Cronkite

by Douglas Brinkley

  On July 18, CBS aired “The Legacy of Harry S. Truman” in prime time. It was solid, but not great. Based on Cronkite’s interviews with Truman’s daughter, Margaret Truman Daniel, and former White House aides such as Clark Clifford, the documentary preempted CBS News coverage of the Democratic Convention. Much as he did in his interview with Reagan at Normandy, Cronkite seemed more like a cheerleader for American greatness than a hard-drilling journalist—a booster, in this case, for Truman’s image to be chiseled into Mount Rushmore. “Walter was an excellent interviewer,” Barbara Walters concluded after carefully watching the CBS Evening News for decades. “But he wasn’t a tough one. As anchorman, there was nobody like him. But I was a much tougher interviewer.”

  Rather was angry that Cronkite had cut into his convention coverage with a triumphalist Truman fest. Cronkite was now in San Francisco, seemingly with all of Costello’s saloon in tow, playing the fount of American political wisdom. Rather issued an edict: use Cronkite very sparingly. When Governor Mario Cuomo of New York gave his keynote address at the convention, Rather turned florid in trying to describe Cuomo’s mesmerizing impact on the crowd at the Moscone Center. Cronkite, taking a talking-head turn, simply said on CBS, “The main thing was that this hall listened, and that’s a major victory in any convention.” It was classic Cronkite. “Nothing fancy about that kind of analysis,” a Syracuse Herald-Journal critic noted, “but it got right to the heart of the situation.”

  Rather cut Cronkite, the critics’ darling, off. He simply didn’t want him around the CBS News broadcast booth. It was quite a stinging insult to Cronkite, who back in 1968 at the Democratic Convention in Chicago had denounced the “thugs” on the floor who had roughed up Rather. But it was eerily reminiscent of how Cronkite had treated Murrow at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles back in 1960. The rivalry between Cronkite and Rather was dysfunctional and now on public display. David Brinkley, by contrast, had been asked to co-anchor ABC’s convention coverage along with Peter Jennings; NBC had added John Chancellor into the convention mix with ease. Cronkite was barely given a cameo on CBS. So, for the first time in thirty-two years, Cronkite, getting jerked around on tedious waits for airtime, had at best a very marginal (almost nonexistent) role to play in San Francisco. “It was quite sad how CBS under Rather treated him that shabbily,” Bob Schieffer recalled. “It didn’t seem right.”

  Out of old journalistic habit, Cronkite now wandered around the streets of San Francisco, asking the man-on-the-street questions, not expecting much from the answers. People shouted out cheerful greetings, such as “Walter, you’re the best!” or “We miss you, Uncle Walter.” Others would stroll past Cronkite, hesitate, display a kind of is-it-or-isn’t-it frown, then stop and ask if he was indeed the famous anchorman. When he would humbly reply in the affirmative, the inquirer would invariably say something to the effect of, “You’re so much better than Dan Rather.” All America wanted to see Cronkite on the Tube for old times’ sake. As an added insult, CBS sequestered Cronkite on a completely different floor from Rather’s at the Moscone Center, as if he were an irritant, not an asset. “It seems funny,” Cronkite told Peter Kaplan of The New York Times, “that after all these years of having looked out through the big glass window over the convention hall, that all I’ll have is a room with a monitor.” Kaplan reported Cronkite’s bitterness toward CBS in his Times article.

  Roger Mudd recalled accidentally bumping into Cronkite in San Francisco and wondered why CBS had been cruel to his old rival and friend. Whatever tension Cronkite and Mudd had between them had largely vanished by 1984. Both men had come to see Black Rock as the home base of Mephistopheles. After losing out to Rather for the CBS anchorman job in 1981, the nimble Mudd had moved over to NBC News and would later move on to PBS and the History Channel. Much like Cronkite, he would always think of himself as a CBSer, even though neither was treated well by the Ratherites. All Rather could do in 1984 was process both Cronkite’s and Mudd’s attacks as sour grapes. “Being on the air five times a week [from 1962 to 1981] created egocentrism,” Rather explained. “It led to narcissism that in Cronkite’s case bordered on megalomania. Everybody who anchors is susceptible. Myself included. It is an occupational hazard, a disease.”

