Cronkite

by Douglas Brinkley

  Tom Brokaw of NBC News, in his early thirties, was based in Los Angeles when he first met Cronkite at a White House press event in 1971. There was Cronkite in the flesh, Brokaw’s all-seasons hero, just another face in the crowd of reporters. Brokaw was in awe of Cronkite from head to toe. “It was like being a diehard Yankee fan for all your life,” he recalled, “and suddenly you’re on the grass in Yankee Stadium getting to chat with Joe DiMaggio. The moment was indelibly carved on my imagination.” For his part, Cronkite could tell from their first conversation that Brokaw was a “particularly fine ad-libber” with a “marvelous extemporaneous style.” Brokaw was named NBC White House correspondent during the Watergate scandal, and Cronkite became a trusted friend. The shorthand between the two was immediate—they could almost read each other’s minds. What strengthened their friendship was the fact that Brokaw’s wife, Meredith, was enamored of Betsy Cronkite. “To Meredith,” Brokaw recalled, “Betsy was proof that you could be in the crazy TV news business and still have a strong, strong family life. As a couple, they became our ideal.”

  Another die-hard Cronkite fan was the future NBC News anchorman Brian Williams. Although Williams was born in New Jersey, he grew up in a small, cream-colored ranch house in Elmira, New York. His two-bedroom home was the kind that defined middle-class life in the cold war era. Around the time of the JFK assassination, when Williams was only four, his working-class parents started religiously watching Cronkite anchor the CBS Evening News every Monday through Friday. “I was a Cronkite groupie by the age of six,” Williams recalled. “At our household, dinner was hinged on Walter saying, ‘And that’s the way it is.’ Only then could the meal get served. That was the mid-1960s, and I continued to travel with him from the age of polyester to the age of his ever-thickening sideburns and beyond.”

  Williams didn’t mess around when it came to Cronkitiana. He might as well have opened up a Walter Cronkite Fan Club chapter in Elmira. Every time there was even a mention of Cronkite in Time, Look, or Life—the three publications his family subscribed to—he’d clip out the story. All Cronkite’s CBS News special events dealing with the Apollo program were almost sacred happenings in the Williams home. As if preparing for a role as a body-double, Williams analyzed the way Cronkite spoke, his voice inflections and facial expressions, even the stylistic bravado of his wide-knot ties and two-toned dress shirts. “I grew up in a CBS household,” Williams recalled, “and even though I’m paid by NBC, I won’t deny it. The Cronkite team members were my superstars. What Lambeau Field is to a Packers fan, Cronkite’s newsroom was to me. I eventually made my way to West Fifty-seventh Street, the broadcast center, just to touch Cronkite’s U-shaped Formica desk and see his woodcut map of the world behind him. Call me a CBS News nerd if you want. I knew more about Ike Pappas than I care to admit.”

  Not all future TV journalists grew up in awe of Cronkite. Bill O’Reilly, host of Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, was raised in a decidedly non–CBS Evening News home, although he occasionally caught Cronkite hosting The Twentieth Century. Part of O’Reilly’s dissociation with Cronkite was simply a matter of circumstance. Bill’s father, William O’Reilly Sr., a corporate accountant for an oil company, wasn’t home for suppertime. As O’Reilly made his way up the electronic journalism ladder, working at CBS News from 1982 to 1986, he saw Cronkite as “too retro” to be relevant. “My guys were Tom Snyder and Howard Cosell,” O’Reilly recalled. “They were lively and jumped out at you. Walter was bland by comparison. And he was always too much of a liberal who traveled in Martha’s Vineyard and Upper West Side circles. I was from Levittown. He was obviously good, but not on my wavelength.”

  Time magazine did a cover story of Cronkite in 1966 titled “The Electronic Front Page” that grappled with how the anchorman held a “kind of subliminal authority” over the American home unprecedented in communications history. Cronkite, the managing editor, decided what you—mothers and fathers in all fifty states—needed to know about the world at large. While newspapers transmitted facts, television was about shared experience in its rawest, most emotional form. Growing up, Shaw (in Chicago), Chung (in Washington, D.C.), Brokaw (in South Dakota), and Williams (in upstate New York) all read different papers, each chockablock full of local news, but the Cronkite broadcast brought shared historic pageantry—like the death of Kennedy and Apollo 11—into their lives. CBS News vice president Gordon Manning described the Cronkite phenomenon this way: “Pictures plus words plus personality equals believability.”

