The Pentagon Papers leak lacked the key elements of effective television news: action and clarity. The enticing fascination of the Department of Defense documents lay in their mountains of detail, in which academics, not TV viewers, revel. When Ellsberg offered NBC News and ABC News a chance to release a portion of the Pentagon Papers, both flat-out turned him down. The documents were radioactive. Disseminating the report would take a network into precarious legal territory as well as dangerously dull television. Another reason NBC said no was that its news division was in flux: Chet Huntley had retired in 1970 and David Brinkley was in the process of retiring. Ellsberg went to CBS News, home of 60 Minutes, hoping it would have the guts to air explosive revelations. If Cronkite deemed it okay to report the Pentagon Papers—secret government deliberations about the Vietnam War—then a pack of journalists would follow suit. “We’d done what we could with them on the air,” Cronkite recalled. “We wanted to interview Daniel Ellsberg, but he was on the lam from the FBI.”
Mid-June also saw CBS embroiled in its own First Amendment struggle. Longtime CBS president (and trustee of the Rand Corporation) Dr. Frank Stanton was facing serious legal consequences over “The Selling of the Pentagon.” Right-wing politicos charged that the CBS Reports documentary had been deliberately unfair, even doctoring quotes to distort the story. A subcommittee of the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce subpoenaed Stanton and the CBS News Department, demanding that they turn over outtakes and extra footage. Stanton, in a heroic First Amendment stand, refused, personally accepting the consequences. He would be exonerated, but as of mid-June 1971, there was a very real possibility that CBS’s president would go to jail for contempt of Congress.
Given Stanton’s situation, CBS might well have been wary of interviewing Ellsberg. Contact with the outlaw could potentially put the network in further legal jeopardy. It would certainly anger the committee members charged with deciding Stanton’s fate. Even so, the CBS Evening News couldn’t resist the scoop: the first televised interview with Ellsberg. Gordon Manning, CBS’s vice president for hard news, negotiated with Ellsberg on two occasions, a cloak-and-dagger process involving clandestine meetings and communication by code. Reading parts of the Pentagon Papers over the air, as Ellsberg wanted, was impossible, but Manning arranged an exclusive interview with the fugitive for CBS News.
Cronkite remembered the advance work differently, claiming in A Reporter’s Life that he used a personal connection with Ellsberg’s family to land the interview. Nobody in America circa 1971 had a better Rolodex than Cronkite. He was encyclopedic about the comings and goings of bluebloods, military officers, and corporate CEOs. He made it his habit to trade in career updates, summer vacation plans, and casual gossip with the rich and otherwise powerful in American life. While other journalists were trying to fathom the real Ellsberg, Cronkite already knew: the now former Rand analyst was married to Patricia Marx, the daughter of Louis Marx, who with his brother had founded Marx Toys in New York City in 1919. As the FBI launched an all-points-bulletin manhunt for Ellsberg, Cronkite simply called a Marx family member from Lake Placid, while on assignment. It was a warm exchange. An arrangement was made for Gordon Manning to have a secret rendezvous with Ellsberg, who kept changing locations, in Cambridge. Cronkite, once protocol was set, wanted to quietly slip into town, allow himself to be blindfolded, and be whisked away to a secret location.
The fifty-four-year-old Cronkite was acting like a cub wire service reporter for the United Press or Scripps-Howard, hungry for an edgy exclusive. That very evening, Manning received a telephone call. Speaking in the cryptic language of espionage, a “Mr. Boston” said a taped interview with Cronkite “might be possible.” The Old Library building on Harvard’s campus near midnight was chosen as a rendezvous spot. Manning met with Mr. Boston, a college-age antiwar leader, who drove him to a Cambridge cottage where the Pentagon Papers (wrapped in brown paper and tied with string) were hidden. Arrangements were made for Cronkite to interview Ellsberg—the White House’s number one enemy—the next afternoon, at the Massachusetts hideaway. Dick Salant worried that CBS News would be accused of aiding and abetting a fugitive, but the network’s lawyers reassured him not to worry.
