After Cronkite’s return to New York, he met with Salant to reconsider how CBS News would cover antiwar marches and riots that summer. After the JFK and MLK assassinations, they didn’t want to encourage kooks to seize Oswald, Ray, or Sirhan Sirhan–style notoriety. The national conventions were a particular concern. To impress upon the news division the need to refrain from using sensational images of protesters, Stanton issued a three-page guide that July, saying that “the best coverage is not necessarily the one with the best pictures and the most dramatic action.” To Cronkite and others, Salant and Stanton were imbued with “near paranoia” about possible unrest at the Republican convention in Miami and the Democratic one in Chicago. Major corporate sponsors of CBS were urging the network not to turn a ragtag band of street protesters into TV heroes.
CBS management didn’t tell Cronkite how to behave at the 1968 conventions. All they told him was that a lot of money was at stake. Covering the entire 1968 election cost CBS $12.3 million. Black Rock didn’t want sponsors to pull advertising because CBS cameras were giving antiwar protesters extensive TV exposure. Salant never put profit ahead of integrity, but he also couldn’t afford to lose sponsors over Yippies, Black Panthers, and malcontents. “Avoid using lights when shooting pictures,” Salant said in an August 20 meeting, “since lights only attract crowds.”
NBC and CBS might have been virtually tied for viewership in the main event, evening news, but every four years the presidential race offered an arena for even keener competition. The summer political conventions of 1968 presented each network with a fine opportunity to lure new fans and whip its rivals. Conventions could be what Cronkite once described as “great, brawling sweatshops of American political history” (that is, great TV drama). But everything about 1968 had Paley, Stanton, Salant, and Cronkite wondering if their own journalistic instincts were starting to crack. “We anticipated trouble,” Cronkite recalled. “Before we ever got to Chicago, the Grant Park encampment was taking place near Lake Michigan and the Hilton Hotel, which was the Democratic headquarters. That’s where the Weathermen and SDS and hippie anti–Vietnam War people camped out.”
Former vice president Richard Nixon, the presumptive GOP nominee, had used primaries and caucuses to win a commanding block of delegates, making the Republican Convention predictable from the outset. “I don’t know whether the convention is arranged for TV or whether TV is arranged for the convention,” Mudd pondered, decrying the public relations atmosphere. The Washington Post reviewed the coverage of the Republican convention under the blunt headline “Boring Convention Ignored by Viewers.” NBC didn’t do any better. Ultimately, American viewers preferred real drama (or comedy), with the result that only one-third of the nation’s televisions were tuned into the convention coverage during prime time.
As the Democratic Convention began in Chicago on August 26, the protesters ran headlong into nightstick-wielding security forces assembled by Mayor Richard Daley, who intended to show that his city was under his tight control. The security forces he assembled, however, acted like goons, proving more disruptive than the demonstrators. In what an investigative report later termed “a police riot” and what contender Hubert Humphrey called “storm-trooper tactics,” Daley’s cops used violence in the streets and in the convention hall itself. Moreover, citywide strikes by telephone workers and taxi drivers hindered the free flow of communication and transportation. As the acrid smell of tear gas filled the air, television trucks weren’t allowed to park near the convention hall and reporters were chased by police from the area. In an on-air commentary, Eric Sevareid compared the deteriorating situation in Chicago to the Soviet Union’s violent suppression of Czechoslovakia’s Prague Spring reform movement for political liberalization. The main difference, he said, was that in Prague, at least there were “tanks in which to travel from A to B.”
CBS News correspondent Jack Laurence teamed up with producer Stanhope Gould to cover the fighting in Grant Park on the first night of the convention. It was radical and bloody beyond belief. They were under extraordinary deadline and technical pressure to get footage of the mayhem in time for Cronkite’s broadcast. Russ Bensley was the only one to check the reporting before it went on the air. “All the executive producers were busy at the convention hall,” Laurence recalled. To put it mildly, Laurence’s five- or six-minute segment did not make the Chicago Police Department look good. “No one from the news division or corporate headquarters criticized me to my face about the story, but they took me off the air for at least the next twenty-four hours. I just could not get a camera crew or producer to work with me, although there were stories to be covered everywhere you looked.”