  Robert Feder of Skokie, Illinois, was Exhibit A for Manning’s point. From the time he was six or seven, Feder believed in the societal importance of the Cronkite broadcast. While other kids made Neil Armstrong or the Beatles their heroes, Feder fell for Cronkite. When he turned fifteen in 1972, he wrote the CBS anchorman a fan letter telling him he had created a fan club in his honor. To Feder’s surprise, Cronkite wrote him back. “I personally am appreciative of your loyalty, given the assumption that you in reality are paying tribute to the efforts of all of us at CBS News to deliver the news fairly and impartially without fear or favor. Please extend my very best wishes to all the members of the Club.”

  The official Walter Cronkite Newsletter was born with that missive. To Cronkite’s surprise, the mimeographed sheet had a fine tactile quality. Working out of his parents’ home, Feder eventually recruited more than a thousand members. With intelligent assistance from die-hard CBS Evening News fans, the monthly newsletter was packed with biographical tidbits about the CBS anchor in chief. Correspondence continued between Cronkite and Feder, and a friendship blossomed.

  Casting a wide net, Feder solicited his activist members to scan newspapers and periodicals for any information—even gossip—pertaining to Cronkite. The newsletter placed Cronkite in a pantheon, promoting him as a towering reportorial icon in the same vein as Lippmann and Murrow. In January 1975, Cronkite, with prankish solemnity, even gave an interview to the Walter Cronkite Newsletter about his amazing on-air stamina anchoring Election Night marathon broadcasts. “I don’t take any pills,” Cronkite said. “I don’t go on a low-residue diet. I just don’t feel fatigue. I think the interest factor keeps me revved up.” In the same issue, Feder asked Cronkite if the rumor was true that sometimes he actually wore tennis shorts or cut-offs when broadcasting the Evening News. “No,” Cronkite told his fan club, “but sometimes my pants don’t match my jacket.”

  Cronkite had good reasons for embracing Feder’s club. The mimeographed newsletter was an excellent way to build a loyal fan base in those pre-Internet days. It was like a Facebook page or a Twitter account before its time. It was one more confirmation that by 1972, Cronkite had become part of the popular culture. Comedian Robert Klein recorded a song called “Middle Class Educated Blues,” in which he crooned, “I watch the Walter Cronkite news . . . I love Walter.” A New Yorker cartoon by Ed Arno showed an average guy having an after-work cocktail slumped down in an armchair with CBS News on the telly. Its caption read, “OK, Cronkite! Lay it on me!” The ABC News affiliate in Baltimore hung a poster of Cronkite dressed like the pope above the words “What makes you think the power has gone to my head?” Pick your comic strip—Peanuts, Lil’ Abner, Dennis the Menace—the cartoonists all used Cronkite as Father Time and wise-man fodder.

  For Cronkite aficionados, an essential moment in the anchorman’s career occurred when Lyndon Johnson died on January 22, 1973. When the CBS Evening News returned from its first station break that night, viewers were jarred. Cronkite was on the telephone, his head bent and his eyebrows gathered together, full of consternation. Devoted watchers of the CBS Evening News had never seen anything like it. With the handset to his ear, the half-knowing, half-bewildered Cronkite was listening without speaking at all. It was as if the television veteran had been caught ordering pizza or humoring a long-winded friend. Cronkite interrupted the person on the other end of the phone line and explained the situation to his CBS viewers. “I’m talking to Tom Johnson,
” he said, “the press secretary for Lyndon Johnson, who has reported that the thirty-sixth president of the United States died this afternoon . . .”

  After hanging up the phone, Cronkite ad-libbed briefly about the former president’s recent health and activities. He then returned to the scripts of the day, detailing battlefield news of Vietnam. “What always impressed me about that moment,” the future CBS Evening News anchorman Scott Pelley recalled, “was Cronkite’s lack of formality. I’ll always remember how he did it. How he told Americans to hold on for a minute, I think I have a big story. The folks trusted him, myself included.” Or, as Brian Williams surmised, “Walter loved the challenge of broadcasting Johnson’s death without a net.”

