A few weeks later, the CIA confirmed that two former CBS correspondents in the 1950s had worked for the agency. Names were never given. Hughes Rudd was suspected of being one of the agents. Speculation about a Cronkite connection tapered off. After looking into the matter, Cronkite wrote his fan club head, Robert Feder, to let him know what he’d discovered. “All of this is deplorable,” Cronkite wrote the twenty-one-year-old, “and should be condemned, but as Sig Mickelson has pointed out, it did occur at a particular juncture in history when the horror of the relationship was blurred by what seemed to be a particular anti-Communist fervor.”
By 1976 the Cronkite style of reporting election results to the American public had become the norm. There was an old habit that Cronkite had picked up at WTOP in 1950 that he wouldn’t shed in 1976. Cronkite, unlike other reporters, refused to use an earpiece. Communication between him and the control board was done in the old-fashioned, circa-1952 way: anchor assistant Mark Harrington would place a card in front of the anchorman saying something like, “Toss to Stahl” or “Ford is about to appear.” If something was really urgent, Harrington would crawl over to Cronkite, tap him on the knee, and hand him a piece of paper. Harrington worked at ground level, under the camera’s frame. He called this the “foxhole.”
On November 2, 1976, once again Cronkite proved a maestro on Election Night. Carter won 297 electoral votes compared to Ford’s 240, the closest presidential election since 1916. Anybody watching CBS saw Cronkite at the top of his “And that’s the way it is” game.
Just because the Watergate and Vietnam eras were over, and a Georgia peanut farmer and nuclear engineer had been elected U.S. president, didn’t mean Cronkite felt good about political trends in America. What concerned him throughout the bicentennial year was the way corporations were influencing TV news as never before. The most talked-about Hollywood film of the year was Network, a black comedy written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet (Cronkite’s director at CBS back in the 1950s for You Are There). Cronkite never missed a Lumet-directed movie. To him, his friend Lumet outdid himself with Network, one of the best movies—maybe the best—he’d ever seen. The story of newscaster Howard Beale—who some said was modeled on a mad version of Cronkite—damned the news industry and the unbridled influence of corporate ownership. Kathy Cronkite, having previously made cameo appearances in Jaws and The Trial of Billy Jack, was cast as the Patty Hearst figure. The plot of Network centered on Howard Beale (Peter Finch), the longtime television anchorman of the UBS Evening News who is told by news division president Max Schumacher (William Holden) he has only two more weeks left on the air because of sagging ratings. When Lumet gave Cronkite a private screening of Network in early 1976, Cronkite “howled with laughter,” just “rolled over on the floor with the depiction of TV news,” hoping someday he would have the courage of Beale to open up the window and shout “I’M MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”
After the laughs faded, Cronkite was left with a lot of haunting questions raised by Network. Lumet had hit close to home. Much about TV news gathering was a sham. To colleagues at CBS News, Cronkite compared the Academy Award–winning film to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. “When Paddy Chayefsky brought out Network, in 1976, all of us thought it was a very funny satire—a wild exaggeration of reality,” Ron Bonn of CBS recalled. “None of us realized that it was prophecy. But Cronkite thought the dystopian film might be prophecy.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Live with Jimmy Carter
DROWNING IN HAPPY TALK—HIRING WOMEN WRITERS—RITA BRAVER AND THE CARTER INAUGURAL BALL—DIAL-A-PRESIDENT—THE VANOCUR SCOLD—REVOLTING AGAINST PANCAKE MAKEUP—BOYS’ CLUB AT SEA—CRONKITE DIPLOMACY—QUITTING WHILE ON TOP (A CONSIDERATION)—THREE MILE ISLAND BLUES—HAMILTON JORDAN’S STUDIO 54 SNORT—REFUSING TO FORGET THE HOSTAGES IN IRAN—WHY NOT BE A U.S. SENATOR?—RATHER BEATS MUDD—THE OLD GOAT CONTINUES—JOHN ANDERSON’S NO. 2—UPSTAGING TED KENNEDY—DR. CRONKITE OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY—THE REAGAN-FORD CO-PRESIDENCY SCOOP—WHO’S AFRAID OF BARBARA WALTERS?—THE PRESIDENTIAL MEDAL OF FREEDOM
Given Cronkite’s mass audience, it was significant that he started championing the women’s movement in the mid-1970s. Although he came to feminism late, once on board, he was an unhesitating public ally (even though he refused to apologize to feminists for doing a Playboy interview in 1973, noting that Albert Schweitzer set the precedent). On the rubber chicken circuit, he publicly supported the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) for women and championed the historic 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion. Full of male swagger, Cronkite quipped that he “hoped all new CBS hires would be women”; it was a comment groaning with condescension. Feminist Gloria Steinem used to tell Cronkite, to his face, that he was a low-grade male chauvinist. He demurred. “I’d go to help her with her coat,” Cronkite chuckled to friends, “and then I’d remember and pull back—and she’d [finger-wag] say, ‘You seeeee?’ ”
Also complicating Cronkite’s sudden pro-feminist attitude was the starburst ascendancy of Barbara Walters. Dubbed by Time the most influential woman in television, Walters had never been a print reporter. Having started her journalism career as a writer on CBS’s Morning Show in the 1950s, she was hired by NBC’s Today show in 1961 as a writer and researcher. She soon became a beloved on-air personality, attracting a loyal following of female viewers. In 1976, ABC News, hoping to compete with Cronkite, hired Walters to co-anchor its evening news show with Harry Reasoner.
