Cronkite

by Douglas Brinkley

  The days of lax security at CBS News abruptly ended on December 11, 1973, when twenty-three-year-old Mark Allan Segal, a demonstrator from an organization called the Gay Raiders, with accomplice Harry Langhorne at his side, interrupted a Cronkite broadcast, causing the screen to go black for a few seconds. Cronkite was delivering a story about Henry Kissinger in the Middle East when, about fourteen minutes into the first “feed,” Segal leapt in front of the camera carrying a yellow sign that read, “Gays Protest CBS Prejudice.” More than sixty million Americans were watching. Segal had insinuated himself into the CBS newsroom by pretending to be a reporter from Camden State Community College in New Jersey. He had been granted permission to watch the broadcast live in the studio. “I sat on Cronkite’s desk directly in front of him and held up the sign,” Segal recalled. “The network went black while they took me out of the studio.”

  On the surface, Cronkite was unfazed by the disruption. Technicians tackled Segal, wrapped him in cable wire, and ushered him out of camera view. Once back on live TV, Cronkite matter-of-factly described what had happened without an iota of irritation. “Well,” the anchorman said, “a rather interesting development in the studio here—a protest demonstration right in the middle of the CBS News studio.” He told viewers, “The young man identified as a member of something called Gay Raiders, an organization protesting alleged defamation of homosexuals on entertainment programs.”

  Segal had a legitimate complaint. Television—both news and entertainment divisions—treated gay people as pariahs, lepers from Sodom and Gomorrah. It stereotyped them as suicidal nut jobs, flaming fairies, and psychopathic villains. Part of the Gay Raiders’ strategy was to bring public attention to the Big Three networks’ discrimination policies. What better way to garner publicity for the cause than waving a banner on the CBS Evening News? “So I did it,” Segal recalled. “The police were called, and I was taken to a holding tank.”

  But both Segal and Langhorne were charged with second-degree criminal trespassing as a result of their disruption of the CBS Evening News. It turned out that Segal had previously raided The Tonight Show, the Today show, and The Mike Douglas Show. At Segal’s trial on April 23, 1974, Cronkite, who had accepted a subpoena, took his place on the witness stand. CBS lawyers objected each time Segal’s attorney asked the anchorman a question. When the court recessed to cue up a tape of Segal’s disruption of the Evening News, Segal felt a tap on his back—it was Cronkite, holding a fresh pad of yellow lined paper, ready to take notes with a sharp pencil.

  “Why,” Cronkite asked the activist with genuine curiosity, “did you do that?”

  “Your news program censors,” Segal pleaded. “If I can prove it, would you do something to change it?” Segal went on to rattle off three specific examples of CBS Evening News censorship, including a CBS report on the second rejection of a New York City Council gay rights bill.

  “Yes,” Cronkite said. “I wrote that story myself.”

  “Well, why haven’t you reported on the other twenty-three cities that have passed gay rights bills?” Segal asked. “Why do you cover five thousand women walking down Fifth Avenue in New York City when they proclaim International Women’s Day on the network news, and you don’t cover fifty thousand gays and lesbians walking down that same avenue proclaiming Gay Pride Day? That’s censorship.”

  Segal’s argument impressed Cronkite. The logic was difficult to deny. Why hadn’t CBS News covered the Gay Pride parade? Was it indeed being homophobic? Why had the network largely avoided coverage of the Stonewall riots of 1969? At the end of the trial, Segal was fined $450, deeming the penalty “the happiest check I ever wrote.” Not only did the activist receive considerable media attention, but Cronkite asked to meet privately with him to better understand how CBS might cover gay pride events. Cronkite, moreover, even went so far as to introduce Segal as a “constructive viewer” to top brass at CBS. It had a telling effect. “Walter Cronkite was my friend and mentor,” Segal recalled. “After that incident, CBS News agreed to look into the ‘possibility’ that they were censoring or had a bias in reporting news. Walter showed a map on the Evening News of the U.S. and pointed out cities that had passed gay rights legislation. Network news was never the same after that.”