  Rather, clinging to his decision, made sure that Cronkite had virtually no role in the Republican Convention meeting in Dallas that August. Cronkite was used mainly as a dancing bear in Dallas, a meet-and-greet man at breakfasts for the CBS News affiliates. Throughout the fall, Rather nixed Cronkite from all CBS’s election coverage without the slightest undertone of human kindness. There were no entitlements for living legends at CBS News. On November 6, Bruce Morton was at Rather’s side to provide cogent analysis of Reagan’s great victory over Walter Mondale—525 electoral votes to 13. It was the first time since 1952 that Cronkite had been absent from CBS on Election Night. Even Bill Moyers got a hit of airtime that evening. But not Cronkite, who watched the election results on CNN at home. A story was out that Rather had a head cold and was taking throat lozenges, antibiotics, vitamin C, and hot water to help see him through his first Election Night as anchorman. When Peter Kaplan of the Times telephoned, the lonely Cronkite broached the Rather cold. “I would often come up with a cold before one of those things, but my producer convinced me it was psychosomatic,” he said. “Maybe it is with Dan, or else he decided he needed to copy me.”

  With the use of sophisticated poll projections, Rather went on the air at 8:00 p.m. EST, and CBS News named Reagan the winner within five minutes. Although Cronkite got along well with Mondale, he seemed genuinely excited about Reagan’s landslide. To him, it was a historic reelection, a confirmation that Goldwater’s conservative movement had indeed turned mainstream. It was also well known that Reagan would more likely green-light a Cronkite interview than one with Rather. A little while later, Martin Kaplan, Mondale’s chief speechwriter, was asked who could have defeated Reagan in 1984. Without skipping a beat, he said, “Robert Redford. Maybe Walter Cronkite.”

  Cronkite, who still represented the ethics of broadcast journalism to most Americans, now hoped that a string of his CBS Reports documentaries scheduled to air in 1985 might bring him a new wave of acclaim. The first special was “Honor, Duty, and a War Called Vietnam,” a reflection on the war and the lessons that were learned in Southeast Asia. It aired on April 25, to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the capture of Saigon by Communist forces. That February, Cronkite had returned to Vietnam for CBS Reports for the first time since 1968, with U.S. representative John McCain (R-Ariz.), a former bomber pilot and POW, at his side. McCain, on his 137th bombing mission into North Vietnam, had been shot down over Hanoi in 1967. Parachuting into a lake, he broke both arms and a leg. He then spent more than five years as a POW, many in solitary confinement. Now, with Cronkite at his side and a CBS News crew on their heels, McCain talked candidly about his POW ordeal. The sounds of M-16s firing in the distance and big Cobra helicopters roaring overhead could no longer be heard. On a pastoral afternoon, he led Cronkite to his prison cell, but wouldn’t enter. “Not all of us can emulate John Wayne,” he told Cronkite about the torture he had endured. “But I think the overwhelming majority of us did the best we could. There was a great deal of suffering, a great deal of loneliness.” It was powerful television.

  Following “Honor, Duty, and a War Called Vietnam,” Cronkite hosted CBS Reports on such serious topics as terrorism, nuclear fallout, and education. All these documentaries were good in the old Murrow-Friendly tradition. None did well in the Nielsen ratings. After this tepid viewer response, the thought of additional Cronkite projects for 1986 seemed far-fetched. Further complicating Cronkite’s life as CBS News special correspondent was the requirement that producer Bud Benjamin clear Cronkite’s paid speaking engagements in advance. Having to seek permission from CBS corporate brass—even a dear friend like Benjamin—bothered Cronkite to no end. To quell his legitimate squawks, CBS did allow the retired anchorman, stil
l on its payroll, to collaborate with BBC and PBS on a space shuttle documentary. But to Cronkite, CBS News president Van Gordon Sauter treated him as an ill-defined hanger-on, a burr on the saddle of CBS’s new horse, Dan Rather.

