That November 1977, the world learned about the “Walter Wants” phenomenon. Walter wanted Begin and Sadat to come together—and they did. New York Times columnist William Safire, a conservative, called it “Cronkite Diplomacy,” as a backhanded way to insult President Carter’s lackadaisical approach to the Middle East peace process. “It took Walter Cronkite of CBS,” Safire hyperbolically wrote, “placing an electronic hand on the backs of Israel and Egypt, to bring them together.” Benjamin now realized that Cronkite had been the archetypal TV reporter for the ages. Like Murrow, his myth would never die. “We played Sadat and Begin off of each other and made history,” enthused John Lane, a producer at the CBS Evening News. “It was a time when you thought ‘damn . . . we’re making a difference.’ ”
On November 19, five days after his diplomatic foray, Cronkite flew from New York to Cairo so he could interview Sadat on his historic visit to Israel on a private plane. Both men had rich, distinctive voices layered with a quietly mischievous sense of humor. They were sitting together on the runway, chatting amiably, when suddenly, almost out of thin air, Barbara Walters appeared like a mirage on the tarmac. She had been in Israel interviewing Moshe Dayan when the announcement of the Sadat-Begin meeting became public fare. The always-resourceful Walters had managed to fly from Tel Aviv to Cairo—the first flight between those cities since the creation of Israel in 1948. To Cronkite’s everlasting consternation, Sadat invited her to join them. His exclusive had been, in point, co-opted by his rival. A Gulliverian jealousy engulfed Cronkite to the point of burning his ears. “On the flight, I slipped Sadat a private note,” Walters recalled. “I gave him interview options. He chose to speak with me alone.”
For the next two years, every time Cronkite tried to wrangle a big exclusive interview—as he was used to doing—Walters seemed to beat him to the punch. The broad, a ticked-off Cronkite thought, was everywhere. The competition between them became tooth-and-claw fierce. A common refrain at CBS from 1977 to 1981 was Cronkite asking a producer, “Did Barbara get anything I didn’t?” Before long, the rivalry almost became fun. “We became, over time, very fond of each other,” Walters explained with an eye twinkle. “I was proud to be competing for interviews with the Walter Cronkite, a great, great newsman.”
Marshall McLuhan’s oft-repeated saying, ��the medium is the message,” has become cliché. But Cronkite’s Middle East diplomacy proved the theory in a steroid-enhanced way. At one point Cronkite, interviewing Sadat, noted that the Egyptian president was “walking something of a tightrope here.” A puzzled Sadat asked what Cronkite meant. “It’s a very delicate matter for you, and how far you can go,” Cronkite explained. “If you offend the Arab world by offering too much, you get in one position. If you don’t come back with something, you’re going to disappoint your own people. Can you successfully navigate those difficult waters?”
A bright-faced Sadat replied, “Marvelous Walter!” What impressed Sadat wasn’t the mixed metaphor but Cronkite’s strange ability to boil down the complexity of the Middle East peace process into a single sound bite. It was Cronkite’s ability to be the editor and distiller of news that made him unique. A year later, Cronkite received the Anti-Pefamation League of B’nai B’rith’s Hubert H. Humphrey Freedom Prize for his initial interviews, which the nonprofit said, “gave enormous impetus and thought to the peace process between Israel and Egypt.”
Over the next two years, the diplomatic dance between Sadat and Begin proceeded, with starts and stops, in Cairo, Jerusalem, Camp David, and Washington. Cronkite interviewed Jordan’s King Hussein, Syria’s president Hafez al-Assad, and Israeli prime minister Golda Meir. It culminated with the establishment of diplomatic relations between Egypt and Israel on March 26, 1979 (the first by any Arab nation with the Jewish state). Cronkite called the signing of the historic Egypt-Israel peace treaty on the White House lawn one of the great moments in his life. “To see something like that blossom right in front of your eyes,” he said, “my goodness, it was extraordinary—a heck of an experience.”
