Cronkite

by Douglas Brinkley

  Cronkite looked back on the decade of his ascendancy at CBS and called it “the terrible sixties.” The era was marked by more internecine anger than any other in the twentieth century. Daggers flashed everywhere. Tear gas and urban riots had become fairly commonplace. Assassinations were the recurring theme between 1963 and 1968—the Kennedys, King, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X. Something seriously bent showed within an American society rife with violence. Sickening and degrading news segments fouled the Evening News, with only Charles Kuralt offering an insular salute to the Norman Rockwell era, when sarsaparilla cost a nickel and we were fighting the “good wars” against totalitarianism.

  Yet Cronkite kept looking for a way for CBS News to play a healing role. The opportunity presented itself with the Apollo program. Americans turned away from all the anarchy to unite with relief and pride behind the well-financed gambit of sending astronauts to the Moon. “This is something we’ve been aiming at for all of these years,” said Cronkite, still NASA’s biggest booster. “We’ve been building toward this. Only thing comparable to it was splitting the atom, but we couldn’t cover that. It was done in secret.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Mr. Moon Shot

  NEW MOON RISING—WE ARE CHILDREN OF THE SPACE AGE—ONWARD IN THE FACE OF DEATH—DOWN PAT WITH THE NASA LINGO—THE CHRISTMAS MAGIC OF APOLLO 8—HIGH TIMES AT THE HOLIDAY INN—CBS’S SPACE GIZMOS—HIGHS WITH SCHIRRA AND CLARKE—OH BOY REDUX—ONE GIANT LEAP—DAY 1 IN THE YEAR 1—A RELIEF FROM EARTHLY NEWS—DRILLING NEIL ARMSTRONG—ONWARD WITH APOLLO—TOUCHING MOON DUST

  While other CBS newsmen staked claims on Castro’s Cuba (Sevareid) or Ho Chi Minh’s North Vietnam (Collingwood), Cronkite’s reportorial beat was central Florida. At Fat Boy’s, the Cocoa Beach barbeque joint, there were eight photos blown up large hanging behind the cash register—the Mercury Seven astronauts and the indomitable Walter Cronkite. Nowhere was Cronkite happier, not even on a sailboat circling Martha’s Vineyard on a golden summer day, than at Florida’s Space Coast.

  With almost everybody else at CBS News seemingly consumed with the Humphrey-Nixon-Wallace presidential race in the late summer and early fall of 1968, Cronkite kept one intense eye fixed on the Apollo 7 flight scheduled for October 7. “Walter had grown very sick of the 1968 election,” said the CBS News producer Jeff Gralnick. “All I remember was Walter going on and on about how having George Wallace on the CBS News was a waste of time. Cronkite was a Wally Schirra man. After the convention, I got the feeling that Walter just said, ‘A pox on all of their political houses’ and reintensified his commitment for CBS to cover space.”

  Apollo 7 was a smashing success for both NASA and CBS News. Even though the astronauts suffered horrible colds and assorted technical problems, the men splashed down safely. While Cronkite dutifully broadcast Election Day 1968 for CBS News from New York—with Nixon winning 301 electoral votes to 191 for Humphrey and 46 for Wallace—his enthusiasm was still with Cape Kennedy, where NASA was gearing up for the Apollo 8 mission, billed as the first human voyage to the Moon.

  For Cronkite, the Christmas season of 1968 was the most memorable of his life. Based at the hundred-room Holiday Inn in Cocoa Beach, he was on hand for the Apollo 8 liftoff on December 21. The astronauts—Frank Borman, James A. Lovell, and William A. Anders—orbited the Moon ten times beginning on Christmas Eve. This yuletide space endeavor, a crucial circumlunar precursor to the Apollo 11 lunar landing, was the most-watched TV event in history at that time. It was hard not to feel the healing and unifying effects of Apollo 8, when images of Earth (the first ever taken by humans of the whole planet) were shown on Christmas and the astronauts read the opening verses of Genesis. When atheist activist Madalyn Murray O’Hair claimed the Apollo crew, as U.S. government employees, were constitutionally prohibited from promoting religion on the taxpayer dollar, Cronkite shot her down like a clay pigeon.