  Tom Johnson had first alerted the Austin bureaus of AP and UPI to LBJ’s death. Then he reached out to NBC News, who wanted to wait for the “flash bulletin” from the wire services. Then it was CBS News’ turn. In a blink, the news of LBJ’s death traveled fast from Tom Johnson in Austin to the CBS News operator, then to producer Sandy Socolow in the fishbowl, and then to live news. Cronkite, breaking his own rule, went with only one source on the story. “Cronkite had just been with LBJ at the ranch,” Tom Johnson said. “He didn’t need confirmation. He knew me and knew my voice. It surprised me, too, but he simply talked with me on air. I even heard somebody in the CBS control room say, ‘It’s coming over the wire now.’ But Walter had beaten the AP and UPI in announcing the news. That was the first time that network news was ever interrupted like that. There was a risk involved. But Cronkite was merely pioneering what we started doing all the time at CNN a decade later.”

  Cronkite had been at the LBJ ranch only ten days earlier, preparing what would be the last installment of a multipart special “conversations” series with the ex-president produced by Burton Benjamin. While the five-part series wasn’t dramatic TV, it was a wonderful historical document. Lyndon Johnson had finished his memoir The Vantage Point and the Cronkite interview had been arranged to sell books. As Cronkite and LBJ sat in a guest cottage conducting the taped interview, both in casual attire, the haggard former president suffered a debilitating bout of angina pectoris, a condition related to the heart disease that would soon kill him. He retreated outside and took a prescription pill. When LBJ returned, he waved aside a conspicuously reticent Cronkite’s suggestion that they postpone the rest of his questions, which focused on civil rights.

  Health scares aside, Cronkite and LBJ got along extremely well during the grueling ranch interviews. There was something bittersweet about seeing the codgers reminisce about Vietnam . . . Selma . . . “We shall overcome” . . . Glassboro . . . Medicaid . . . Medicare. But behind the scenes, a volcano was erupting. CBS News producer Bud Benjamin and John Shamick had poorly edited the Cronkite-LBJ talks. Showing zero respect for the former president, Benjamin spliced the film footage in unflattering ways very different from the actual as-delivered answers. “It was just awful,” Bob Hardesty, LBJ acolyte and editor of The Vantage Point, recalled. “Johnson had expected more of Cronkite. He redid his facial expressions so when Johnson spoke about Vietnam, it looked as if Cronkite had raised his eyebrows in disgust or nodded his head. Johnson was mad as hell.”

  The CBS News rough cut was viewed by LBJ himself, who declared it “dirty pool.” A score of Johnson aides were tasked with keeping the blasphemy off the air at all costs. “It burned the hell out of the president,” LBJ aide Harry Middleton recalled. “It was a matter of great concern. It was unbelievable. Benjamin had re-shot Cronkite asking the questions in a completely different way, giving a raised eyebrow and making expressions he hadn’t done at the ranch.”

  LBJ’s lawyer, Arthur Krim, who was then chairman of United Artists, threw a fit with Frank Stanton about the misleading Benjamin-edited interview. It was a real black eye to Cronkite. Eventually, Krim prevailed and the Cronkite-LBJ conversation was unscrambled back to its actual, as-delivered Q&A format. “It was my very first experience with that ‘technique,’ ” Tom Johnson, who served as president of CNN from 1990 to 2001, recalled. “It was reprehensible.”

  That January 22, when LBJ died, the ex-president was still bitter toward Cronkite, not for his Vietnam dissent of 1968 but for his dishonest collaboration with Benjamin on what would be the last big interview of his life. Lady Bird Johnson, however, didn’t hold a grudge against Cronkite at all. It helped that Cronkite had treated President Johnson like a colossus in death, a political figure on a par with FDR or Kennedy. In coming years, Lady Bird would visit the Cronkites at Martha’s Vineyard for sailing trips around Cape Cod.

  The spontaneous announcement of Johnson’s death reminded Cronkite’s CBS colleagues yet again why their anchor was Top Gun. His instincts were beyond formidable. When Bill Felling—who would later become a national editor for CBS News—started working at the network around the time of Johnson’s death as a desk assistant, his principal morning job was to roll the AP, Reuters, and UPI copy into fat scroll-like documents at the crack of dawn and deliver them to the bigwigs according to their status. The first wire machine printout had the darkest, easiest-to-read type. The last printout was faint; a magnifying glass was needed to decipher some of the quasi-disappeared letters. That one went to “the schmuck” (in Felling’s jargon). “Walter got the first roll,” Felling explained. “I’d ink his name on it and type it up so nobody could poach it from him. I’d put them all on his desk. In ritualistic fashion, he’d come in, put his feet on the desk, and read all the rolls religiously. He’d rip off stories that mattered and use a ruler to make the tear clean.”

