Cronkite

by Douglas Brinkley

  On February 6, 1980, Cronkite gave The Washington Post the scoop: he would be leaving the CBS Evening News sometime in 1981. The announcement was big news across the country. A reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution compared the retirement to ripping Linus’s blanket away from an electronic America. Brushing aside rumors, Cronkite insisted that management hadn’t forced him out. “I’d like to be able to step out right now,” he said. He had adopted the get-out-while-you’re-on-top strategy.But, he added, he would stay through the election season and probably leave on or around his birthday, in late November 1981.

  With that, speculation about his replacement grew fervent. All America was guessing. On February 15, The New York Times made it official: the darkly handsome Rather would replace Cronkite as the CBS Evening News anchorman. The announcement, made by the new CBS News president Bill Leonard, was something of a shock. Mudd had been the Vegas bookies’ favorite. The normally laconic Mudd, on the boil, cleared his desk immediately. He spent hours browsing the antiquarian shelves of novelist Larry McMurtry’s Booked Up shop in Georgetown, pondering his plight. He would go to work for NBC News within the year. The rumor mill held that market researchers found Rather polled better than Mudd. Adding insult to injury, CBS News refused to let Mudd out of his contract early, knowing he would sign with ABC News or NBC News.

  Cronkite played good soldier, telling the Times that Rather was extremely well qualified for the anchorman job. Whatever their personality differences, Cronkite knew that Rather was the relentless investigative gumshoe reporter of the JFK assassination, civil rights, the Vietnam War, and Nixon woes; he was proud to call him his successor. But Cronkite also made it clear that he was in charge of CBS News’ 1980 presidential election coverage. “I’ve covered every inauguration since Harry Truman’s,” he said, “and I want to do one more.”

  Just how dramatic the 1980 election would be became clear as Cronkite hosted a debate in Manchester, New Hampshire, among seven Republican candidates—Ronald Reagan, Howard Baker, Philip Crane, John Connally, Bob Dole, Harold Stassen, and George H. W. Bush. It was quite a playing field. Mark Harrington, Cronkite’s assistant producer, was once again his human time prompter at knee level, flashing cards like a railroad brakeman. As The Washington Post joked regarding the debate, “Harrington tells Cronkite what is happening. Harrington is Cronkite’s reality; Cronkite is ours.”

  Although Cronkite was a noncontroversial interviewer, he was a stopwatch stickler. Ronald Reagan learned this the hard way. At one juncture, when Reagan was on a roll, Cronkite interrupted and said time was up, cutting Reagan off in midsentence. Reagan’s campaign team went ballistic after the broadcast. They believed that Cronkite had tried to make his friend George H. W. Bush look polished and Reagan the fool. Cronkite wouldn’t have any of it. Live TV was no place for rambling. Any good high school debater knew you couldn’t run over the clock time. It made the politician look selfish, hogging the competition’s allotted time. When you entered the debate realm, Cronkite said, you played by the rules. Reagan now understood, like Walters, that despite all the off-camera avuncular charm, Cronkite, like Reagan himself, was a tough customer.

  Congressman John Anderson (R-Ill.) declared an Independent candidacy for president in 1980, eventually running in the November election against Ronald Reagan on the Republican side and President Carter on the Democratic ticket. At heart, Anderson was a Rockefeller Republican with an overweening Earth Day sensibility who had served admirably as a U.S. congressman from the Sixteenth District in Illinois. As a registered Independent, Cronkite, amazingly, was suggested as a vice presidential candidate for Anderson. The idea snowballed. Wherever Anderson went that month, he was dogged by reporters’ questions about Cronkite as his running mate. At Georgia State University, Anderson fueled the rumor by ending his speech with Cronkite’s trademark “And that, my friends, that’s the way it is, April 29, 1980.” The crowd went wild with applause.

  On May 3, 1980, Morton Kondracke of The New Republic accurately reported that Cronkite, floating a trial balloon, told him “he’d be honored if asked” to join the Anderson ticket as vice president. A dispute erupted over whether the chat was supposed to be off the record or not. CBS News executives in New York got bombarded with media queries. Had Cronkite shed his objectivity yet again? Cronkite, unreachable for a few days, was off on Wyntje, away from radio contact. Then the hullabaloo caught up with him. “Oh my God,” Cronkite said in horror. “He totally misrepresented the spirit of our conversation.”