  In a year when the assassins James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan received so much press attention, Time magazine inspiringly chose Borman, Lovell, and Anders as its “Men of the Year.” Cronkite applauded Time managing editor Henry Grunwald for his inspired choices. “We are the lucky generation,” Cronkite enthused. “Not only were our achievements in space important in restoring our self-respect, they enabled us as well to enter the history books.”

  Every new capability NASA introduced on a mission was more exhilarating than the last. When Apollo 9 launched in March 1969, a spacewalk was televised live for the first time ever. Cronkite was at Cape Kennedy for the historic moment. CBS News was now devoting more and more resources to the impending moon mission. Cronkite spent most of his waking hours that summer preparing for the Apollo 11 liftoff with the intensity of an attorney rehearsing for trial. His NBFs (new best friends) were meteorologists and aeronautical engineers. “Never before had I seen Dad with such thick binders,” Chip Cronkite recalled. “We all knew he was studying like never before.”

  Whenever Cronkite was on his NASA space beat, he rented a convertible from Jacksonville or Tampa Airport and headed down the central Florida coast. Sometimes he’d take boat rides down the Banana and Indian rivers for relaxation. “Walter would have on a Hawaiian shirt, drinking some fruity drink poolside,” author Norman Mailer recalled. “If you just arrived to Cape Canaveral, like I did from New York or Boston, feeling jet-lagged or perhaps hungover, the sight of the straitlaced CBS anchorman in full tan mode was jarring. But I admired his relaxed panache. . . . Walter was right. Why not take full advantage of the remote Florida lifestyle while the fools up East, the suits, even I, thought Houston or Cape Canaveral was hardship duty?”

  There was a lot of speculation that NASA’s public relations office and CBS News were in cahoots to make a big show of Apollo 11. Though NASA had declined to let Cronkite join astronauts on a survival exercise in the Mojave Desert, he was essentially accorded carte blanche treatment by the powers at NASA; information embargoes were often lifted for him. Cronkite, NASA believed, was the ideal conduit to reassure U.S. taxpayers that $25 billion of their money was being spent nobly. “We were given absolute freedom to report the story, and a great flow of information from NASA,” Cronkite told TV Guide. “I would suggest that this freedom and the comparative reluctance of the Soviet Union to tell the facts until after the fact is an indication of the difference between an open and a closed society.”

  Just how close NASA and CBS News were during the Apollo program period has never been properly analyzed by scholars. The paper trail linking the two organizations is quite thin. Gentlemen’s agreements, in the end, aren’t easy to footnote, but in a thirty-day period around the time of the Apollo 11 mission, other startling events occurred (Chappaquiddick, the Manson murders, and the Woodstock music festival among them). At CBS, all else took a backseat to coverage of the moon shot. Don Hewitt, producing CBS News’ 60 Minutes, came closest to explaining the Tiffany Network’s collaboration in his memoir, Tell Me a Story. “Nobody ever said it because nobody had to say it,” he wrote. “But I always figured that there was an understanding between television and NASA—never spelled out, never even whispered, never even hinted at, but they knew and we knew. If we continued to help the space agency get its appropriations from Congress, they would in turn give us, free of charge, the most spectacular television shows anyone had ever seen.”

  Cronkite understood that the Apollo 11 mission would put American technology to the test in one tremendous, almost miraculous, public display. That a rocket—an invention made practical less than thirty years before—could go to the Moon had been demonstrated by two previous Apollo missions. Now the big moment was upon NASA. Apollo 11 added several bold steps: a lunar module would detach from the mothership, navigate its way to the Moon’s surface, find a suitable landing spot, and later lift off and then rendezvous with the main ship. Each step and a hundred in between offered moments of gripping drama. But the most stunning possibility of all was that so much of the mission could be captured on video and sent
back to Earth live. Cronkite credited John F. Kennedy for declaring in a May 25, 1961, speech to Congress that America would put a man on the Moon “before the decade is out.” To Cronkite, the fact that Kennedy insisted that the space program be conducted in the open was another testament to his greatness.