Cronkite thought that, all humor aside, perhaps Peter Jennings was right. Why not quit CBS News while he was at the top of his game? The idea certainly had its merits. In 1977, Eric Sevareid retired from CBS News at the age of sixty-five. According to network policy, the retirement age was not, in fact, mandatory for on-air talent, but it was often used as an excuse to end careers. CBS News wasn’t known for rewarding its most important newsmen once they turned too gray. Banished, they ended up living on Social Security checks in San Diego or Naples, Florida. Murrow was the most excruciating example. When Sevareid’s turn came to resign, he was promised appearances on CBS specials and news magazine broadcasts, but those invitations never came to pass. Collingwood, yet to turn sixty-five, was suffering a similar fate. One of the original Murrow Boys, he came to work every day only to sit in his office with nothing to do. He would formally retire in 1982, an embittered man. The network had proven its savvy in hiring smart, budding journalists, but in parting with them, it was graceless.
CBS News had an ego of its own. In the Paley hierarchy, stars were built. But as a corresponding corollary, this premise likewise rejected the notion that any on-air talent was bigger than the news division itself. Not Murrow, not Sevareid, not Collingwood, not Cronkite—they all worked at the pleasure of CBS, not the other way around. So CBS News’ reputation for cruel dismissals was well known in the industry, as was Cronkite’s reputation as its biggest star. With the two certain to cross, speculation bubbled over just how long Cronkite would remain king of the broadcast center. To some CBS executives, Cronkite was becoming an aging dinosaur, stuck in old-style objective journalism, the kind that ignored entertainment glitz. “It’ll be up to Walter to decide whether he wants to do more, or do less, or do nothing,” Bill Leonard, who would replace Salant as CBS News president, said. “There is an awful lot of workhorse in Walter, and there are ways to keep him on despite mandatory retirement rules. No one took Lowell Thomas out and shot him on his 65th birthday.”
Research showed that focus groups wanted more bells, whistles, and salacious gossip than Cronkite was offering. In a December 1977 interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Cronkite, uninterested in the fickle whims of viewers, continued his wholehearted assault on the desultory trends of tabloid entertainment-as-news. As Cronkite saw it, the nub of the problem was greedy shareholders demanding excessive profits without recognizing that they, as shareholders of a news-gathering organization, had a public responsibility. “What I rail against is the Action news, Eyewitness news,” he said, “that consultant format that diminishes the importance of the story itself in favor of presentation.”
Salant was constantly asked in 1978 about who would replace Cronkite. He developed the gag line that Ed Asner (who played the newsman Lou Grant on the CBS comedy The Mary Tyler Moore Show) was the leading candidate. That bought CBS some wait-and-see time to decide whether Cronkite—who won the Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award in Broadcast Journalism that year—should quit. Word on the street was that Roone Arledge was prepared to offer Dan Rather $1 million to jump ship to ABC News as anchorman. Talent agent Richard Leibner, who worked in spurts for Cronkite since 1964, was also Rather’s hard-negotiating agent, responsible for getting ABC interested in Rather. Leibner met with Cronkite for lunch at Alfredo’s, near Columbus Circle, to discuss his retirement date at CBS. Salant had anointed Roger Mudd as Cronkite’s successor. But Cronkite pushed for Rather to be his successor because he was a terrific international correspondent. Mudd, by contrast, had just worked the D.C. beat. “People who blame Rather for pushing Cronkite out,” Leibner said, “are peddling bullshit.”
By the late 1970s it was fairly obvious to the big-time Opinion Makers that either Mudd or Rather would replace Cronkite within the next year to eighteen months. The decision showcased the congenital split personality of CBS News: it was sort of Salant (Mudd) versus Cronkite (Rather). Mudd had ably served as Cronk
ite’s substitute for years. Rather, once vilified by right-wingers as “the president’s archfoe,” had, since 1975, become very popular as a host of Sunday evening’s top-rated 60 Minutes. The year 1979 came and went, though, with Cronkite still the paragon of TV news broadcasters. Yet Cronkite was indeed tired of the hectic rigmarole of managing the CBS Evening News. “Do you know what kind of a weight it is,” he told incoming news division president Bill Leonard, “carrying this thing on your shoulders, week after week, month after month, year after year? It’s getting to me. I need time. Time to sail. Time to relax. Time to . . . aw, hell . . . it’s getting me down. I’d be a damn fool not to quit while I’m ahead.”