It was reported that Walters would be paid a whopping $1 million a year. Scads of newspapers headlined the “Million-Dollar Baby.” Roone Arledge, chairman of ABC News, desperate to beef up his news organization, had intentionally thrown that high-salary figure to the press, knowing it would generate a frenzy of attention. (What Arledge didn’t stress was that Walters received that salary for anchoring and hosting four prime-time specials a year.)
The Big Three men in news—Cronkite at CBS, Chancellor at NBC, and Reasoner at ABC—each made around $400,000 annually. Was Walters worth that much more? Cronkite didn’t think so. But he didn’t want to be perceived as anti-Walters on the basis of gender, so he overcompensated with pro-ERA rhetoric, which gave him fig-leaf cover to regularly snipe at Walters for diluting real news with People magazine–style entertainment gossip. And Cronkite joked that ABC News was the schlock network, that if you wanted to end the Vietnam War, just put it on ABC and, like its programs, it would end very quickly. “Walter was very nasty about me,” Walters recalled. “It was the old boys’ club and I didn’t fit in. I was a new generation. I started in TV, not the AP or UP. Walter didn’t like any of this.”
When ABC News announced that Walters was the industry’s first million-dollar reporter, CBS management felt deeply embarrassed. Unblinkingly, they offered Cronkite the same salary. Cronkite—who thought Walters was too showbiz—feigned offense. “Not on your life,” he told CBS News president Dick Salant. “Forget it. I’m not going to play the celebrity journalism game.” It proved to be a hollow protest. A deal was struck for Cronkite to earn over $900,000 a year, with three consecutive summer months of vacation to enjoy sailing Wyntje. The network would also provide him with a town car and driver, memberships to private clubs, and corporate aviation to and from Martha’s Vineyard. Not a bad deal. “Walter complained about me getting $1 million,” Barbara Walters recalled. “But he soon was the great beneficiary. He didn’t complain about making a lot more money a year, because I broke the mold, very loudly.”
Most Americans in 1976 didn’t distinguish fame from accomplishment. No one much cared about the personal life of syndicated columnist Andy Rooney until Hewitt hired him for a regular segment on 60 Minutes (to deliver his signature curmudgeonly commentary on the pratfalls of American life). Suddenly Rooney, inundated with speaking requests, was all the must-get-to-know rage. If you were on TV, beamed into living rooms, the American public believed you were important. “A good journalist is worth more than
a baseball player or a rock star, but I’m worried about where it’s going,” said Salant, following the Walters announcement. “A million dollars is a grotesque amount of money.”
Unlike Salant, Cronkite had been careful not to snicker publicly about Walters getting paid more than double his CBS salary—for what he privately derided as “happy talk.” When Time magazine asked him about Walters as his new competition, he had a ready high-road answer. “She has shown exceptional talent in interviewing,” Cronkite said. “She’s aggressive and studies her subject.” Both Cronkite and Reasoner underestimated the talent of the irrepressible Walters by a long shot. As a tough interviewer, her only peer was Mike Wallace. (Cronkite used to say, “You don’t know competition until you get in the ring with Mike Wallace.”) The fast-rising tide of TV news changes that Walters heralded left Cronkite stone cold; he privately hoped she’d fail. “Back then, Walter was unbelievably competitive,” Walters recalled. “Let’s just say Uncle Walter wasn’t Uncle Walter to me.”