  A space geek from Norfolk, Virginia, wrote Julian Scheer, NASA’s assistant administrator for public affairs, at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., about making Cronkite an honorary Apollo astronaut in the spring of 1969. “We do not have an official or unofficial ‘honorary astronaut’ title to bestow,” Scheer informed her. “But I can assure you that many of us in the program—including all the astronauts, I’m certain—consider Mr. Cronkite an honorary astronaut, officially or unofficially. He is a most knowledgeable reporter with experience in the space effort that dates back to the days when we were firing ‘big’ rockets, which now seem to be mere ‘firecrackers.’ ”

  America was plagued with the Vietnam War quagmire, high inflation, campus upheavals, pollution, and race riots, but moon exploration lifted the national spirit in the summer of 1969. Three All-American Apollo 11 astronauts—Neil Armstrong of Ohio, Buzz Aldrin of New Jersey, and Michael Collins of Oklahoma—were rewriting the Icarus myth and flying nearer the sun than anyone before them. Approximately one million people were in Cape Kennedy to witness the Apollo 11 liftoff on July 16. Thousands of police officers tried to control the jam-up of cars and boats that kept arriving on Florida’s Space Coast.

  There were hippies in VW bugs, retirees on Social Security looking for reduced fares, Pontiac station wagons crammed with antsy kids, and 4-H Club buses that had driven down from the upper Midwest—all participating in the Fourth of July–like festivities. Reader’s Digest had distributed an astonishing sixty-eight million American flag bumper stickers for the moon launch extravaganza, and they were everywhere to be seen on the cars in the parking lots around Cape Kennedy.

  Apollo 11 was slated to blast off at 9:32 a.m. on July 16, its huge Saturn V rocket propelled by 7.6 million pounds of thrust. For three days and three nights it would travel through space toward the Moon. The lunar module Eagle would land on the Moon with Armstrong and Aldrin, who would spend little more than a day on its surface while Collins remained behind to man the spaceship Columbia. The Holy Grail moment would be on July 21, when Armstrong would start to climb down off the Eagle on a ladder (pulling a lanyard as he descended that activated a television camera) and then take his first steps on the Moon. Buzz Aldrin would join him in the next hour to collect rock and soil samples to bring back to Earth. After about twenty-one and a half hours on the Moon, the module would take off from the Sea of Tranquility to dock with Columbia. On July 24, the Apollo 11 mission would end with the astronauts splashing down in the Pacific Ocean as citizens of the world cheered, having watched the feat on television and hearing it on the radio.

  All three U.S. networks vied to produce the most informed blastoff-to-splashdown coverage. NBC slated readings by performers such as James Earl Jones and Julie Harris—they were to read poems about the Moon. ABC commissioned the jazz legend Duke Ellington to compose a new musical composition—titled “Moon Maiden”—inspired by the landing; he would also sing its lyrics while the astronauts made their lunar debut. CBS lined up Orson Welles to narrate science fiction material from London, including a remake of his own infamous 1938 radio drama, War of the Worlds, in a panoply of race-to-the-moon nostalgia. “Now the Moon has yielded, not merely to man’s imagination,” Welles said with his great voice of authority, “but to his actual presence.”

  Dick Salant of CBS News spoke for all the network presidents, in a sense, when he said Apollo 11 presented some of the most “formidable challenges” in electronic history. The network’s main asset was Cronkite, covering his twenty-first manned flight. CBS had arranged for models and simulations to demonstrate (in color) what was happening whenever NASA footage (which was black and white) was unavailable. Cronkite would need a lot of cutting-edge techniques to compete with NBC and ABC. And Paley, recognizing that this was history in the making, opened his pocketbook wide.

  At the CBS News studio at Kennedy Space Center’s press site, the preproduction team was chased away on Wednesday, July 16, as the Apollo 11 countdown to liftoff grew closer and closer. Only Cronkite (attached to his Smith-Corona, like the editor in The Front Page) and former Mercury astronaut Wally Schirra, producer Joan Richman, stage manager David Fox, and a few cameramen and technicians were allowed to remain in CBS’s tiny Cape Kennedy studio. “I don’t suppose,” Cronkite confided to Schirra, “we’ve been this nervous since back in the early days of Mercury.”

  There was a debate at CBS News over which veteran astronaut to have as Cronkite’s color man for Apollo 11. If fame was the main criterion, then Alan Shepard or John Glenn was the obvious choice. But Cronkite had developed a special affinity for “Wally” Schirra since he had done a half-hour prime-time Sigma 7 preview broadcast from Florida in September 1962. To get Salant to offer Schirra a handsome retainer for exclusivity, Cronkite spread the rumor that ABC was after him. That quickly seized Salant’s attention. The Cronkite-Schirra chemistry worked so well that the duo broadcast together from Apollo 11 all the way to Apollo 17, and became known in CBS display ads as “Walter to Walter” coverage.

