the Johnson bombshell. No one could have predicted he wouldn’t seek reelection. Roger Mudd, covering the Oval Office speech from Washington, later wrote that the announcement “left me shocked, disbelieving and babbling.” Cronkite, relaxing with Betsy at home, had missed reporting the year’s biggest nonviolent political headline. But his “Report from Vietnam” was immediately seen as a catalyst by pundits in the Monday newspapers. They divined a cause-and-effect scenario between CBS and the White House: Cronkite turned dove, and the hawk Johnson lost his talons. “I think that Johnson felt like most of the American people said at that point: ‘Let’s just get out of this,’ ” Cronkite recalled. “But the president couldn’t get out himself. He was too deeply committed. So the thing to do was get out of the job.”

  The public response to LBJ’s shocker was welcomed by supporters and opponents alike. The president’s popularity as measured in polls rose dramatically. Eugene McCarthy believed it was his own incredible showing in the New Hampshire primary on March 12—losing by only 230 votes—that caused Johnson to throw in the towel. Some analysts believed that after Tet, regardless of Cronkite, the president reached his own conclusion that the war wasn’t worth the United States spending $30 billion annually. Another factor was the New York Times story about LBJ wanting to increase the number of troops by 206,000. Most Democrats believed that was an awful idea. Somewhat surprisingly, Cronkite was saddened by Johnson’s unexpected withdrawal—to a degree. When not anchoring the CBS Evening News, he had praised on CBS Radio Johnson’s Great Society domestic policies, including Medicaid-Medicare, wilderness preservation, civil rights, and a hopper full of antipoverty measures. Cronkite actually thought LBJ was a good president; it was only on the Vietnam War that the record soured. “Daddy and Walter stayed close,” Lynda Johnson Robb, daughter of the president, maintained. “There were strains. They never let the war get between them.”

  Many CBS viewers wrote to Paley demanding that Cronkite be fired in the wake of “Report from Vietnam,” which supposedly led to Johnson’s decision not to run for reelection. But the New Left now heralded Cronkite and Eugene McCarthy as the Establishment peace heroes. While not quite a guru to New Left intellectuals such as Herbert Marcuse or Frantz Fanon, Cronkite was cheered as an honest journalist with a deep sense of public morality. But, at least in 1968, he declined to take victory laps. He was quite stunned at how ferocious the antiwar protests became all over the world and recognized that CBS News was in part responsible. Many of the public protests were being held to attract TV cameras. It was a main lesson of Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent movement: protests equal cameras equal Cronkite’s Evening News broadcast. Like all the networks, CBS thought street demonstrations were excellent television. The lesson Cronkite learned anew from the connection between “Report from Vietnam” and LBJ’s resignation was that TV didn’t just report events in the 1960s; it also helped shape them.

  Decades later, Lady Bird Johnson made gracious efforts to reassure Cronkite that her husband always understood that his Tet dissent on CBS News had been an inherently patriotic act. By February 1968 her husband knew in his heart of hearts that Vietnam had been a godawful mistake. Instead of bemoaning Cronkite’s stalemate analysis, LBJ understood that he had lost the political center. Cronkite’s views were already in sy
nc with what polls were showing: that the country was losing faith in the pro-war rhetoric of Westmoreland and McNamara. LBJ wasn’t angry at Cronkite. He feared that the “middle-of-the-road folks,” who had bought into the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, were having buyer’s remorse about Vietnam.

  Whenever Cronkite went to Austin in the coming decade, he’d socialize with Lady Bird and her personal assistant, Liz Carpenter. “You have been a great force for good in this country,” Lady Bird wrote to Cronkite. “We love you so much. A stalwart with whom we’ve shared moments that touched depths of despair and the farthest reaches of space. We’ve mourned with you some of America’s saddest days and soared as we celebrated some of mankind’s highest aspirations and achievements. You’ve been an advocate for what is best in the United States, and we are better for it.”

