What surprised Bob Schieffer of CBS News was how the Rather crowd purged the broadcast center on West Fifty-seventh Street of all remnants of the Cronkite regime. Cronkite’s old beige set backdrop was repainted blue-gray, because Rather thought it enhanced his complexion. He even had the “Cronkite Newsroom” plaque taken off the wall. “I would have had the ‘Cronkite Newsroom’ sign plated in gold,” a disgusted Schieffer scoffed. “I came to work that Saturday morning, March 7, after Cronkite quit. I was slated to do the Evening News that weekend night. And to my utter surprise Walter’s anchor chair was gone from the set. ‘Where’s the chair?’ I asked. I was told it had been moved to storage. ‘Go get the damn chair,’ I told a stagehand. This being CBS, it took them all day to find it. But I broadcast the news from Walter’s chair.”
Just how insecure Rather (whose salary was $6 million over a period of three years) was became apparent during his first appearance as anchorman on Monday, March 9, 1981. A direct order had been handed down from CBS executives that the set change from Cronkite to Rather was to be minimal, but Rather wanted to jazz things up a little bit. Among other things, a new desk and backdrop were frantically erected in the studio over the weekend to give things a Ratheresque aura. The new guard at CBS News wanted to make Rather’s debut memorable. Cognizant that he had big shoes to fill, Rather himself indicated his broadcast needed a new tone and tenor.
Two minutes before airtime, Rather threw a fit over Cronkite’s chair, which Schieffer had used for his weekend broadcasts. It was still behind the desk. He refused to sit in it. “I was in the fishbowl and got an emergency call from the film editing office that there was a problem with some footage of a segment,” Socolow recalled. “I rushed out down the hall to take care of the problem. Then suddenly, over the loudspeaker, I heard director Richard Mutschler shout, ‘Socolow, he’s standing up! He’s standing up!’ ”
The cameramen didn’t know what to do. “It was a near-catastrophe that will not be soon forgotten all these years later,” CBS writer Sandor Polster recalled, “by those who had worked so hard to make sure that his debut would be perfect.” In a blog post titled “The Empty Throne” (posted on March 7, 2011), longtime CBS Evening News veteran Polster—one of the three news writers Rather inherited from Cronkite—detailed Rather’s strange intransigence just before airtime that Monday. The drama began when stage manager Jimmy Wall barked, “Two minutes. Two minutes to air.” Suddenly, Rather got up from Cronkite’s old chair and pronounced, “I don’t want to sit here,” thereupon moving himself to a low table. Socolow lost his temper and cursed at Rather’s selfish bad timing. “What an asshole thing to do,” Socolow recalled. “It was so disrespectful to the crew; it makes me sick to my stomach.”
The clock was ticking. Thirty seconds . . . ten . . . five . . . showtime. The newsroom floor hands, longtime professionals, scrambled to fix lights, re-angle the cameras, and make all sorts of instant lighting adjustments. “I still can see Dan Rather perched on that typewriter table,” Polster recalled thirty years later, “looking a bit constipated, as if he were bracing for a hasty retreat.” Schieffer put it more succinctly: “Quite frankly, Dan looked like he was going to the crapper.”
Cronkite, working at home, was devastated by the way Rather treated his legacy on his first CBS Evening News broadcast. Why was he embarrassed to sit in his chair? It seemed to Cronkite rude and immature, like cooties in grade school. “It was goddamn crazy,” Socolow recalled. “Dan’s explanation to Cronkite and me was that he thought standing would be better than sitting. By the first commercial break he knew better and sat down.”