The battle that raged on Michigan Avenue in Chicago and on hundreds of college campuses around the country also echoed in the Cronkite home. The conversations throughout 1968 often turned ugly. The Cronkites’ two daughters, Kathy and Nancy, were teenagers more in tune with the counterculture than with their parents. “We both went through a period of time,” Kathy wrote in her book On the Edge of the Spotlight, “when we didn’t get along with the parents.” Chip, the youngest, was still a boy, old enough to play a good game of tennis with his father but too young to rebel. Both Kathy and Nancy chafed under parental rules intended to keep them on a straight and respectable path.
Strangers sometimes asked the Cronkite children whether their father was as genuinely nice in real life as he seemed on television. Kathy sometimes gave an unvarnished answer, feeling emotionally barricaded by being the child of somebody so highly visible; she could be livid with him for putting his work ahead of their family. “I was awful when I was growing up,” Kathy admitted. “I’d go on and on about how I hated his guts and how he made me stay home and gave me a curfew. I’d just give them the whole rap about what a drag I thought he was. . . . People thought I was fucked up, I’m afraid.”
The generational tension in his household distressed Cronkite until he realized that many families were divided along the same lines: the Greatest Generation versus the Baby Boomers. At least he was now in agreement with the counterculture on the Vietnam War: the troops needed to come home. What Cronkite objected to most was that the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon acted as though the Vietnam War was too complicated to explain properly to the general public—a stance that was not acceptable when young men were at Walter Reed General and Bethesda Naval hospitals without arms or legs or genitals or faces. Nonetheless, Cronkite didn’t have much use for either the SDSers or the Yippies (Youth International Party)—despite Kathy and Nancy being, in appearance and outlook, very much sixties hippies. “I didn’t like their attitude,” he said of the hippies. “I didn’t like their dress code. I didn’t much like any of it.”
Cronkite was what the young generation called square. He was part of the establishment, a dirty word in the hippie universe. He was fifty-two and rich (two more reasons for suspicion)—a yachtsman, no less, who enjoyed summer sailing with the conservative William F. Buckley in the Atlantic. (Historian Garry Wills noted in Outside Looking In that Buckley “admired Cronkite’s mind,” actively seeking his counsel from time to time.) The generation gap wasn’t just a news story that Cronkite reported on; his family was its living embodiment. Yet his reaction to the protesters in Chicago, like his “Report from Vietnam,” showed just how fairness-driven the anchorman could be. As Chicago police savaged demonstrators, Cronkite was in a CBS broadcast booth at the International Amphitheatre, a good five miles away. When he first heard about the rioting, his information was incomplete, and he blamed the peace activists. “The anti-war demonstrators,” Cronkite reported, “have gotten particularly unruly and are even battling in the lobbies of the hotels with police, who sent for reinforcements.” Yet while the Yippies in Chicago, led by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, were undoubtedly there to cause a ruckus, the police response was downright criminal. Assault and battery became commonplace police procedures.
As Cronkite gazed down on th
e convention floor from his CBS anchor booth, he saw scuffling and fistfights as unidentified security men and uniformed police next turned on the delegates. The intimidation infuriated Cronkite. Credentialed Democrats who dared demonstrate against the war were removed from the hall—an action entirely against convention rules. Cronkite, as usual, refused to wear an IFB (interrupted feedback ear device), so he relied on producers Jeff Gralnick, Stanhope Gould, and Ron Bonn to keep handing him updates on the air.
On the convention floor, Mike Wallace was roughed up and hit in the face. Dan Rather took a hard blow to the stomach from security guards trying to keep him from interviewing a Georgia delegate who was himself being ejected. Both Wallace and Rather were trying to gather information on the removal of individual delegates. Cronkite saw the unprovoked attack on Rather, sucker-punched to the floor, as a national disgrace. “I think we’ve got a bunch of thugs here,” Cronkite told viewers with unmasked anger. Filled with fury, he suggested that the roughed-up reporters and cameramen leave the floor. More gently, he advised Rather to go and get medical help if he needed it. (Rather, having risen from the floor, said he’d be all right.)
