CBS News was undergoing major changes in personnel in late 1981 that would continue throughout the decade, presenting a stark comparison to the stability of Richard Salant’s years as division president. In November, the president of CBS News, Bill Leonard, was replaced by a brash former executive at CBS Sports, Van Gordon Sauter, who wanted to make his own mark at the network. He had no particular use for Cronkite. On the corporate level, William Paley was fighting his own losing battle to maintain control of the company he’d founded.
Rather had his own troubles in late 1981. On air, he seemed a little stilted in the early days, not entirely comfortable in his own skin. Even worse was that CBS News had lost its comfortable front-runner lead, along with approximately 2.5 million viewers each night; this translated into about $20 million in annual revenue. Rather was well aware of the rumor that if his ratings didn’t improve quickly, he would be replaced by Charles Kuralt, whose Rockwellesque “On the Road” segments—that wonderful hybrid of prose and picture narrated by a deep, soak-it-up baritone voice—were beloved. Kuralt was bald, with a headful of interesting bumps and a wry whiskey smile. But he was a wonderful reporter and a real bon vivant to boot. Cronkite, furious at his post-Cairo treatment, promoted the notion that Kuralt should replace the interception-prone Rather as the quarterback of the CBS Evening News.
One way for Rather to bolster his audience share would have involved using Cronkite on a more regular basis. But Rather was not interested in that cotton-up approach. He was as vitally competitive as Cronkite had ever been. His team moved Cronkite out of the CBS Evening News office suites and the core of the news division as well. Given his druthers, Rather would have banned Cronkite from the broadcast center entirely. The story was as old as any transfer of power in any field. Cronkite knew it, understood it, and was utterly aghast when it was happening to him. Second-guessing his decision to leave the CBS anchor chair, he told historian Don Carleton in an oral history interview that his retirement in March 1981 had been premature. “I very much regretted it because it didn’t work out as it was planned,” he said in a volcanic display of disgruntlement. “Rather and company shut me out from doing anything. . . . [The thinking was] as long as I was on the broadcast, there would be unfavorable comparisons with Rather, and Rather couldn’t establish himself as his own man. Well, I don’t disagree with that too much. I can understand their coming to that . . . I think if I had been in the same place I would have had the same feeling about it. But, the thing is, it went on for ten years, it goes on to this day. And that’s unconscionable, unreasonable.”
In the fall of 1981, Cronkite invited Rather to lunch at a midtown Manhattan club. It didn’t go well. “It was somewhere between awkward and a strain,” recalled Rather, who went to the lunch merely to listen. “The comfort factor wasn’t high. Walter was critical of me to my face. He told me I was ‘too stiff’ on the air.” The takeaway from the lunch was that Cronkite wanted Rather to do the Evening News broadcast his way. Nothing else would be acceptable.
When Socolow visited with Van Gordon Sauter one afternoon, he suggested that Cronkite’s desk be sent to the Smithsonian Institution for public display on the Mall in Washington. Sauter said that was a jolly idea, that he would take care of it. A few months later, after a little detective work, Socolow learned that the desk had been pulped during Rather’s purge of all remnants of his predecessor. What a grave injustice, Socolow thought, what a vindictive, asshole thing to do. When told about this desk story, Rather shook his head. “Socolow,” he said, “has been putting dirt on me for years.”
Cronkite had contracted for a prominent role on the air as part of his CBS retirement agreement. But with Universe floundering, to put it mildly, he was reconsidering his options. He took a little solace in the fact that his conundrum wasn’t unique. David Brinkley—fully in the shadow of John Chancellor—was going through much the same thing at NBC in 1981. One of Brinkley’s problems was that his network had hired a cadre of former CBSers to manage the NBC news department. In fact, that was a problem both former anchors shared, inasmuch as men such as Richard Salant and Bill Small, supporters of Cronkite, had moved over to NBC, where they couldn’t help Cronkite and didn’t choose to help Brinkley. Forced into a smaller and smaller role, Brinkley found himself wishing he’d be fired. He daydreamed that he’d continue to receive his large salary and take an endless vacation in his native North Carolina. But NBC made it clear it wasn’t going to fire him. So Brinkley quit.