  In an op-ed for The New York Times, Cronkite defended being an Independent and quashed the Anderson rumor. “To be among the best reporters and analysts of government,” he wrote, “does not in itself equip one to become a government leader, no more than being a good sportswriter equips one to play for the Dallas Cowboys.” Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, a political centrist, had also been bandied about as Anderson’s vice presidential pick. He felt, in fact, that Anderson had offered the job to him. With devious humor, Moynihan wrote Cronkite that “knowing” the CBS News anchor’s “devotion to TRUTH,” he felt obliged to rip the curtain back on Oz. “The fact is,” Moynihan told Cronkite, “that you were No. 2 for the No. 2 spot on the Anderson ticket.”

  Cronkite also found himself in a controversy over his urging President Carter to do something urgently dramatic to gain release of the U.S. hostages in Iran. On April 24, 1980, Carter’s rescue attempt, code-named Operation Eagle Claw, proved disastrous. Two of eight U.S. helicopters were destroyed after colliding in midair, resulting in the deaths of eight American soldiers and a failed mission. James Reston wrote a New York Times piece lambasting the president and his buddy “Ayatollah Cronkite,” an “innocent villain,” but in part responsible. “It seems slightly mad,” Reston wrote, “but it happens to be true that the character in the White House really felt some pressure from Uncle Walter’s announcing every night the number of days of captivity of the hostages.”

  Because people knew Cronkite would be retiring soon, the outpouring of emotion for him was torrential. One morning Cronkite joined Ted Kennedy, the liberal Massachusetts senator, on the campaign trail for a flight to Erie, Pennsylvania. As they left the aircraft together, the crowd went wild—for Cronkite, not Kennedy. “Walter!” they shouted. “It’s Walter!” Cronkite was overshadowing the candidate. As Kennedy worked the crowd, everyone wanted to shake Cronkite’s hand, not his. According to The New York Times, Cronkite was “seemingly embarrassed” by the commotion he had caused. He tried to get out of the way, maneuvering to a different part of the tarmac. But the crowd acted as if he were all four Beatles rolled into one and Kennedy was Pete Best. One woman shouted out, to cheers, “You ought to be running, Walter!”

  On June 6, Cronkite earned an honorary doctorate of law from Harvard University. He was in a state of disbelief, for the first time seeing his career as truly historic in nature. At the commencement ceremony, he was praised for being the “preeminent figure” in contemporary journalism. No longer would he carry the stigma of being a college dropout. Now he was Dr. Cronkite, with “Harvard” affixed to his name. He embraced the advanced degree with awe and embarrassment. “You know, Anna Freud [daughter of Sigmund] got an honorary degree, Professor so-and-so who won a Nobel got one,” a humbled Cronkite told Fred Friendly, with a trace of forced modesty, after the ceremony. “And yet, when I stood up, there was a standing ovation. What’s it all about?”

  “You know what that’s about,” Friendly snapped.

  “You mean television?” Cronkite responded.

  “No,” Friendly said. “Not television. At a time when everybody was lying—fathers, mothers, teachers, presidents, governors, senators—you seemed to be telling them the truth night after night. They didn’t like the truth, but they believed you at a time when they needed somebody to believe.”

  The Republican Convention—held in Detroit from July 14 to 17—had a spell of drama, with Cronkite acting as the c
atalyst. Reagan, the voice of conservatism, seemed likely to win the GOP nomination. The big unknown was who would run with him. A movement, somewhat unprecedented, was launched to have former president Gerald Ford be Reagan’s running mate. Thirty-three-year-old David Kennerly had been White House photographer for the affable Ford. A great friendship—almost of the father-and-son variety—had developed between them. Ford invited Kennerly to tag along with him in Detroit, snapping a few photos and sharing some laughs. Barbara Walters of ABC News thought she had scooped Cronkite by getting an exclusive first interview with Ford. Cronkite found himself number two in the pecking order and wasn’t happy. But while Walters got the first one-on-one, it was Cronkite who scored what Tom Shales of The Washington Post called the “scoop of scoops.”

  When Cronkite’s turn arrived, he asked Ford about taking the vice presidential spot on the GOP ticket, “If Reagan chose you, wouldn’t it be like a co-presidency?”

  Ford, his wife Betty looking on, foolishly agreed. “I would not go to Washington,” Ford told Cronkite, “and be a figurehead vice-president.”

  What a score for Cronkite. CBS News fanned the spark into a wildfire. Without time for Ford to swivel, the phrase co-presidency ricocheted all over America. Ford later said it best: “Cronkite had me in a pickle.” Reagan would never accept a co-presidency. The disclosure squelched the novel idea of a Reagan-Ford ticket once and for all.