Cronkite, like all the CBS leadership, considered the brutalizing of Rather inexcusable. Writing about the Rather incident in Air Time: The Inside Story of CBS News, Gary Paul Gates posited that it was the “only time in his long career that Cronkite displayed such undisguised wrath on the air.” Democratic Party leaders issued all sorts of apologies, but the film footage lived on. In one fell punch, Rather had become an icon of freedom of the press. Joining CBS in First Amendment complaints were top executives of Time, Newsweek, and five newspapers. “An investigation by the FBI is under way to ascertain whether this treatment of news personnel involved violation of federal law,” a joint protest letter to Mayor Daley read. Many conservative Democrats applauded Daley for organizing the security detail that manhandled Rather. The Chicago congressman Roman Pucinski, from the Polish-American Eleventh District, called CBS’s coddling of protesters “outrageous and unfair, the zenith of irresponsibility in American journalism.” Joining the anti-CBS chorus was Congressman Ed Edmondson of Oklahoma’s Second District. “Network media personnel such as Cronkite,” he said, “have done violence to the truth by their unfair coverage at Chicago, and the public deserves better at the hands of this great industry.”
Eventually, the Daley machine’s worst nightmare became a reality as CBS motorcycle couriers managed to evade police and deliver film of the battle outside the convention hall. “We put it on the air,” Cronkite proudly recalled. “Delegates watched, first in disbelief, then in rage.” The images shocked Cronkite, too, and his commentary from that point on no longer blamed the Yippies for the Chicago unrest. Anger was exploding in all directions. CBS’s coverage alternated between convention business—Hubert Humphrey’s grand moment on the national stage—and strong-arm tactics on both the convention floor and on the streets of downtown Chicago. This was Daley’s grotesque street show. As CBS broadcast the film across the country, the Democratic Party itself sustained a body blow. Because Humphrey didn’t respond strongly to the clashes all around him, the violence consumed his campaign from its start. He looked like a liberal weakling afraid to confront Mayor Daley. If he couldn’t control a Democratic mayor run amok, how could he possibly face up to bullies like Ho Chi Minh and Mao?
A hubristic Mayor Daley was outraged at CBS’s portrayal of Chicago as a fascist city. In a speech at the convention, Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut called Daley out by name and condemned the “Gestapo tactics” of the Chicago police. Daley loyalists stepped up to defend the mayor. Frank Sullivan, director of public information for the Chicago Police Department, held his own news conference after the convention ended. “The intellectuals of America,” he declared, “hate Richard J. Daley, because he was elected by the people—unlike Walter Cronkite.” Sullivan claimed Cronkite and CBS were among the mayor’s enemies in the media.
That August 29, just hours later, Daley gave Cronkite an exclusive interview for CBS. Every journalist wanted a chance to drill him down to a damaged bit. But because Eleanor Daley, the mayor’s wife, loved the CBS Evening News, Cronkite won the exclusive. Cronkite was certain he could outfox the mayor by asking him simple questions and giving him plenty of room to hang himself with his own words. But with millions watching, Cronkite botched the interview by being overingratiating. “I can tell you this, Mr. Daley,” Cronkite said, “that you have a lot of supporters around the country as well in Chicago.” Daley claimed he possessed secret reports that named him and three other leading Democrats on an assassination hit list. The strong measures taken by the police, he told Cronkite, had been necessary. “You could tell that Cronkite had decided to be very courteous to Daley,” recalled newsman Brit Hume, who had worked for UPI. “It wasn’t in him to climb all over Daley. He seemed embarrassed for having used the word thugs on air.”
Cronkite’s exclusive interview with Daley was beyond lame. It constituted the low-water mark of his journalism career. Everyone at CBS News knew that Cronkite thought Daley was behaving like a mobster that week. Full of civic pride, disdainful of supposedly unpatriotic, filthy hippies filling Chicago’s parks and streets, Daley had turned bully.