  While CBS News did receive hate mail for Cronkite’s perceived role in causing LBJ not to seek a second term, it wasn’t much. Whenever Cronkite was in New York, people thanked him for his candor. The pro-war GOP hawks likewise thought LBJ needed to go. Folklore, however, snowballed into the questionable assumption that it was his “Report from Vietnam” that had caused LBJ not to seek reelection; it was impossible to put the brakes on the myth. “Walter went out of his way to avoid the cause-and-effect syndrome,” Sandy Socolow recalled. “A lot of people were trying to connect Walter’s Tet offensive report to Johnson’s abrupt resignation. Walter completely shied away from that kind of specious claim. There were over six weeks between the events. To his mind, they shouldn’t be linked in history.”

  Press secretary George Christian also rejected the Cronkite-is-the-reason theory years later in an oral history. “Well, I don’t buy it,” he said about the broadcast’s influencing Johnson’s decision. “It didn’t quite happen that way.” Marvin Kalb of CBS News explained the impact of Cronkite on LBJ best: “What Walter was saying about Vietnam wasn’t all that dramatic,” Kalb believed. “He just moved the story an inch or two forward. Cronkite was scrupulous in being objective, of keeping himself out of the news. In many ways, all he had done was report the obvious. But LBJ, it’s fair to say, was enormously impressed by anything Cronkite said on CBS. He had a huge, huge audience. So Walter made a difference.”

  Over time, Cronkite was of two minds about being branded the cause of LBJ’s decision to step down. On the one hand, it made him beloved by liberals. Yet it called his Mr. Objectivity persona into question. Depending on whom he was talking with, Cronkite would flip-flop on the question over whether he was in any way responsible for LBJ’s surprise March announcement. His most succinct answer occurred in a Q&A with Richard Snow of American Heritage. “I don’t feel that a journalist’s influence is so great that you can change the course of human events by a single broadcast,” he said. “Whether it’s a president’s decision to act or not act, it doesn’t work that way. It’s just one more straw.”

  What no one debated was that the spring of 1968 was a time of great upheaval. On April 4, just days after LBJ announced he wouldn’t seek reelection, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. He was preparing to lead a peace march to quell the racial violence that had broken out in the Mississippi River city because of a sanitation workers’ strike. Cronkite, broadcasting from CBS’s Washington, D.C., studio, provided the bare details of the Memphis shooting at the end of the 6:30 p.m. news. During the commercials that followed, Dan Rather broke the news of Dr. King’s death in a special report from New York City. Moments later, Cronkite broadcast the news of the assassination on the 7:00 p.m. feed of the CBS Evening News. In a verbal tone that was, if anything, far more forceful than usual, Cronkite, visibly upset and angry, called Dr. King “the apostle of the civil rights movement.”

  When Cronkite got off the air, he sobbed in shame. Cursing, his head a mess, he predicted riots across America to his colleagues at the CBS News bureau. “I’d hate to be up on U Street tonight [in Washington, D.C.],” he muttered to coworkers as he wandered out of the M Street studio in a trance. Once at the Hay-Adams Hotel, where he was staying, he called his three children to discuss the King murder: eleven-year-old Chip, a student at St. Bernard’s School in New York; eighteen-year-old Kathy, at school in Vermont because the ski trails were awesome; and twenty-year-old Nancy, a student at Syracuse University. Somehow he needed reassurance that the family was whole.

  The year 1968 was turning out to be a brutal, appalling, harrowing one. Ever since the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, CBS had prided itself on its King coverage. The thought that King had been murdered caused all the CBS reporters who covered civil rights—Cronkite included—to fear for the nation. Cronkite wanted to attend King’s funeral in Atlanta, but the grueling Democratic primary schedule in March prohibited him from doing so. Joan F. Richman, who oversaw special events for CBS News, dispatched the reliable Charles Kuralt instead.

  Less than two months later, on the night of June 4, Cronkite was in New York City anchoring CBS’s one-hour prime-time special coverage of the California Democratic primary. Preliminary results showed Kennedy on his way to a crucial victory over Eugene McCarthy. CBS News had two correspondents, Roger Mudd and Terry Drinkwater, working the floor at the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where Kennedy supporters had gathered to await the results. Presuming the coverage would trail off after Kennedy’s victory speech and comments by Mudd and Drinkwater, Cronkite went home for the night. It was just after nine o’clock in Los Angeles when Kennedy made his victory speech, one dotted with humor and filled with hope that the nation would be less sharply divided in the future. CBS cameras were rolling as Kennedy made his way out of the rollicking ballroom. The cameras focused on the confetti-filled atmosphere of the primary triumph because Cronkite wasn’t around to provide his usual commentary.