Roone Arledge was ready to pounce. For Brinkley, the breakup with NBC News led to a fulfilling fifteen-year turn at ABC News, where he hosted the Sunday morning show This Week. Cronkite had much the same opportunity: to go to a new network, where his strengths would be assessed and then showcased. He had a standing offer from Arledge, as well as occasional feelers from NBC. CNN desperately wanted him to host an evening talk show. After weighing these options, Cronkite stayed at CBS News, a decision he later regretted. Sadly, he would never again be happy there. “I thought, well, the hell with them, if they want to pay me a million dollars a year not to work, that’s all I ever need,” he recalled. “But it sure was a mistake. I shouldn’t have done that. I should have fought it. I should have quit with dignity.”
The lucrative contract purchased Cronkite’s affiliation, at least seven years of it, but not his blind loyalty. He deeply disagreed with the direction in which Sauter was leading the CBS Evening News, with drastically decreased emphasis on overseas reports and developments in Washington, D.C. Cronkite’s resentment only intensified after Sauter canceled Universe during the 1982 summer season. The program had failed to find a sustainable audience. But Cronkite felt that management had willed the show’s failure by not promoting its second season and by preempting it so often that even fans would forget to tune in, week after week. “Howard Stringer [the executive producer of CBS Evening News after 1981] thought that Cronkite was a threat to Rather,” longtime CBS News producer Bud Lamoreaux recalled. “Their strategy was to bury Walter. They didn’t promote him at all at CBS. After 1981, the fix was in. Walter was bound to fail.”
On February 22, 1982, New York magazine declared that “the Cronkite age is behind us, and TV news, which was the same for years, will change beyond recognition in the next five.” CBS’s news division was comfortably moving ahead without Cronkite. Before long Rather brought the CBS Evening News back to first place in the ratings. This didn’t impress Cronkite. Full of despair, Cronkite was upset by Rather’s superficial version of the CBS Evening News and didn’t refrain from saying so in appearances throughout the country. In his time, Cronkite had worked himself into a frenzy, trying to shoehorn one more twenty-second news item into his allotted twenty-three minutes. He was convinced that turning away from that kind of passion for news and replacing it with feel-good features recommended by Research Analysis did the viewers a terrible disservice. “After leaving his anchor post,” New York Times media reporter Peter Kaplan wisely noted, “Cronkite was always one step short of disillusionment.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Struggling Elder Statesman
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING—BACK TO NORMANDY—BONDING WITH REAGAN—COSTELLO’S SALOON—NO ROLE IN SAN FRANCISCO—THE ART OF NEWS DOCUMENTARIES—CLOWNING AROUND WITH MIKE ASHFORD—YELLOWSTONE—ALWAYS THE ROAST OF THE PARTY—ROONEY AND BUCHWALD JABS—THE MOUTH OF THE SOUTH—SUPPORTING BOB SCHIEFFER—OLD AND IN THE WAY—BONDING WITH FRIENDLY—OGN NEWS—PALEY PAYS CRONKITE HOMAGE
Ever since Cronkite’s “Report from Vietnam” in 1968, General William Westmoreland had become persona non grata around CBS News. It didn’t matter whether you were part of the Cronkite cult or the Rather camp, everyone at CBS considered Westmoreland a congenital liar. While Cronkite took swipes at Westmoreland in many interviews about his famous “Report from Vietnam,” his friend Mike Wallace, the toughest interviewer in CBS News history, got to go mano a mano with the former chief of staff of the U.S. Army. Wallace’s interview of Westmo
reland for the CBS Reports documentary “The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception” (which aired on January 23, 1982) gave credence to the old Cronkite claim that the Army general who commanded American military operations at the peak of the Vietnam War had deliberately lied about Vietcong troop strength in 1967 to bolster morale, keep congressional appropriations flowing, and build civilian support back home. Cronkite had blown Westmoreland’s deceit wide open in 1968, and Wallace stuck the knife in deeply in 1982. “I screened the broadcast,” CBS News president Bill Leonard recalled, “and was very much impressed.”