In Adam Cohen’s and Elizabeth Taylor’s biography of Daley, American Pharaoh, the authors criticize how Cronkite allowed the Chicago mayor to spin one untruth after another in the interview without properly challenging the assertions. Cronkite seemed intimidated by the mayor’s bluster and raw power. Daley had entered the CBS anchor booth as the bane of American TV viewers and almost miraculously emerged as a public service champion. On air, Daley claimed that certain reporters had been beaten by his Chicago police force because they were, in essence, plants for the antiwar movement. Cronkite merely nodded, seemingly in acquiescence. One CBS News executive, embarrassed by Cronkite’s kowtowing to Daley, said sadly when the interview was finished, “Daley took Cronkite like Grant took Richmond.”
Once retired from CBS, Cronkite made a lot of fanciful excuses for having allowed Daley to dominate him in the big interview. (The gist was that the mayor had startled him by walking straight onto his set without knocking.) Producer Stanhope Gould was there at the time and felt contempt for Cronkite for the one and only time in his life. “He just didn’t know how to interview Daley,” Gould complained. “Just let him off the hook.”
What Cronkite was trying to do in the interview was heal the rift between Daley and CBS by being conciliatory; it was the worst tactical approach imaginable. The tension between television news and politicians of both parties was probably inevitable. Mayor Daley had provided a particularly vivid example of the shift in dominance between the two. Film drove the transition. It made every TV viewer a potential witness to police brutality. Newsreels had existed before, but they weren’t distributed into millions of homes in real time, and they lacked the authority that came with a journalistic enterprise such as CBS. If a police superintendent in pretelevision days had stated, “The force used was the force needed to repel the mob,” as Chicago police superintendent James B. Conlisk Jr. did say after the Chicago unrest, citizens would never have known the truth. Some would have believed the reporters on the scene. But many more would have believed the superintendent. In 1968, by contrast, as CBS News president Richard Salant would write, “The pictures and sound of the Chicago police department in action speak for themselves.”
Film had the power to expose politicians and police betraying public trust. Martin Luther King Jr. had learned this early on, in his nonviolent effort to reach the nation, when motion pictures of Bull Connor’s men billy-clubbing well-behaved, churchgoing protesters in Birmingham, Alabama, came to light. President Johnson learned it, too, when film of children screaming in terror after U.S. bombing raids undermined both the troops and the very rationale for U.S. intervention in Vietnam. The power of truth itself belonged to cameramen as they chose their shots; it belonged to network
news producers; and at CBS, it belonged to Cronkite in his role as managing editor. Viewers believed Cronkite in the 1960s for reasons of character but also because he had the truth-telling cameras on his side. In the Daley interview, it was Cronkite who came out as cowardly. When told that Gary Paul Gates in Air Time used the Daley bungle as Exhibit A of Cronkite’s inability to go after the jugular like Mike Wallace, Cronkite cried foul. “I think he missed the point by a wide margin,” he snarled. “My interview technique is not to have blood spurt from the open vein, but to have it drain slowly from the body until you see the white corpse sitting there.”
The Justice Department would soon go after the “Chicago Eight,” a tangentially connected cabal of antiwar activists charged with conspiring to cross state lines to incite violence at the Democratic National Convention: David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Lee Weiner, John Froines, and Bobby Seale. Yippie leader Hoffman and Cronkite actually became minor friends of a sort. Daring and a convivial genius at street theater, Hoffman made for good television. Not long after the Chicago convention, Hoffman, full of mischief, wrote Cronkite an unsolicited letter suggesting that he abandon horn-rimmed glasses in favor of contact lenses. Hoffman thought the glasses made Cronkite seem Goldwater-square when he really wasn’t. Cronkite accepted Hoffman’s suggestion. “I took your advice, you know,” Cronkite told him over the phone. The odd couple liked each other. (Or was Cronkite only flattering a valuable new source?) Whatever the reason, the charismatic Hoffman was an exception for Cronkite. In-your-face protests, Yippies, and LSD-high hippies generally left him cold.
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