  Just as RFK’s followers began to chant, “Kennedy, Kennedy, rah, rah, rah,” screams broke out from a corner of the room, with terrible anguish replacing the victory smiles. Mudd’s voice could be heard asking bystanders what had happened and telling the control room to “keep me plugged in.” Mudd, a personal friend of Bobby and Ethel Kennedy’s, dashed into the chaotic passageway leading to a hotel kitchen, where shots had just been fired. RFK had been shot with a .22-caliber revolver by Sirhan Sirhan, a Christian Arab from Jerusalem angry about the senator’s pro-Israel stance.

  Cronkite recalled on his Cronkite Remembers video memoir, released in 1996, how he himself heard the news about Bobby Kennedy. “I’d left our New York newsroom right after reporting that primary and the Kennedy speech,” he said. “I’d gotten home barely twenty minutes later and I was just undressing when the telephone call came. Another Kennedy had been shot. Well, I ran for a cab, buttoning my shirt on the way. The driver had his radio on. We were both just listening, speechless, I guess. Listening to the turmoil in that hotel kitchen, we cried. That cabdriver and I cried. We cried. And we weren’t ashamed.”

  Americans of all stripes were stricken by the Los Angeles shooting, the second assassination in two months, the second Kennedy brother murdered in four years. The death of Robert Kennedy in many ways shattered the American psyche. Americans wondered about the moral character of their beleaguered nation, and whether worthy candidates would come to the fore in the future if the specter of assassination hung over all American leadership. Cronkite provided brief comments during CBS News’ fifteen-hour coverage of Kennedy’s funeral, concluding, “Robert Kennedy was shot at 12:15 am Pacific Coast Time, the end of a brilliant political and public career. . . . At the age of 42, Robert Francis Kennedy was dead. . . . The people weep for the Kennedys. Perhaps they should weep, too, for themselves. . . . This is Walter Cronkite, reporting.”

  Not since the Civil War had a six-month span been so full of deadly tragedy at home as the first half of 1968. Cronkite, while continuing as the bearer of disturbing news, was again filling his other role as a steadying presence in frightening times. He was a
national leader of a new sort: the healer in chief. He hadn’t sought the post. He had no real agenda. Even those who disliked his liberal leanings accepted his irreplaceable presence at the center of American events in 1968. According to an informal poll, politicians of all stripes considered him the fairest of the national newsmen. Everyone of consequence, it seemed, thought Cronkite gave people an honest shake in interviews. He was also reassuringly permanent when so much was in flux. Even when he was announcing tragic news, he was himself a reminder that America would persevere. Jack Gould of The New York Times, who had pointedly refrained from praising Cronkite over the previous decade, found something to appreciate during 1968 in the anchorman’s ability to communicate the nuances of complex circumstances. Gould called him “the master of subtle variations in intonation of speech and facial expression.”

  That Fourth of July, in need of a break, Walter and Betsy flew to London for a week to be with friends ahead of the conventions. To start his July Fourth celebration, Cronkite took Morley Safer out for a bout of heavy afternoon drinking. Safer had been in London when Cronkite delivered his “Report from Vietnam” and was elated that the CBS anchorman had turned dove. Earlier that evening, Safer had met Jane Fearer, a graduate student in anthropology at Oxford, and they went on a double date with Walter and Betsy that evening. After dinner and a lot of wine and laughs, they decided to go for a nightcap. “It was after midnight. . . . I had an old Bentley convertible with a rumble seat,” Safer recalled. “The four of us piled in, Walter and Betsy in the rumble seat. As we made our way to a favorite pub, Walter suggested we go past The Mall to Buckingham Palace. As we arrived, Walter stood up and did a remarkably convincing impersonation of Queen Elizabeth II, complete with that loose-wristed wave she reserved for adoring throngs. He insisted I make a half-dozen circuits of the palace, clearly trying to get the guardsmen in their red coats and busbies, to crack a smile, or even shift an eyeball, all to no avail. They could have been made of stone. That was my first date with Jane. We got married in October ’68.”