To Connie Chung, who nicknamed Rather the “Stealth Bomber”—for his sneak character attacks—Rather had purposefully tried to humiliate Cronkite out of jealousy. Morley Safer, Cronkite’s old drinking buddy at CBS News, a mainstay on 60 Minutes, saw “Chairgate” as indicative of Rather’s creepy personality. “Rather was determined to wipe out every vestige of Cronkite,” Safer recalled. “It’s that simple. That was the root of it. Rather was nasty toward Walter. The chair stunt was one of many slights. Dan’s a liar and an unbelievably paranoid guy. He did his best to get rid of all the Cronkite people. Rather and Nixon, you might say, were strangely very much alike.” When Jeff Fager was named executive producer of the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather in 1996, Rather was at first livid. “He told me he wasn’t happy I got the job,” Fager recalled. “This surprised me. I asked, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Because you’re friends with Morley Safer who talks to Sandy Socolow who talks to Cronkite who talks to everybody.’ ”
Ratings dipped by 9 percent at CBS Evening News after Cronkite’s departure, the largest number of defectors going to ABC’s World News Tonight. Cronkite was not psychologically prepared for retirement. Just weeks after resigning as CBS News anchorman, he flew to the Soviet Union with producer Andrew Lack (who later went on to become NBC News president, Sony BMG chairman, and then head of Bloomberg LP multimedia operations) to report on the state of that nation. Cronkite’s assigned point man in Moscow was Gordon F. Joseloff, who had been a UPI reporter there until CBS hired him in 1975 to write for the Evening News. Joseloff and Cronkite became fast friends. It was a UPI alumni thing. It always gave Joseloff a thrill to hear his own copy read on air at CBS by his boyhood idol. It was at the Cronkites’ annual Christmas party in 1978 that Joseloff was asked to run CBS News’ Moscow bureau. Salant thought that since Joseloff had once worked the Russian beat for UPI, he’d be ideal for the job. “Don’t worry,” Cronkite had told him. “We’ll teach you what you need to know.”
So Joseloff was thrilled to host a dinner for Cronkite on March 30 at his spacious Sadovo-Samotechnaya apartment, just a stone’s throw from CBS operations. “Walter wasn’t big on diplomacy,” Joseloff recalled. “He got down and dirty, wanting to know everything going on in Moscow.” Midcourse, somebody from Reuters banged on the apartment door to give Joseloff and Cronkite the grim news: President Reagan had been shot outside the Washington Hilton by a deranged John Hinckley. Videotape of the attempted assassination had just been shown on ABC. “I’ll never forget Walter’s reaction as he heard those words,” Joseloff recalled. “He sat bolt upright, his face got red, he got to his feet, and he asked me to lead him to the Reuters office. A throng had already gathered around the incoming news wire. Walter pushed his way in. A couple of correspondents did double takes as they turned around to see that the older man breathing down their necks was none other than Walter Cronkite.”
Here was the leaping jaguar that Bill Felling of CBS News had talked about. Reagan had been shot and Cronkite was ready for on-air action. NBC News pool footage was already being streamed to the Soviet Union. CBS in New York told Joseloff to get Cronkite, now all laser-focused on the Reagan tragedy, ready for a live interview, something more than a sound bite, even though it was almost midnight in Moscow. At first, all the Soviet satellite transmissions were tied up; state television was being uncooperative with CBS. But when they learned that it was the Walter Cronkite wanting a channel to New York, studio technicians were rushed to a state-run studio for an emergency broadcast.
Back in New York, Rather had been on the air for hours doing a fine job of explaining the circumstances of Reagan’s near-assassination. When Secretary of State Alexander Haig stated incorrectly that he was constitutionally third in line of succession to the presidency, Rather correctly took issue, calling the remark “patronizing.” A Soviet security vehicle came softly to the curb to pick Cronkite up and rush him to the camera. After a harrowing ride to a station located on Moscow’s outskirts, Cronkite managed to get airtime. “America once again had Walter to watch at a time of national trauma,” Gordon Joseloff recalled,
Not that Cronkite saw it that way. The Reagan assassination attempt put him in a deep funk. He didn’t like being sidelined. He felt marginalized almost into a state of nonbeing at CBS. A bitterness swelled inside of him. One CBS holdover from Cronkite to Rather was Linda Mason. From her ca
tbird perspective, Cronkite wasn’t merely disgruntled by Rather’s trying to differentiate himself from the former anchor on the air or by being exiled in Russia for the attempted assassination story—though those were factors. Cronkite, she believed, was envious that Rather had gotten paid a $2 million annual salary to replace him. Why hadn’t Black Rock been as generous to him? Meanwhile, the Ratherites simply weren’t impressed with the work Cronkite did from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in 1981. That fall, Cronkite went to Hungary for CBS News to cover the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Soviet invasion of 1956. Cronkite produced an ungainly ten-minute piece he wanted Rather to air on the Evening News; it wasn’t very compelling. CBS News ran only an extremely boiled-down, bottom-of-the-broadcast filler version of it.