  Meanwhile, Sandy Socolow received a hysterical phone call from Hinda Glasser, Cronkite’s office manager. Barbara Walters was trying to bully her way into the CBS broadcast booth where Cronkite and Ford were still chatting. Socolow, arms crossed, acting like a bodyguard, rushed to Glasser’s aid and prevented Walters from entering. “Barbara and I had an argument,” Socolow recalled, “but I succeeded in excluding her. She didn’t reach Ford until the Cronkite interview was over and Ford had exited our offices.”

  Cronkite, still the alpha newsmaker, now had an unexpected problem on his hands. Walters was high-heel-clicking mad and just outside the guarded booth. She was demanding a follow-up interview with Ford. “She had planted herself right outside the door,” Kennerly, still amazed at her gall decades later, chuckled. “She was howling mad that Cronkite got the scoop, that the old-boys’ club was in play.”

  Ford was afraid to exit the CBS booth. “Is she still there?” the former president timidly asked Kennerly.

  “Yes,” Kennerly said. “We’ve just got to walk past her.”

  That was easier said than done. Once Ford emerged from the booth, Walters pounced on him.

  “You’ve got to give me the interview!” Walters raged. “You’re making me look bad!”

  “I’m busy here,” Ford told her, walking swiftly away, desperate for escape, “I’m running late for an appointment.”

  Walters hadn’t played her last card. “You’ve got to do it for Alan’s sake,” she implored, referring to her then-boyfriend, Alan Greenspan, who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during Ford’s presidency. Kennerly looked at the Walters spectacle with contempt. She was begging, pleading, arm-twisting, cajoling, like a spoiled child throwing a temper tantrum. But Walters got the follow-up interview. It was at that moment that Cronkite knew that Barbara Walters—his chief rival—was a real force of nature, one whose career would have longevity. “At a luncheon that both Barbara and I attended the next day, Ford told the group that he had a sore shoulder,” Cronkite recalled, “suffered when Barbara twisted his arm to get him onto ABC.”

  A UPI reporter asked Socolow about the Walters incident, news of which had spread. He told a G-rated version of events, swear words left out. A little while later, Socolow fielded an irate call from Walters. She charged Socolow with betrayal. “Done what?” a perplexed Socolow responded. For four or five minutes, Walters ripped him a new one. “She said she was sorry,” Socolow recalled. “That she had looked forward to someday, perhaps, working with me, and now I had made that impossible.”

  The Democratic Convention was held in New York City from August 11 to 14. As Rather predicted to Cronkite, the entire night was indeed “an entertaining brawl with elements of farce.” President Carter easily defeated Ted Kennedy to win the party’s nomination. But the most noteworthy moment of the night occurred when a seemingly inebriated Kennedy wouldn’t shake Carter’s hand onstage at Madison Square Garden. That night was Cronkite’s last hurrah. When CBS threw Cronkite a surprise party at the Democratic National Convention, inviting reporters and producers from NBC and ABC to come, Cronkite was touched. “I am overwhelmed,” he said. “I really am . . . even though I know that the free drink and free booze is a hell of a lure.”

  At the end of the convention, Cronkite’s microphone was mounted like a trophy; its accompanying plaque thanked him for teaching “three generations of Americans the political process.” Charles Kuralt, who had become a great pal of the anchorman, presented the memento to Cronkite as everybody held up a shot of Maker’s Mark. A button in the back of the microphone played Cronkite’s first CBS convention report from 1952, when the word anchorman was created for him.

  That November 4, Cronkite broadcast his last Election Night for CBS News. Reagan easily trumped Carter by 489 electoral votes to 49. Cronkite sensed that the timing of his retirement was good, that before long the TV news standards he had spent decades establishing would recede into the land of folly. Though one can never trust statistics, a report had come out that November announcing that 27 percent of U.S. homes were wired for pay-cable, uninterrupted first-run movies, and specials. Within a year it would reach 38 percent. No amount of Maker’s Mark or colleague assurance, mugs of beer at P.J. Clarke’s, or fine wine on Wyntje could protect CBS News from the encroachment of the cable revolution. There would no longer be must-watch Cronkite personalities to offer headline news service to the 70 percent of the U.S. public that got most of its news from television. Depending on how you looked at the situation, cable TV was either the grand payoff for Telstar or Nixon’s revenge. Cronkite saw it as both.

  On January 16, 1981, just before leaving the White House, President Carter awarded Cronkite the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “For thousands of nights, the eyes of millions of Americans have been turned into the eyes and ears of Walter Cronkite,” Carter said at the Washington ceremony. “He has reported and commented on the events of the last two decades with the skill and insight which stands out in the news world, in a way which had made the news of the world stand out for all of us. There is probably not a single American who doesn’t know Walter Cronkite, and of those tens of millions who do know him, I don’t believe there are any who distrust him.”