Shortly after “The Uncounted Enemy” aired, Westmoreland sued CBS News for $120 million. The charge was libel. Cronkite’s producer for Universe, Bud Benjamin, was asked to conduct the network’s internal inquiry into the controversial documentary. To Cronkite’s surprise, Benjamin, who had worked for him as far back as 1957 (as executive producer of The Twentieth Century), ended up critiquing the documentary as deeply flawed and in violation of CBS News guidelines. The Benjamin Report, as Cronkite called it, didn’t make much of a difference in the acrimonious Westmoreland v. CBS trial, because the burden was on Westmoreland to prove “actual malice.” Westmoreland settled for accepting an apology from CBS, feeling he had, in part, cleared his name and restored his honor. The controversy petered out. While Cronkite had nothing to do with Westmoreland v. CBS per se, the general’s disdain for the Eye dated back to “Report from Vietnam.” In one oral history interview, Westmoreland charged that the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite had remorse about its own pro-Vietnam news segments from 1964 to 1967, and in 1982 had diabolically tried to put the “blame on my back.”
All the media attention surrounding Westmoreland v. CBS galvanized Cronkite to make more TV documentaries destined to grab the public’s attention. Abandoning the Universe formula, determined to follow in Murrow’s esteemed footsteps, he rebelled against being the “definitive centrist American” and “everybody’s uncle.” Why not instead make a cutting-edge documentary on the order of “The Uncounted Enemy”? Cronkite didn’t want to get sued but he wasn’t ready to be neutered and put out to pasture. Don Hewitt convinced him that a 60 Minutes–style documentary program was where the action at CBS News had moved to in the Rather era. With heart and soul, Cronkite went to work on the documentary “1984 Revisited” (a CBS Reports special that aired in prime time on June 7, 1983). Reading George Orwell’s classic novel 1984, published in 1949, had been a revelation for Cronkite. He was stunned by Orwell’s raw insights into both Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. To Cronkite, the dystopian 1984 was prescient in showing that America’s civil liberties were being gutted by a right-wing agenda. To coincide with the CBS Reports documentary, Cronkite wrote a far-reaching opinion piece for The New York Times, warning about Orwell’s Thought Police fast becoming the new American reality. “The total absence of privacy,” he wrote, “the idea that the government is (or may be) always watching, means, most of us would agree, the ultimate loss of freedom.”
As Cronkite imagined it, “1984 Revisited” would be a libertarian defense of the Fourth Amendment, which was under assault. Cronkite visited banks, supermarkets, and department stores to watch surveillance cameras spying on customers. The very fact that Miami Beach had cameras trained on street corners to monitor sidewalk activity, Cronkite believed, was Orwellian prophecy come true. To Cronkite, the fact that the U.S. government now had access to individuals’ bank statements, medical files, and credit card records was a sign of creeping Big Brotherism.
What made “1984 Revisited” so difficult to film were the technical mishaps that trailed Cronkite’s CBS crew around like a Murphy’s Law dust cloud: everything that could go wrong did go wrong. “Walter blew his stack,” writer-producer Dale Minor recalled of a trip to Spain. “His temper went into overdrive. It was clear for ‘1984 Revisited’ that he wasn’t getting A+ crews anymore. Semiretirement wasn’t going well for Walter.”
Having to suffer CBS cutbacks was one thing. But being assigned the C-crew by CBS News was more than Cronkite could tolerate. Then, compounding his frustration, the U.S. government blacklisted him while he was making the documentary. It was a scary new world indeed. The Washington Post reported in early 1984 that the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), the organization Murrow headed from 1961 to 1964, had put Cronkite on its blacklist for being “too liberal.” Others on the USIA list included civil rights activist Coretta Scott King, Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee, consumer advocate Ralph Nader, and Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. Congressional Democrats had a field day castigating Reagan’s USIA for maligning such outstanding Americans as Cronkite, whose picture appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country accompanied by the blacklist story. To Cronkite, it was Nixon’s Enemies List redux; he dealt with the ridiculous revelation with confident nonchalance. Reagan, who respected Cronkite, was embarrassed by the blacklist. Enemies lists weren’t the Gipper’s style. “The White House does not condone any blacklist,” Reagan’s spokesman, Larry Speakes, forcefully told reporters at a press conference in California. “We’ve communicated our displeasure to USIA.”