Wanting to make spot news, Cronkite and Benjamin traveled to Poland to cover the Solidarity movement (which emerged in 1980 as the first non-Communist trade union in a Warsaw Pact nation). They hoped to earn an exclusive U.S. broadcast interview with Lech Walesa, the movement’s leader. Walesa, a humble shipyard electrician, fighting for workers’ rights and organizing for democracy, was amassing the power to topple the Communist regime. It felt unsettling to Cronkite to be working as a far-flung cold war reporter in Poland for the pampered Rather, who was ensconced in his old New York studio. Could a five-star general of nearly two decades really become a corporal again? After a harrowing flight into Warsaw, having force-landed on a grass strip, Cronkite indeed scored an exclusive interview with the Polish freedom fighter. “Walesa and his whole retinue reminded me of Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 campaign, with the young people surrounding him,” Cronkite recalled. “He was constantly taking advice from them, conferring with them, deciding one thing one minute and then something the next. . . . And they all adored him. It was a damn good interview; I’m very proud of it.”
Even though Cronkite scored big interviews with Lech Walesa and Wojciech Jaruzelski, Poland’s last Communist prime minister, no one at Black Rock gave a damn about Poland. Apple Computer had introduced the first serious home computer, triggering a desktop revolution throughout the world, and CBS management was trying to see whether it would replace the wire service for instant news. Compounding Cronkite’s difficulties in stepping down as CBS News anchorman was his boneheaded decision to join the Pan Am board. It proved to be a terrible mistake. The hitch was that he was still getting paid $1 million a year to be a CBS News special correspondent. Pan Am had a contractual relationship with NASA and the Pentagon. How could Cronkite cover the space beat for CBS while serving on the board of a company that profited from the program? It was a clear conflict of interest. Accused of breaching journalistic ethics, Cronkite quit Pan Am to save his reputation.
Cronkite was turning more and more bitter toward the Rather regime as the competition feasted on the opportunities left by his departure. ABC, led by news division chief Roone Arledge, regarded the end of the Cronkite era as a rare opening for the third-place network to excel. To Arledge, the CBS News lineup with Cronkite had been like “the Yankees when they had Murderers’ Row.” But with Cronkite, the cleanup hitter, gone, the lineup would start to unravel. ABC was determined to turn the perennial two-horse race between CBS and NBC into a three-way contest. Arledge steadily and strategically bolstered ABC’s commitment to news, starting with its extensive coverage of the Americans held hostage in Tehran, from November 1979 to January 1981. Much of his strategy anticipated Cronkite’s eventual withdrawal from CBS. When March 6 arrived, said an ABC colleague, Arledge was “like a boxer who smells the kill and doesn’t want to wait for the next round.”
From March to October 1981 Cronkite promoted Universe. With an extra-high regard for scientists and professors, he visited the far reaches of the planet, trying to learn about the Islamic world, China, the South Pole, Alaska’s Mount McKinley, and even chimpanzees along the Gambia River in Africa. It was Lowell Thomas–type fare. Cronkite also signed on as chairman of Satellite Education Service, a nonprofit company that produced the series Why in the World for the Los Angeles PBS station KCET. Between Universe and the KCET gig, Ed Bradley quipped, his friend Cronkite was acting like a “senior citizen” taking “crash courses at This-Is-the-World night school.”
Universe was conceived as a half-hour newsmagazine with two stories each program, one story reported by Cronkite and one by staff reporter Charles Osgood, who had a literary style and bountiful good humor. The show—which aired at 8:00 p.m. EST on Tuesdays—was built around Cronkite’s NASA, Israel-Egypt détente, and Earth Day accomplishments as CBS anchorman. “The basic idea was to take subjects that could have a strong impact on our world but were not getting attention from the evening news or daily newspapers,” Osgood explained. “The environment was a major area we were interested in—also scientific exploration and the cutting edge of science.”