“I was proud of Cronkite for his Vietnam stalemate report in February 1968,” Ellsberg recalled. “I was in D.C. at the time working as staff for Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford. When I had come back from Vietnam in 1967 with hepatitis, I had one goal: to get people to understand that Vietnam was a stalemate. President Johnson had given a direct order never to say stalemate. It was taboo. When Cronkite said the word, it meant a lot. So I wanted Cronkite to do the Pentagon Papers interview because he was the most famous journalist in America.”
Cronkite, like a character in a John le Carré novel, was directed to meet a contact for Ellsberg in the lobby of the Commander Hotel in Cambridge on June 23 (the very day Stanton appeared before the Senate subcommittee). The hotel manager immediately recognized the famous CBS anchor and tried to be helpful, interrupting Cronkite’s attempt to case the lobby for his secret contact. Cronkite felt like he was on an undercover operation that was going to backfire. He talked with the manager about where he might make a telephone call. The pay phone was downstairs, next to the bathrooms. Cronkite, afraid that his waiting around could be interpreted as looking for a “homosexual pickup,” was starting to second-guess himself. “There were many amateurish aspects to the plot,” Cronkite later said, laughing, “but the most obvious never occurred to any of us. It turned out to be pretty difficult for the anchorperson of the most popular television news broadcast in America to go incognito.”
A young man finally made eye contact with Cronkite, who instinctively followed him out to the street. The FBI couldn’t find Ellsberg, but after a cloak-and-dagger rendezvous worthy of spy intrigue, Cronkite could; that made him chuckle. Now in a getaway car and in the hands of anti–Vietnam War radicals helping a fugitive, Cronkite was asked to keep his head down so he couldn’t retrace the route for the FBI. The car stopped at a nondescript house, and Cronkite went inside to find Manning and two film crews—and the visibly stressed Ellsberg—already waiting. Carefully the two exchanged updates on all things Vietnam. Although Ellsberg had debated Nixon’s Cambodia bombing with Senator Bob Dole (R-Kans.) for the TV show The Advocates, a public television production of KCET in Los Angeles, he wasn’t camera-savvy. The former Defense Department analyst didn’t want to speak solely about the Pentagon Papers or his own employment experience in the mid-1960s for President Johnson. Manning and Cronkite argued over how many documents would be read on the air. Determined to end the Vietnam War, Ellsberg wanted to “present at some length to a prime-time national television audience an understanding of Nixon’s secret strategy.”
Parts of the Cronkite-Ellsberg interview were broadcast on the CBS Evening News that day; a longer version was shown on a prime-time special the next evening, June 24. Ellsberg and Manning had collaborated to come up with the perfect CBS stock footage from Vietnam—shot since 1965—to accompany the commentary. Ellsberg’s story was full of gaps, and he artfully avoided Cronkite’s most probing questions. At times, Ellsberg went into monologue mode (as was his tendency). The CBS anchor didn’t push much in the way of follow-ups. When he asked Ellsberg why, at the very moment that President Nixon was winding down the war, he chose to kick the hornet’s nest, the fugitive’s unsatisfactory answer was, “We are seeing 1964 all over again.” What? Cronkite just let the Gulf of Tonkin reference hang. No real news came out of the interview except that Cronkite had tracked down the FBI’s most wanted ex-Pentagon official. This was enough to send the White House reeling. Why didn’t Cronkite or Manning make a citizen’s arrest? Or set up a sting operation with the FBI? A better question was: how could Cronkite find Ellsberg between tennis matches and the FBI couldn’t?
Media critics said Cronkite was too gentle interrogating Ellsberg. Pro-war Americans said far worse. The very fact that Cronkite
had the temerity to treat Ellsberg as anything more than a traitor irritated thousands of viewers. They didn’t give a damn what the treasonous weasel Ellsberg said; the thief should be shot. According to the National Review, the Ellsberg interview was part of a liberal plot to undermine the Nixon administration. “It is the anti-Nixon CBS-Establishmentarian Walter Cronkite who got the interview,” it editorialized. Criticism from the GOP mounted. “The Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc., led by Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid, have almost destroyed this great country,” wrote the Kingsport, Tennessee, mayor. “Never have I seen men so dedicated to demoralizing and tearing their country apart. This is due to blind hatred or prejudice of the President and Vice President and seemingly sanctioned by president Frank Stanton of CBS.”