A female CBS News hire whom Cronkite adored was Rita Braver. Her first job in TV was writing copy at CBS affiliate WWL-TV in New Orleans. CBS’s Washington bureau hired her in 1972. It was a propitious time for women to get into TV news. Before long, Braver was assigned to cover the Watergate story at CBS News’ Washington bureau. “We all felt honored when Cronkite came to town,” Braver recalled. “We got along extremely well because, as you know, Walter liked women! Not that he was overly flirtatious; he wasn’t. He was courtly. It was as if he wished the entire newsroom were run by women.”
Cronkite asked Braver to accompany him to the Carter Inaugural Ball on January 20, 1977, along with producer Bud Benjamin. Besides being a superb producer, Benjamin had been Cronkite’s alter ego for a decade—each made the other one better. Betsy preferred to stay back in New York, so Braver ended up being Cronkite’s escort. “Walter was all dressed in his tuxedo when we got in the limousine,” Braver recalled. “He looked good. Suddenly he started frisking himself, looking for his inaugural ticket. There were no cell phones in those days, we were running late, and he didn’t want to turn around and drive all the way back to the hotel. Bud kept laughing, saying, ‘Relax Walter . . . I promise you they’ll let you in the ball. You’re Walter Cronkite.’ ”
Although Benjamin kept laughing hysterically, Braver saw that Cronkite was indeed deeply anguished over the embarrassing situation. He was mortified not to have a ticket. He didn’t want to be perceived as a big shot, Mr. Red Carpet, a celebrity arrogantly thinking the inauguration rules didn’t apply to him. “When we arrived,” Braver recalled, “about four people were waiting to sweep Walter away so he could be with Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter.”
On March 5, 1977, President Carter and Cronkite, hoping to capitalize on their strong chemistry, sat on Queen Anne chairs near a fireplace in the Oval Office and answered the public concerns of forty-two callers from twenty-six states. This was an unprecedented CBS radio call-in program: a cross section of Americans could dial into the White House and ask Carter questions, with Cronkite serving as moderator. Newsweek called the event “Dial-a-President.” It was Carter’s quirky gambit to field the type of questions “you never get in a press conference.” To Cronkite’s amazement, none of the 900-code long-distance calls was prescreened. AT&T, smelling a publicity boon, had established a people-to-president system in Bedminster, New Jersey, with a direct hookup to the White House, with only a three-second delay to censor obscenities.
That afternoon, Carter, grinning heavily, gave detailed, factual answers to questions about everything from the tax code to Ugandan politics to Castro’s Cuba. “No matter how far out the question,” Cronkite later wrote, “he had in his head a textbook of information about it.” While there were no headline-caliber disclosures, Carter, the master of clarification, had handled the varied callers exceptionally well. But Cronkite’s closing comment was met with surprising anger in journalism circles, a sign that Cronkite wasn’t getting free passes anymore. “We [CBS] would be glad to sign you up again, Mr. President,” Cronkite said. To which Carter responded, “Walter, I liked it. . . . My inclination would be to do this again.”
Cronkite’s performance stirred up envy and resentment from other press organizations. Cronkite, it seemed, was trying to corner the journalism market on the Carter White House. These carps were crystallized in a hard-hitting op-ed piece written by Sander Vanocur for The Washington Post, titled “The President Carter Show.” Vanocur took Cronkite apart limb by limb for acting as White House master of ceremonies instead of as a journalist, for playing “Mr. Interlocutor to President Carter’s Mr. Bones.” White House press secretary Jody Powell didn’t do Cronkite any favors when he said that Carter had personally selected Cronkite because “no one would be disrespectful” to him. NBC’s Saturday Night Live did a hilarious spoof on the Oval Office and CBS call-a-thon, with Dan Aykroyd playing Carter and Bill Murray as Cronkite.
A lot of print reporters had taken to mocking Barbara Walters as the “Pope” and Cronkite as the “King” of TV news in 1977. Rejecting the weight of celebrity, Cronkite found solace aboard his double-ended Wyntje with friends like novelist James Michener. Cronkite even gave Michener the title of his memoir: The World Is My Sea. Together Cronkite and Michener would sail for days; the stormier the sea, the more their anxieties subsided. Godspeed had now become Cronkite’s favorite directive. The cabin of his ketch was a sanctuary from the clatter of TV news. A deal was even struck for Cronkite to acquire a minority share in the Waterway Guide—founded in 1947—which contained yearly pertinent information for both the recreational and commercial boat owner. Cronkite’s job was to decide which charts, anchorages, and tide tables to include for the scene from Maine to Key West to the Bahamas.