  Felling soon observed, as only a newcomer can, that all day long Cronkite had his ear tilted toward the wire room. The machines were kept under noise-dampening lids, in a corridor just across from the main newsroom. But Cronkite seemed to hear them like a dog hears a high whistle. Others waited to get served the copy, but Cronkite, a wire addict, was always ready to pounce. “If the three bells would go off, that old man would pop up like a goddamn jaguar and head down the corridor,” Felling said, laughing, years later. “He couldn’t wait to get his paws on the raw news first. He had simply conditioned himself to be the UP guy.”

  Cronkite had zero tolerance for slackers in the newsroom. It was best to leave your eccentricities at home if you wanted to survive. Socolow recalled that at one point Cronkite wanted to put the squeeze on a scriptwriter for being dangerously unstable. “We’ve got to get rid of him,” he told Socolow; “he’s a drunk.” He had residual anger about his father’s alcoholism and simply wouldn’t tolerate a boozehound in the newsroom. Socolow told Cronkite to chill out; he had secretly searched the suspect’s office and found no bottles. “I’m telling you, he’s a drunk,” Cronkite reiterated. “Fire him.” Socolow refused, on the grounds that the scriptwriter hadn’t done anything wrong. “That was until the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C.,” Socolow recalled. “There had been a minibar in the writer’s room. The scriptwriter in question cleared it out. Drank it all. Walter had been right after all. I dismissed him.”

  In late summer 1973, Cronkite flew with producer Ernie Leiser to Laos and Vietnam to document the release of American POWs. It was the newsmen’s first visit since February 1968, but the psychic scars remained. Tagging along with them was photographer David Hume Kennerly of Time. Cronkite hoped to score interviews with the released POWs, including John McCain, about their ordeals of torture, dysentery, solitary confinement, and beatings. Many of the POWs were near death, not unlike survivors of Auschwitz. “These POWs were dressed in striped pajamas and were getting released one by one,” Kennerly recalled. “One of the prisoners said to me, after I gave him a pack of cigarettes, that he didn’t believe we were going to get out of Vietnam until he saw Walter Cronkite waiting outside the gate. That, to him, represented freedom.”

  While Cronkite was in Vietnam, charges of financial misdeeds (income tax evasion) surfaced against Vice President Spiro Agnew. He claimed through his attorneys to be “a victim of a deli
berate [media] campaign calculated . . . to drive him from office.” On October 10, Agnew resigned as part of a plea bargain that kept him from going to trial. He pleaded nolo contendere to a felony charge of income tax evasion. The news was not unexpected and yet caught many people by surprise when it was announced as a CBS News Special Report at 2:35 p.m.

  Cronkite’s broadcast led with the resignation, but did so without glee. There was no victory in kicking a man when he was down—even his nemesis. Viewers respected that posture. Cronkite saved several minutes at the end of the October 10 program for a comment, expressing both regret and irony. “I first met Spiro Agnew in 1967 and I liked him,” Cronkite said. “He was warm, friendly, witty, candid, open—qualities that a newsman appreciates in a news source. Then there came that November 1969 speech that opened officially the Nixon offensive against the news media. Some of us thought it was demagoguery at its worst and frankly, I was surprised that Agnew would lend himself to it. But he did and because of my beliefs that a free press must fight any attempt to intimidate it, we became ideological enemies. But we would not have wished even on Spiro Agnew the disgrace in which his reputation, his hopes and dreams are smothered tonight. As Americans, we all share his tragedy.”

  Agnew’s resignation enhanced Cronkite’s appeal. He had become a full-fledged celebrity dragon slayer. No longer was Cronkite safe walking the streets of New York. Everybody, it seemed, wanted something from him. Refusing to have a limousine driver because it was too expensive, Cronkite set himself up to be an easy target for autograph seekers, photo hounds, and full-fledged kooks. Back in those pre-9/11 days, television studios didn’t have security guards. A complete stranger could wander into the Fifty-seventh Street building and take an elevator right up to Cronkite’s fishbowl office. It took gall, but it happened fairly often.