  When Mission Control in Houston said on the morning of July 16, “We are still a go with Apollo 11 . . . 30 seconds and counting,” the tension in the CBS booth was overwhelming. At liftoff, Cronkite was speechless. Those present worried that he was so transfixed by the rise that he’d forgotten he was on air. David Fox broke the ice by whispering to Cronkite, “There she goes! It’s beautiful,” and giving a thumbs-up. But the CBS anchorman stayed quiet a little longer. Cronkite knew, from experience, that no voice should ever interrupt a reverie.

  The towering Saturn V was 111 meters (363 feet) tall, about the height of a thirty-six-story building and 18 meters (60 feet) taller than the Statue of Liberty. Fully fueled for liftoff, the Saturn V weighed the equivalent of four hundred elephants. Its five large engines produced 160 million horsepower and 7.6 million pounds of thrust, generating more power than eighty-five Hoover Dams. Once Cronkite realized that the rocket wasn’t going to explode, he snapped out of his trance. “Oh boy, oh boy, it looks good, Wally,” he said joyously. “Building shaking. We’re getting the buffeting we’ve become used to. What a moment! Man on the way to the Moon! Beautiful.”

  At summer camp in Vermont, Kathy Cronkite, like so many other schoolchildren, was monitoring the historic launch on CBS. “The principal let me go into his office to watch Dad,” she recalled. “It wasn’t a big deal seeing him, but the Moon was a big deal. We grew up with the space program in our family, and this was our payoff.”

  Her sister, Nancy, only nineteen, was living in Hilo, Hawaii, with her husband. She opposed the space program. “I had deep reservations,” she said. “I was almost anti-NASA. We had no TV. I was living back to nature. I thought we were just now bringing our own junk, golf balls, lunar module, to pollute the Moon.”

  At least one of the Cronkite kids, twelve-year-old Chip, was delirious about Apollo 11. His favorite childhood memories were of Cocoa Beach at Henri Landwirth’s motel talking space and collecting seashells. Along with his mother that day, Chip attended a viewing party in Connecticut with family friends. “My previous Apollo experience had been bone-rattling,” he said. “I had been at Cape Canaveral, and I felt it right down the spine. So I was really pumped up for Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins. What impressed me most was watching Dad broadcast at night. And when I woke up many hours later he was still on TV extemporizing. I was like wow . . . you go, Dad!”

  Although Cronkite and Schirra were the only on-air talent in the CBS News studio at liftoff, they had a lot of technical help. Working in CBS’s central room, beneath the studio, was producer Robert J. Wussler. Ever since that fateful moment at Kennedy’s inaugural when Sig Mickelson assigned him to cover
space, Wussler had been preparing for the history-making event. He usually stayed at CBS News in New York during space missions, but not for this seminal launch. Now, quite comically, this TV wunderkind pulled out his own little personal camera during liftoff to snap a few photos that wouldn’t belong to CBS. “I wanted to be able to say,” Wussler later recalled, “that these were the pictures I took on the day man left for the Moon.”

  All the dignitaries around Cape Kennedy were hoping to be on CBS News with Cronkite. Vice President Spiro Agnew, for example, arrived in the CBS News booth to talk with Cronkite. When former president Lyndon Johnson arrived at the CBS studio Cronkite turned deferential. Just fifteen months earlier, he had damaged Johnson considerably with his Tet prime-time special. “I was—how to put this,” Cronkite’s producer Joan Richman recalled, “not a big Lyndon Johnson fan.” But LBJ seemed to hold no grudge against what he called “the Cronkites” at CBS. All present remembered just how warm Johnson was to Cronkite that afternoon. For a while it seemed that LBJ might replace Schirra as Cronkite’s new astrobuddy; they got along that well. While all Cronkite’s on-air friends spoke about Apollo 11, LBJ honed in on the Great Society. Cronkite nodded admiringly in agreement. “Our family never held a grudge against Walter for a second,” Lynda Johnson Robb, daughter of the president, explained. “Both Mother and Father admired him.”