While Cronkite was beloved for his Apollo 11 commentary, his cozy interview with Ellsberg infuriated many conservatives throughout the Midwest, the South, and the West. Owners of CBS affiliates threw conniptions. The hate mail that Black Rock received multiplied and became more vicious. In June 1971, TV Guide journalist Edith Efron, an Ayn Rand acolyte, published a book titled The News Twisters. Underwritten by the little-known Historical Research Foundation (which gave grants to authors with conservative themes), The News Twisters followed Nixon White House henchman Jeb Magruder’s strategy to “arrange for an exposé” to be written by pro-Nixon scribes Earl Mazo or Victor Lasky. Published simultaneously in hardcover and paperback, The News Twisters became a bestseller, with a blurb from the president himself. Once on the New York Times bestseller list, Magruder believed, the book would find its own readership.
The News Twisters begins by excoriating Cronkite. Based on Efron’s study of the three network evening news programs over a seven-week span in the fall of 1968, the book concluded that 31 percent of the material presented on the CBS Evening News was opinion. Efron found that NBC was slanted 18 percent of the time, and ABC, because it devoted more time to designated commentators, 48 percent. CBS countered The News Twisters by commissioning a study from a nominally independent organization (headed by former CBS director Ed Bliss Jr.) at American University. It examined the Evening News over the same span and found, not surprisingly, that the program was entirely objective. Cronkite, in other words, was given a clean bill of health when the study was released in 1974.
After the first round of confrontation over Ellsberg, the Nixon administration decided that CBS News, not NBC News, was the bigger threat. The White House now targeted Cronkite. The anchorman had gotten under Nixon’s skin. In his Watergate memoir, Witness to Power, White House counsel for domestic affairs John Ehrlichman wrote of how the president was now obsessed with Cronkite. “I have watched Nixon spend a morning designing Walter Cronkite’s lead story for that evening,” he recalled, “then send it to Ron Ziegler, Kissinger or me, to send out to a press briefing to deliver it in such a way that Walter Cronkite simply could not ignore it.”
Magruder and Colson were flummoxed over how best to take the avuncular Cronkite down a notch. On September 30, 1971, Cronkite testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, which, under Senator Sam J. Ervin Jr. (D-N.C.), was very supportive of the press. With unblinking directness, Cronkite lambasted the Nixon administration for curtailing First Amendment rights “by fiat, by assumption, and by intimidation and harassment.” CBS News continued to hold its substantial lead over NBC News in the Nielsen ratings for evening news. Cronkite was quoted as saying “ratings didn’t matter,” but his attitude was different in the newsroom, where he could be heard to mutter darkly—or yell—when another network gained a point.
After Chet Huntley retired in 1970, The Huntley-Brinkley Report (renamed the NBC Nightly News) faltered. Still Cronkite’s major competitor, the NBC news program had difficulty finding the right anchor replacement before eventually settling on John Chancellor, a former Today host and correspondent for The Huntley-Brinkley Report. Cronkite considered Chancellor, a fellow college dropout with whom he served as co-inquisitor for the fourth Kennedy-Nixon debate, merely a safe bet for NBC News, not a potential usurper of his ratings supremacy. On December 10, 1971, a confident Dick Salant, just in time for Christmas, promoted everyone at CBS News in a single memo: Bill Leonard and Gordon Manning (senior vice presidents), Sandy Socolow and Bill Small (vice presidents), Russ Bensley (executive producer of the Evening News), and John Lane and Ed Fouhy (producers for Cronkite). Instead of having CBS News on the run, the Nixon administration had pressboys ascending en masse up the ladder of success.
By January 1972, the Nixon White House seemed less interested in destroying Cronkite than in having his swarm of disciples at CBS News cool their jets. It was an election year, and Nixon understandably wanted less antagonism with the fourth estate. If a scorched-earth war with CBS News, or any other journalism organization, became a central campaign issue, he might be doomed in November. Better the press should focus on the president’s surprise trip to the People’s Republic of China. But on February 13, President Nixon had an Oval Office meeting with Charles Colson, his valet Manolo Sanchez, and scheduler Stephen B. Bull about how to keep CBS News from further attacking the administration’s Southeast Asia policies. A recent CBS Evening News broadcast—echoing Cronkite’s testimony before the Senate Subcommittee—had questioned the ethics of the White House’s attempts to try to control the media.