  Before long, Cronkite ran gay rights segments on the CBS News broadcast with almost drumbeat regularity. “Part of the new morality of the ’60s and ’70s is a new attitude toward homosexuality,” he told his millions of viewers. “The homosexual men and women have organized to fight for acceptance and respectability. They’ve succeeded in winning equal rights under the law in many communities. But in the nation’s biggest city, the fight goes on.”

  Not only did Cronkite speak out about gay rights, but he also became a reliable friend to the LGBTQ community. To gays, he was the counterweight to Anita Bryant, a leading gay rights opponent in the 1970s; he was a heterosexual willing to grant homosexuals their liberties. During the 1980s, Cronkite criticized the Reagan administration for its handling of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and later criticized President Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy regarding gays in the military. When Cronkite did an eight-part TV documentary about his storied CBS career—Cronkite Remembers—he boasted about being a champion of LGBTQ issues. And he ended up hosting a huge AIDS benefit in Philadelphia organized by Segal, with singer Elton John as headliner.

  As the Watergate investigations circled closer to President Nixon’s cover-up activities, Cronkite lingered on each new revelation without taking a further hand in developing the story. When Nixon in December 1973 called the press “outrageous, vicious and distorted,” Cronkite responded, but without his earlier vehemence. A reporter who spoke with him about Nixon’s remark concluded that “if there is any criticism of President Nixon in Cronkite’s conversation, it is almost completely by implication.” CBS News correspondents, notably Dan Rather and Daniel Schorr, were aggressively pursuing Nixon and his inner circle on matters related to Watergate and other crimes. Cronkite, by contrast, didn’t push the story hard. He stepped back when the noose tightened. The Cronkite view was that CBS News could report on The Washington Post’s coverage without taking sides. “Walter liked presidents,” Rather explained. “He was, for example, of two minds about his famous Tet report. He liked making history, but he wasn’t comfortable when people said that he had helped bring LBJ down. Cronkite never thought his Vietnam broadcast was a good thing for the institution of the presidency.”

  With Watergate consuming the nation, Cronkite’s fans and admirers, private and corporate, would send him everything from family photos to restaurant discount coupons and free Knicks tickets. IBM started delivering new computer models for him to try out. If he looked weary on air, a fan invariably sent him holistic cures. If his mustache grew too long, somebody would write in recommending the best barbershop to get a trim. Cronkite most enjoyed receiving news clips from local papers—such as The Denver Post or the Los Angeles Free Press—that he missed while marooned on Manhattan Island. It didn’t matter whether the letter was praiseworthy or critical; Cronkite craved feedback and would often respond. “The Lenny Bruce cult certainly was (is) a strong one and while I can’t say we’ve received as many letters as we get from the Ku Klux Klan, Birch Society, National Rifle Association, Daughters of the American Revolution, SNCC, the CORE, Ascap and other organized groups,” Cronkite wrote a fan insistent that the comedian’s death warranted more than a five-second obit on CBS, “I have heard from several persons who took offense at the tone and brevity of the Bruce death notice. I regret that I offended them.”

  Everybody, it seemed, knew exactly what aspect of modernity CBS News was neglecting, and Cronkite was their Wailing Wall. By 1973, he had developed a stock answer: Sorry, we don’t have enough time to do that story. He tried to answer—or have answered by his secretary, Carolyn Terry—all serious letters in a businesslike manner. Oftentimes getting a reply from the legendary anchorman put a gripe to rest.
Media critics tagged Cronkite the “Most Trusted Man in America” as a result of the Quayle survey, but the truth was that he had become the “Most Powerful Man in Journalism.” Both monikers became his seal of honor. “There’s something in Walter’s style,” Chet Huntley believed, “his character, his very face and delivery that promotes sincerity.”

  Doug James, an Alabaman who wrote a book on Cronkite for JM Press, interviewed John Chancellor of NBC News about Cronkite’s trustworthy box-office appeal. Sipping coffee and relighting his pipe from time to time, Chancellor discussed Cronkite with James in his Rockefeller Center office in New York.

  “Why do you feel Mr. Cronkite has risen to the high position he has?” James asked.