Leonard staved off Cronkite’s departure, telling him to stall until outgoing president Dick Salant retired. A prime directive to Leonard, as he took his new job in 1979, was to keep Cronkite from leaving the CBS Evening News. He managed to convince him to wait. But the let’s-find-a-replacement strain was clearly starting to annoy Cronkite. “In the grimiest commercial terms, each rating point gained or lost by the CBS Evening News meant millions to the network,” Leonard explained. “And year after year Walter Cronkite came through with a one- or two-rating-point lead over NBC, usually more over ABC. But that wasn’t all. Evening News leadership meant . . . leadership in network news in the public mind, and that translates throughout the day. It helps deliver more viewers into the evening entertainment schedule. Prestige and money. And the wonderful goose that had been turning out those golden news eggs for so many years would lay no more.”
While Black Rock festered out the new anchor situation, Cronkite continued to dominate TV news with smart exposés of China and Egypt. David Halberstam made Cronkite a veritable folk hero in The Powers That Be—published in 1979—illuminating the dramatic courage the CBS News anchorman exhibited after the Tet Offensive in 1968 by declaring the war a stalemate. That year both Cronkite and Halberstam agreed to lecture and lead seminars at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Hoping for one last Vietnam or Watergate or Begin-Sadat diplomatic foray before retirement Cronkite, long wary of nuclear power, got intensely involved with the partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1979. To Cronkite, the March 28 disaster was proof of the unacceptable risks both to humans and to the environment of this energy source.
The movie The China Syndrome was released shortly after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. It seemed obvious to producer Sandy Socolow that the Evening News should do a feature piece showing the eerie similarity between The China Syndrome and Three Mile Island, and he mentioned it to Cronkite: “You know this is really uncanny that this movie should be so close to the bone,” Socolow told Cronkite. “It’s just stunning, a stunning coincidence, and I think we could make a story out of it.” To which Cronkite, the anti–Barbara Walters, shot back, “I’m not in the goddamn business of selling movie tickets.”
While Cronkite later took well-deserved credit for CBS News’ deep investigation of Three Mile Island in 1979, he also blundered that year. White House chief of staff Hamilton Jordan, a handsome Georgia pol considered Carter’s top confidant (besides his wife, Rosalynn), was charged with snorting cocaine at the Studio 54 nightclub in New York City. A special counsel was appointed to investigate the alleged narcotics use. Cronkite, to his everlasting regret, opened the CBS Evening News with a report about the incident. In 2001 he told Larry King on CNN that his airing of Jordan’s cocaine problem was the “low point” of his career. “I think we did [Jordan] an injustice in reporting that,” Cronkite admitted. “Not in reporting it so much as leading the broadcast with it as if it had great importance, and it had none really. Nothing important about it.”
The CBS News Special Report “Showdown in Iran” (January 23), which grappled with the Islamic Revolution (and included a Mike Wallace interview with the Shah of Iran) was extremely important television. Little did Cronkite realize that U.S. policy toward Iran—because of the hostage crisis—would become the foreign policy curse of the Carter administration by year’s end. The shah of Iran had left his revolution-rippled nation in January 1979, coming to the United States to get medical treatment. In his absence, the Ayatollah Khomeini, an Islamist fundamentalist, tightened his grip on Iran. Within days of the Shah’s arrival in New York, armed Iranian protesters sacked the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took fifty-two diplomats hostage. For the next 444 days—all that remained of his presidency—Carter struggled to have the captives released. “It was always gnawing away at your guts,” Carter said. “No matter what else happened, it was always there.”
The hostage crisis consumed President Carter in 1979 and 1980. Cronkite, worried that the media would abandon the story prematurely, made a bold decision, along with producer Ernie Leiser, that had far-reaching consequences. At the end of every CBS Evening News broadcast, Cronkite would sign off with the number of days the hostages had been held. CBS News started this count on Day 74. Cronkite’s nightly in-your-face reminder of the hostages was a public relations disaster for the White House. It was as if, every day, Cronkite was chastising Carter, saying, “You still haven’t brought our boys home, sir!”