During the Carter years, Cronkite also began sailing, drinking, flying, and carousing with Mike Ashford, a well-known figure in Annapolis, Maryland, who was spearheading a revitalization of the waterfront city. Ashford (from Joliet, Illinois) and Cronkite saw themselves as good-guy pirates straight from the footloose lyrics of a Jimmy Buffett song. At yacht clubs all over America, Cronkite was known as The Commodore. The two rum-runners had met when Ashford, owner of McGarvey’s Saloon and Oyster Bar, held a “Save the Bay” fund-raiser at his Annapolis home; Cronkite volunteered his services to the eco cause. “We hit it off right out of the gate,” Cronkite recalled. “I took him out for a sail and we discussed books and nautical life.”
After a carefree sailing summer with Ashford in 1977, Cronkite returned to the CBS Evening News desk after Labor Day, covering in great depth Carter’s signing of the Panama Canal treaties. The White House was pleased. On the afternoon of November 11, a sleepy Friday, a wire service report seized Cronkite’s attention. Agence France-Presse matter-of-factly reported that Egyptian president Anwar Sadat would be willing to visit Israel; this was huge news in the world of Middle Eastern diplomacy. AFP reported that some Canadian diplomats cited a rumor that Sadat told his parliament in Cairo that he would be “willing to go to Israel to talk peace.”
Because Sadat had made similar statements before, Cronkite felt that more information was needed to warrant broadcasting the report on the CBS Evening News on Saturday (with Harry Reasoner hosting). Cronkite decided to keep an eye on the AFP reports over the weekend. He instructed executive producer Bud Benjamin to begin setting up for a satellite interview with Sadat for Monday morning. Technology in the mid-1970s was laborious, and a hookup to Egypt would take time. Over the weekend, Cronkite, Benjamin, writer Sandor Polster, and others talked about what questions to ask Sadat. No one at the time thought to also line up an interview with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin.
Cronkite interviewed Sadat on Monday, November 14, 1977, about his conditions for visiting Israel. In pro forma fashion, he spoke of Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. When pressed by Cronkite on the AFP report, Sadat matter-of-factly said, “I’m just waiting for the proper invitation�
�� from Israel. An animated Cronkite, doing pantomime while Sadat spoke in his earpiece, turned and mouthed to Polster, “Get Begin!” Polster raced into the adjoining network newsroom to telex the CBS News bureau in Tel Aviv about the development. The AFP report was suddenly tangible to Cronkite, real breaking news. “Under my suggestive questioning,” Cronkite recalled, “Sadat said he could go [to Israel] within a week, as soon as he had an official invitation. But we hadn’t laid any lines to Begin for his response, so we had to scramble.”
That evening, Cronkite began the CBS Evening News by reporting: “Not since the founding of the modern state of Israel—not as far as we know—has a leader of Israel met with a leader of Egypt. But now all obstacles appear to have been removed for peace discussions in Jerusalem between Egyptian President Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Begin.” The first two segments of that Monday broadcast were devoted to the separate interviews Cronkite had conducted that morning via satellite feed—first with Sadat from Cairo and then Begin from Tel Aviv. Each Middle East leader argued his side of the post–Yom Kippur War story. But Cronkite skillfully prodded them, for the first time, to agree to have face-to-face meetings with no preconditions. “It was later suggested by some critics that I had overstepped the bounds of journalistic propriety by trying to negotiate an Israeli-Egyptian détente,” Cronkite recalled. “They did not know the full story—that my initial journalistic intention was to knock down the speculation over the visit.”
Cronkite had become peace broker between Israel and Egypt. When Time magazine asked him about his diplomatic coup, he gloated. “There was a lot of desk-slapping and hot-diggity-damns around here.” Newsweek called Cronkite’s intervention the “most dramatic cross-coupling ever between mass media and the secret world of diplomacy.” CBS executives wisely declined to boast. “It was a matter of a couple of good interviews coming at the right time,” Bill Small, now senior vice president of CBS News, told Newsweek. “Both sides have a vested interest in the world knowing what they say.” ABC’s Roone Arledge tipped his hat to Cronkite. “CBS ought to be congratulated,” he said. “It was dynamite TV.” Peter Jennings of ABC News cabled Cronkite: “Walter, I’m sure Sadat would disagree, but dammit, I wish you’d retire. Congratulations again.”
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