  “I hope that it would be years in service and the kind of experience that Walter has—and I say that because my experience is, to some degree, comparable,” Chancellor answered. “I’m younger than Walter is, so I didn’t land at Arnhem in a glider. I wish I had. But Walter had that experience with the U.P. in Moscow, which means he understands the basic tenets—I think I would call them the ethics of print journalism—fairly well. . . . I think, in Fred Friendly’s phrase, ‘Walter has paid his dues.’ ”

  Having achieved his seniority meant that Cronkite could, from time to time, pursue personal larks. One of his decisions didn’t go over well with his boss, CBS News president Richard Salant. Cronkite, unbeknownst to anyone at CBS News, did a favor for CBS Entertainment: he appeared on the wildly popular Mary Tyler Moore Show. For his cameo appearance, which aired on February 9, 1974, and was done in one take, he played himself in a scene, hamming it up with Lou Grant (the actor Ed Asner) and the dimwitted Ted Baxter (Ted Knight). The comedy’s premise was that the local Minneapolis–St. Paul television anchor, Baxter, wanted to become Cronkite’s new Eric Sevareid–like colleague. The episode was hysterical and a ratings knockout. Oddly enough, Cronkite used as precedent for his sitcom turn Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had appeared on The Colgate Comedy Hour in 1955.

  But the cameo caused Cronkite a fair amount of grief. Was it proper for a real TV anchorman to appear on a comedy show? Was Cronkite, who denounced the blurring of news and entertainment, being a hypocrite? When a ticked-off Salant asked why he hadn’t gotten permission to go on the popular sitcom, Cronkite’s retort was that he knew the answer would have been no. As it turned out, Cronkite’s own private opinion was sound. The television-watching public, not as dumb as Salant thought, lost no respect for him. His appearance on Mary Tyler Moore showed he had a sense of humor, and even signaled, with a nod and a wink, that he wasn’t a male chauvinist. Future network anchors such as Brian Williams and Diane Sawyer took a page from the Cronkite-Moore collaboration, using it as justification for their appearances on comedy programs such as The Daily Show and The Tonight Show.

  A few months after Cronkite taped The Mary Tyler Moore Show, he was in Chicago, where he met with Feder, his fan club’s president. With a tape recorder running, Feder asked him why he had done the sitcom.

  I love The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I welcomed the opportunity to go out and pal around with those people I had been on The Mary Tyler Moore Show to find out if they’re real. And it was a chance to go out to the coast for a weekend with all expenses paid and a Cadillac at the other end. And I’d weighed it very seriously, and I must say my bosses weighed it terribly seriously—far more than I did—and the final decision was that if it was a sort of a walk-on thing and wasn’t any more serious than that, why we could do it.

  And I did it—I did it—for fun. With some acknowledgement on my own part, privately and secretly, that there was a little bit of wearing away of the stone perhaps of Old Stone Face, if you please. But I didn’t care that much about it. And also, I don’t mind people thinking occasionally that I’m human. Twenty-three or 24 minutes a day of giving all this solemn news doesn’t give you much chance for self-expression, and it shouldn’t, and I’ve always believed it shouldn’t, and it doesn’t, I believe on my broadcast. So that’s one reason I did that.

  By the mid-1970s, Cronkite had put together a crackerjack staff at CBS News, the envy of the other networks. One of his smartest hires was Linda Ann Mason in 1971; she helped produce the long Watergate pieces in October 1972. For all his open-mindedness about women’s rights, though, Cronkite loved telling dirty jokes out of the earshot of female employees. He and his producer friends—Sandy Socolow, Ernie Leiser, Les Midgley, and Burton Benjamin—didn’t edit their locker room banter at the broadcast center. They let the off-color jokes rip. As the pioneering first woman producer-scriptwriter at CBS News in New York, Mason ignored the stale males. She had grown up in Middletown, New York, revering Cronkite. His performance during the Kennedy assassination was a defining moment in her life. “You watched Cronkite on Kennedy’s death,” she recalled, “and you couldn’t believe it happened. But Cronkite helped guide me through it all. That might sound hokey, but he really did.”

  Mason had the right stuff to make it in the brutish world of broadcast journalism. An international affairs graduate of Brown University, she started her reportorial career at the age of sixteen. Like Betsy Cronkite at the Kansas City Journal-Post, Mason began her professional career writing for the “Woman’s Section” of Rhode Island’s Providence Journal. What made her unusual for a woman in the mid-1960s was her steely determination to enter TV journalism. After a stint at PBS, WCBS-TV in New York City hired her. “I thought I had arrived,” she recalled. “I just started working my way up the ladder.” Around every bend, though, Mason encountered a purposeful workplace bias against women. At times it became degrading. “I had a choice to make,” she recalled. “Sue or fight. I chose the latter.”