Once again, Cronkite led the charge and the rest of the media followed suit. Before long, NBC News made updates from Khomeini’s Tehran its feature story. ABC News launched the 11:30 p.m. Nightline, which focused for fifteen minutes almost exclusively on the Iranian hostage crisis—ABC would banner it “America Held Hostage.” Former State Department undersecretary George Ball blamed Cronkite for starting a national TV soap opera. “Night after night, the television news dramatized the number of days the hostages had been held,” First Lady Rosalynn Carter complained. “I tried to turn off the television quickly if we were watching CBS before Walter Cronkite could sign off with the daily count.”
Despite his constant bluff about retiring, Cronkite was busier than ever at CBS News. But in a November 1979 interview with Michael Gorkin for the magazine 50 Plus, Cronkite laid out his fantasy plan to retire and sail around the world, maybe get good enough to compete in the America’s Cup. His wife, Betsy, knew the seafaring plan by heart. Whenever Cronkite grew depressed about the Iran hostage crisis, Three Mile Island, double-digit inflation, or long gas lines, his glorious dream lifted his spirits. “We’d do it slowly,” he told Gorkin, “across the Atlantic to the Azores, then around Africa to the Persian Gulf, and so on . . .” He then closed his eyes, as if studying a nautical chart in his mind, smelling the spray of sea. “We could stop in various ports around the world, go ashore and spend time with friends, then sail on. It would be wonderful, absolutely fascinating. And really, could there be any better way for an old journalist to spend time after he’s left his trade?”
Throughout the 1980 presidential election campaign, it was no secret that Cronkite’s clock was running down at the CBS Evening News. That didn’t mean his popularity was waning; to the contrary. With the exception of a couple of odd weeks, his CBS Evening News had topped the ratings ever since 1967. On the 1980 presidential campaign trail, Cronkite was a bigger celebrity than the politicians he interviewed (excepting Carter and Reagan). But he had grown overwhelmed by the workday grind of two jobs. He’d always been absentminded about keeping track of personal belongings, but now that tendency increased. Lost keys became almost a medical condition. He was also getting puffy under the eyes. When a friend from Houston visited the Evening News set, he was surprised to see how thick Cronkite’s on-air makeup was. “I’ve spent thousands of dollars developing these bags under my eyes,” Cronkite chuckled, “and CBS spends thousands of dollars trying to hide them.”
Livid against exit polling, computer predictions, and “action news” as being “perfectly ridiculous,” Cronkite criticizing news-as-entertainment became as predictable as the swallows returning to Capistrano. The gullibility of the American electorate worried him. “We need courses, beginning in junior high, on journalism for consumers,” Cronkite said. �
��How to read a newspaper, how to listen to the radio, how to watch television. . . . People have got to be taught to be skeptical so that they won’t become cynical about all news sources.” Cronkite never grappled with the possibility that he—the biggest TV news star in U.S. history—was part of the cultural problem.
Duke University professor James David Barber accurately wrote that a revolution in presidential politics meant the new kingmakers weren’t the Democratic or Republican parties, but Cronkite and other elite TV journalists. In April 1980, Barber published The Pulse of Politics: Electing Presidents in the Media Age. According to Barber, journalists could now make or break a candidate. If you were Reagan or Carter, kissing up to Cronkite was far more important than kissing babies on the campaign trail.
That spring, Hugh Sidey of Time covered a Chicago focus group evaluating voter trends in the coming Illinois primary and seconded the Barber thesis. “Their focus was not on a local luminary but on Walter Cronkite, who had come to the provinces and set up his majestic broadcast booth,” Sidey wrote. “His noble gray head appeared at the bottom of the screen, a gigantic red, white, and blue map of the U.S. spread out behind him. Not since George C. Scott opened the movie Patton had such a dramatic entrance been filmed. There were quiet gasps among the appreciative Chicagoans.”
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