Nixon: Cronkite is one of the worst offenders.
Colson: Oh that Cronkite interview, Mr. President . . . I sent you the transcript of that report before it got on the news. It will be somewhere in your reading material. It is the most incredible transcript I have ever read in my life. I mean, he describes the evil influence of this administration and he talks about how we’re intimidating advertisers and how we’re trying to get advertisers not to advertise with CBS.
Nixon: I saw that. Jesus . . .
Colson: Talk about saying “ghosts under the bed.”
Nixon: Have we ever influenced CBS?
Colson: No. But, see that’s just creating a complete red herring and that shows you how dishonest the man is. He is basically a dishonest person.
Cronkite knew that Nixon was a brilliant political strategist. He thought the president’s decision to visit China in the spring of 1972 was a stroke of genius. But Cronkite also feared that Nixon had something pathologically wrong with him. As the White House organized its China trip, the role of TV news was preeminent for Nixon, who didn’t want print reporters with a true understanding of Chinese politics accompanying him. What he needed was to have Cronkite, Chancellor, and Reasoner singing his praises on TV. At all costs, Nixon believed, reporters needed to refrain from discussing the sharp cold war differences between China and the United States. As Nixon was preparing to break bread with Mao Tse Tung, he didn’t need Robert Elegant of Newsweek, a China hand, writing magazine cover stories about how the Chairman was responsible for killing sixty or seventy million of his own people.
White House spokesman Ron Ziegler announced that eighty-seven newsmen would accompany President Nixon on his trip to China. Cronkite topped the list, which included twenty-one newspaper writers, six news agency reporters, three columnists, and six magazine correspondents. All journalists gossiped about was the protocol of the White House selection process. When Nixon saw Stanley Karnow of The Washington Post on the Ziegler list, he penciled a line through his name, with the added notation “absolutely not.” Speculation mounted over Nixon’s rationale for choosing reporters. Why did William F. Buckley get a billet when his magazine, National Review, had criticized Nixon’s China overtures? Who had decided that Joseph Kraft of The New York Times, whose telephone had been tapped by the government, was the best liberal columnist to meet Zhou Enlai? The Nixon trip became the inverse of the Enemies List. Which journalists did Nixon (in the parlance of the times) dig?
The Nixon administration allowed CBS News to send its A-team reporters to China: Cronkite, Sevareid, Rather, and Bernard Kalb. To prepare for the
winter trip, Cronkite shopped at Macy’s for a parka, thick socks, and thermal underwear. “I understand it gets bitter cold when the winds whistle down from the China steppes,” Cronkite said in early February, justifying his Macy’s shopping spree. “I’ve already bought myself an imitation fur hat with flaps to keep my ears warm.” In his memoir White House Years, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger offered a hilarious anecdote about sightseeing amid elegant birch trees by a beautiful still lake near Hangchow, a provincial capital in eastern China. “All was tranquility and repose,” Kissinger wrote. “Suddenly, into the picture swaggered Walter Cronkite. He was a little worse for the wear, dressed in heavy furs more appropriate for a polar expedition and weighted down by a spectacular assortment of photographic gear around his neck. Fond as I am of Walter, the scene lost some of its serenity.”
In preparation for China, Cronkite had his physician inject him with gamma globulin to boost his immune system and inoculate him against cholera, diphtheria, polio, and influenza. He telephoned the CBS cameramen who were going—Skip Brown, Izzy Bleckman, and Jime Kartes—to make sure they also got shots. Cronkite boarded the red-eye to China from Honolulu with the rest of the lucky reporters. A paranoid Nixon was worried that one of the news-gathering jackasses would queer the trip; it didn’t happen. As President Nixon stepped off Air Force One on that cold morning in Beijing to shake hands with the Chinese prime minister, Zhou Enlai, Cronkite swelled with pride. History was being made. But China clearly wasn’t paradise. In the coming days, he would assess China’s industrialization to be on par with Stalin’s Russia in the late 1940s.
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