  Mason soon realized that beneath the surface chauvinism, at a deeper human level, Cronkite’s team was really mensch-like. When Mason arrived for her first eggnog bash, the Cronkites’ annual Christmas party, Walter was warm and funny toward her. He introduced her to Betsy as the gal who was making her way up the ranks at CBS (although he called her “Mary” by mistake). With alcohol flowing freely and a player piano hammering out “Good King Wenceslas” and “Deck the Halls,” Mason finally felt a new camaraderie with her work colleagues. No longer did she worry about an old-boys’ club or chauvinist exclusion. Her dream had come true: she was a producer-scriptwriter at the Tiffany Network. For God’s sake, her boss was the Walter Cronkite. Why complain?

  By all accounts, Cronkite was a happy man in 1974. He bought a summer house in Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard, a dream of his since he first covered the America’s Cup for Eyewitness. The six-bedroom, four-and-a-half-bath waterfront colonial had an amazing pier for Cronkite to dock the new forty-two-foot yawl Wyntje, which had teak and mahogany decks. Friends considered him a “lunatic sailor,” always wanting to circumnavigate the globe like Magellan. The 4,330-square-foot home allowed Cronkite space for his personal library—primarily books about American history, sailing, space, popular music, and the environment. His literary hero was C. S. Forester’s famous Captain Horatio Hornblower. The house, which had been built in 1929, was set on a hill and had a tall chimney. Every clear-weather summer day, Cronkite would personally hoist up Old Glory on the tallest pole in Edgartown; his flag became a fixture of the harborscape. All three Cronkite children got a kick out of the fact that director Steven Spielberg was making the movie Jaws that summer on the Vineyard—and Kathy was an extra in the blockbuster film.

  The Vineyard was as much an ideal as a reality. A routine developed during that summer of 1974: breakfast in the large kitchen, followed by work for a few hours in the uncluttered attic study. Then it was out on the Wyntje to sail the Atlantic blue. Sometimes Cronkite would go over to the Readers Room—a men-only private club—for a bowl of clam chowder. By late afternoon, before cocktails, he often napped. But he also shed his beach clothes for a suit and left his summer vacation for work breaks. He covered President Nixon’s Mideast tour that year and had an exclusive interview with Egyptian presid
ent Anwar Sadat, taped a series of radio reports titled “The American Challenge,” and conducted a brilliant interview with the Soviet dissident author Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

  In early summer 1974, Americans of all stripes were deeply concerned about American political affairs. While Cronkite was proud of the CBS News team for its Watergate coverage, he worried that America was coming unglued. When he was asked in Austin, Texas, if he planned on interviewing President Nixon in San Clemente, he quipped, “San Clemente or San Quentin?” When Chief Justice Earl Warren died on July 9, 1974, Cronkite felt great sorrow. He had first met Warren in 1956, and had occasionally called upon the chief justice as a source. He saw Warren as a judicial giant without tolerance for racial discrimination: a man like himself, getting more liberal with age. “The Chief Justice himself said he was simply following the dictates of the Constitution,” Cronkite said. “He wanted his court to be remembered as the ‘people’s court.’ ”

  A people’s court is an apt way to describe what Cronkite thought of his CBS Evening News bully pulpit. Shuttling between Martha’s Vineyard, New York City, and Washington, he managed to cover the House Judiciary Committee’s hearings on the impeachment of President Nixon on July 25 and 29 and present special late-evening reports on July 24, 26, and 27. Even though Americans were losing faith in the White House, Cronkite encouraged his fellow citizens not to lose faith in their government and its ability to do great things. The public would need that reminder, for, on August 8, after the release of taped proof that he had lied about his involvement in the Watergate cover-up, President Nixon announced he would resign the presidency. The Watergate scandal, it seemed, was almost over. Nixon’s vice president, the genial Gerald Ford of Michigan, who had served in Congress from 1949 to 1973, would take over the White House.