  PART VI

  The Spokesperson

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Retirement Blues

  THE LONG GOOD-BYE—NO SHAME IN CRYING—UPI FOR SALE—RATHER IN THE HOT SEAT—RUSSIA, REAGAN, AND REGRET—THE UNIVERSE—GLOBETROTTING TO EXCESS—PALLING AROUND WITH CHARLES OSGOOD—CABLE TV ROCKETS—OF JOHN HENDRICKS AND THE DISCOVERY CHANNEL—BANQUET SPEECHES AND SAILING—RECONNECTING AS DAD—SADAT IS SHOT—DOWN WITH RATHER, UP WITH KURALT—BETRAYED BY CBS—PRINTER INK IN HIS VEINS—A PRISONER OF HIS CBS PAST—THE JOURNALISM-CELEBRITY COMPLEX—FULL OF DISILLUSIONMENT

  Cronkite’s last day anchoring the CBS Evening News was Friday, March 6, 1981. At the company’s request, he had stayed through the February sweeps. There was a sense that Cronkite’s leaving the broadcast was akin to his dying. A telegram from a Long Island woman reached Cronkite, begging him not to quit: “Keep it up, you’re getting better.” But Cronkite wasn’t taking a hiatus; he was going out on top. A national magazine, in full mourning mode, contacted Cronkite with an offer for him to write his own obituary. Amazed at the letter’s gall, Cronkite indeed mailed back a response: “Walter Cronkite, television and radio newsman, died today. He was smothered to death under a pile of ridiculous mail, which included a request to write his own obituary.”

  Upon stepping down, Cro
nkite, the preeminent television newsman of the twentieth century, insisted that he not be treated as a retired figurehead. Having negotiated a $1 million annual salary with CBS, he remained a vital part of the network. He would be regularly logging stories for the Evening News as special correspondent. Most of his time would be devoted to a weekly news magazine on science, space, and the environment called Walter Cronkite’s Universe (with Bud Benjamin as producer). A progenitor to the Discovery Channel, the half-hour CBS pilot had first aired on June 27, 1979, to good prime-time ratings. In 1980, Universe ran four additional times, earning a Peabody Award. So it made sense that, in 1981, Cronkite would try, in thirteen summer episodes, to make Universe a hit show focusing on U.S. military affairs, NASA, oceanographic exploration, and ecology. But while still part of the company, he had left behind a leadership void at the CBS Evening News. “That little guffaw laugh of his wasn’t around anymore,” Connie Chung lamented. “No more of his warmhearted ‘Attaboys’ after doing a segment he liked in the hallway.”

  The forty-nine-year-old Rather was an aggressive newsman, to be sure: he even experimented with heroin for a story on drug addiction. No television correspondent had covered civil rights or went after Nixon with more doggedness. During Nixon’s first trip to China in 1972, he pushed against White House rules and tried to interact with the common people of Beijing. The very year that Cronkite became CBS News anchor, Rather was a cub reporter at KHOU-TV in Houston, gaining superlative notice for his coverage of Hurricane Carla from Galveston Island. “We were impressed by his calm and physical courage during that hurricane,” Cronkite said. “He was ass-deep in water moccasins.”

  But Rather also had his critics. Many felt he had been undignified in drawing President Nixon into a verbal clash at a Houston press conference in 1974. From that point on, Rather had trouble shedding the image of being a loose cannon. His deviating from protocol during Nixon’s trip to China had rubbed Cronkite—a play-by-the-rules establishmentarian—the wrong way back in 1972; he considered it gauche. For all of Rather’s intensity when he interviewed politicians, his questions tended to bleed into long digressions. Rather’s style was quite different from Cronkite’s down-home neighbor-next-door persona. Rather was folksy, but in a quirky way (“This is shakier than cafeteria Jell-O,” “If a frog had side pockets he’d carry a hand gun,” etc.) that Cronkite thought hokey and tedious. He sometimes came across as simultaneously loopy and wooden, edgy and insecure. One word often used to describe him was “enigmatic.” Nobody at CBS ever mastered the riddling essence of his character. “I’m a different person than Walter Cronkite,” he tried to explain, fearing unmet expectations, “and as time goes along, it will naturally be a different broadcast.” Rather, for all of his great reportorial skills, was paranoid that Cronkite, after going on his global junket for Universe, would plot a return to the anchor chair.