For Universe, Cronkite retained members of his old Evening News team, from his loyal producer Bud Benjamin to his choice of researchers, writers, and off-camera assistants. During the spring of 1981, they completed thirteen episodes, to run during the summer. But Cronkite understood that building the Universe brand would be expensive; he worried that CBS was being chintzy on the promotional front. From June 14, 1981, to September 1982, Cronkite aired nine space-related segments on Universe, including programs on the search for extraterrestrial life; an advanced look at Voyager 2’s flyby of the ringed planet Saturn; Eta Carinae, a star one hundred times larger than our sun; an investigation of the aurora borealis and its effect on global communications and military surveillance; and a colorful look at Mars photographs taken by Viking spacecraft in the late 1970s. A few of the space segments fell flat (for example, a Camden, New Jersey, high school wanting to send ants into space), but for the most part, Universe was akin to PBS’s NOVA before its time.
Cronkite’s conceit was that he could become a public educator like Carl Sagan or Jacques Cousteau or Jane Goodall—at least in making environmental science entertaining to the masses. He visited a remote African village to compare its holistic medicine with that of the West. He spent time with field biologists in the Amazon. He studied photosynthesis and chemosynthesis. Playing a modern-day Robert Peary, he later flew low over the frozen Arctic Circle expanse. The world-famous Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts allowed him to explore fissures on the seafloor with its top marine biologists. He rode in a small submarine to a depth of 8,700 feet off Cabo San Lucas, Mexico (“10 hours in a tin can,” he called it). “I wouldn’t go down that far,” CBS cameraman Izzy Bleckman remembered of a submarine trip. “Walter essentially ran the camera on the Alvin himself. Adrenaline was racing through him. Sea life was everywhere.”
Whatever it took: Cronkite simply loved reporting on the far corners of the Earth to the American TV viewer. No outdoor adventure was dismissed as being too dangerous. What didn’t appear on air—the outtakes—would have made ideal programming three decades later as reality TV. A reviewer could be forgiven for thinking that the making of Universe was more interesting than the show itself. When the Cronkite-Bleckman team went to the Amazon, for example, they rented a motorized dugout canoe. The weather got incredibly hot, so Cronkite stripped down to his underwear and went for a river swim. Bleckman soon joined him. After only a few minutes in the water, they felt something nibbling at their legs; it was little four-inch piranhas. They quickly leaped out of the water. That evening they ate piranha cooked in olive oil at a little village restaurant. It tasted pretty good. “I asked the owner about the fish,” Bleckman recalled. “He brought me to a little eddy where he kept the fish. For my benefit he dumped garbage in the pond. They all gobbled it up. We had just eaten garbage-fed fish.”
Not all Cronkite’s time filming Universe was spent in the bush. Charles Osgood recalled bumping into him by accident once in Paris, with Betsy at his side. They were headed to the Louvre to prepare a segment on Leonardo da Vinci. “I said, ‘Walter, the Louvre is closed today,’ ” Osgood recalled. “I just got b
ack from there.”
“Great,” Cronkite said. “Let’s go drink at the Ritz Bar.”
Universe was an expensive show to produce. Unlike 60 Minutes, it was generally lacking in controversy, as was Cronkite himself, though the program was technically very sophisticated. The golden rule for Universe was that the science magazine didn’t cross the line into entertainment. While noble, such old-school integrity hurt the ratings. In a stubborn display of archaism, Cronkite rejected using bells, whistles, drum bands, and colorful graphics to jazz the show up a bit (as cable networks like Animal Planet and the History Channel would do in the twenty-first century). To Cronkite, that would be akin to dumbing down learning. “Cronkite,” wrote his friend Andy Rooney in a 1981 tribute, “is not a genius at anything except being straight, honest and normal.”
Neil Postman, one of America’s foremost communications theorists, challenged Cronkite’s boast that he didn’t pander to entertainment imperatives in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death. He mocked the fact that the official title of the CBS show was Walter Cronkite’s Universe (not just Universe). “Television’s strongest point is that it brings personalities into our hearts, not abstractions into our heads,” Postman wrote. “One would think that the grandeur of the universe needs no assistance from Walter Cronkite. One would think wrong. CBS knows that Walter Cronkite plays better on television than the Milky Way.” But the Cronkite of Universe was only magnetic to science buffs and environmentalists. Many TV viewers of the 1980s wanted to know about Michael Jackson’s moon walk or Princess Diana’s wedding or the behind-the-scenes gossip of ABC’s Dynasty, not bioluminescent plants.
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