On the heels of the USIA flap, CBS Morning News senior producer Missie Rennie scored for Cronkite a coveted exclusive with Reagan for the fortieth anniversary of D-day (June 6, 1984). The president was scheduled to deliver two speeches in Normandy: one at Pointe du Hoc (where the U.S. Army Rangers Second Division famously climbed the cliffs) and the other at Omaha Beach. Usually, when it came to exclusives, the CBS Morning News got outhustled by both NBC’s Today show and ABC’s Good Morning America; not this time around. Cronkite was incredibly popular with the World War II veterans and Reagan wanted atonement, so the CBS anchorman got to make the trip. Long before Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation, Cronkite had asked America to start honoring every June 6, not December 7 (Pearl Harbor Day), as the formative anniversary of the Second World War. In Normandy, one by one, the vets told the CBS anchor emeritus about where they had been on D-day. “Everybody wanted to keep shaking Walter’s hand,” Rennie recalled. “They were moved to tears by the mere sight of the old anchorman returning to Pointe du Hoc.” (After the D-day retrospective, World War II veterans started asking Cronkite to blurb small-press books about their firsthand combat experience in Saipan or Anzio or the Bulge. More often than not, he obliged.)
Surrounded by World War II veterans, with the English Channel serving as the dramatic backdrop, the Cronkite-Reagan interview was refreshingly candid from the get-go. Yet it could have been called the nostalgia hour. “Mr. President,” Cronkite said after the Pointe du Hoc speech, “you know, this war—World War II, that is—was called a popular war, as opposed to the actions we’ve had recently—Vietnam, Lebanon, Grenada, I suppose. What are the conditions it takes for us to have a popular war, for heaven’s sake?” Reagan answered with the same kind of softness toward Cronkite that he had exhibited in March 1981 when he called the anchorman the consummate “pro”; Reagan didn’t mind the “for heaven’s sake” coming from old Walter. Reagan told a story about a World War II soldier who used to say, “We all know, the shortest way home is through Tokyo.” Cronkite seemed to agree. At the interview’s end, Cronkite asked Reagan, in a corny way, what his “plan for D-Day” was against his Democratic rival—presumably Walter Mondale of Minnesota or Gary Hart of Colorado—in that year’s presidential election. “Just tell them what we’ve done,” Reagan said with humor on his face, “and what we’re going to do and pretend they’re not there.”
After his Normandy coup, Cronkite felt certain that CBS News would have him co-anchor the 1984 political conventions and Election Night with Rather. Reagan was seeking a second White House term, heading the Republican ticket in 1984, while Walter Mondale—former vice president for Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981—was the Democratic front-runner and eventual nominee. Having Cronkite broadcast from the conventions on television had been an American tradition since 1952.
At the Democ
ratic Convention in San Francisco (from July 16 to July 19)—the first up—there was rampant speculation about how much airtime Rather would allow Cronkite. “We’re waiting to see if Dan talks to Walter with a 30-degree or 40-degree chill in his voice,” became a standard joke at all CBS conventions in the 1980s. Rather, the grapevine maintained in 1984, was worried about being overshadowed by the most trusted man in America. It was said that having Cronkite and him together was like putting forty tons of dynamite next to a gas stove: combustion was likely. The convention pairing that garnered the most inside media attention at times wasn’t Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro, but Cronkite and Rather. There was endless gossip about their feud.
Perhaps Cronkite’s real power in 1984 was in educating print reporters from around the world about the hot-button political issues leading into convention season. Using Costello’s saloon—which boasted James Thurber’s original drawings on its walls—on East Forty-fourth Street as his New York think tank, Cronkite regularly hosted media powwows over scotch-and-waters, as if anchoring an inebriated version of Meet the Press. Journalists such as David Halberstam, Theodore White, R. W. Apple, Andy Rooney, Mike Wallace, and Morley Safer were regulars at these What-Walter-Thinks pub sessions. In keeping with his frugal nature, Cronkite drank for free at Costello’s as long as his guests ran up a tab. One afternoon in July 1984, just before the Democratic Convention, Cronkite met with a group of British correspondents at Costello’s to discuss what was shaping up to be a Reagan-Mondale presidential square-off. “Four years is too long,” Cronkite told a New York Daily News reporter who had joined the happy hour. “But the British campaigning of six weeks is too short. There’s not enough time to develop the issues. I’d like to see an American campaign of between two-and-a-half to three months.”
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