  Constantly looking for a CBS prime-time news magazine to boost his sagging fortunes at the network, Cronkite gambled on Walter Cronkite at Large. The first program aired in September 1986, with two more following in March 1987 and June 1988. They were ratings flops. Cronkite, of course, blamed the network for not promoting the shows. Unhappy with his treatment by CBS News, bitter that he had retired too soon, he circulated at New York cocktail parties, a sacred ritual. Without the daily grind at CBS, he imbibed regularly. No matter how exhausted he was from international travel, he enjoyed closing the bar. “When he drank,” his Texas friend Ben Barnes recalled, “he had an appetite for both history and political bullshit.”

  Entertaining of the sort Walter and Betsy did on both Martha’s Vineyard and in New York City took money. Cronkite wasn’t allergic to accepting handsome speaker fees during the Reagan years. He received a steady stream of lucrative gigs and traveled extensively, almost entirely on assignments for honoraria. At each of their homes, he and Betsy were very social and entertained often. All three Cronkite kids, in fact, have their best memories of Dad being carefree in Edgartown. The endless list of his prominent friends visiting them on the Vineyard became something of an inside joke. On any given afternoon at the Cronkites’, you could find Lady Bird Johnson, John Lehman, William F. Buckley, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, John Kennedy Jr., or Joseph Heller. Bedecked in a colorful Hawaiian or Lacoste tennis shirt, Cronkite loved taking visitors around the Vineyard by boat. Betsy preferred the Upper East Side, jokingly calling the Vineyard “Elba,” the godforsaken isle she couldn’t escape.

  Cronkite was once challenged to a name-dropping contest; he boasted heavyweight credentials. His competitor was the harmonica virtuoso—and wit—Larry Adler. Cronkite wheeled in as many Kennedys as he could fit into one story. But Adler won by describing a tennis match he played at Charlie Chaplin’s house against Greta Garbo and Salvador Dalí. “For Walter and me it’s like the Dr. Seuss story,” explained Brian Williams of NBC News. “Oh, the people you’ll meet!” Yet his favorite friends remained the ones from Texas and Missouri. “A big part of his lovability,” actress Deborah Rush, who married Chip Cronkite in 1985, recalled, “was that Kansas City—not New York or the Vineyard—was always home.”

  Not all Cronkite’s post–March 1981 gambits involved news work. While in Martha’s Vineyard, he forged a business partnership with watercolorist Ray Ellis. Cronkite was a fan of painter Thomas Hart Benton’s Martha’s Vineyard paintings. He thought Ellis was the next best at natural seascapes. They decided to collaborate on a trilogy of coffee-table books. In the early 1960s, John Steinbeck had traveled around America and wrote the marvelous memoir Travels with Charley. Ellis’s idea was that they would sail all around the country—instead of journeying in a camper, as Steinbeck did. While Cronkite would write up the sailing experiences in vignettes, Ellis would paint the seascapes he saw. “A publisher had accepted my paintings for a book and wanted Pat Conroy or William F. Buckley to write the text,” Ellis recalled. “I said, ‘Why not Walter Cronkite? He’s the most trusted man in America.’ At first Walter said he was too busy. But I got him with the line, ‘Wouldn’t you like to be known as an old salt?’ That was all it took.”

  What is remarkable about the Cronkite-Ellis collaboration was that they pulled off the trilogy, with Oxmoor House, a boutique publisher in Birmingham, Alabama. The books—South by Southeast (Chesapeake Bay to Key West), North by Northeast (New Jersey to Maine), and Westwind (Point Flattery, Washington, to San Diego, California)—were dedicated by Cronkite and Ellis to their grandchildren. Ellis became one of Cronkite’s closest and most stable friends. They enjoyed sailing around Sandy Hook, “the hinge to America’s front door” (and the approach to New York Harbor) and heading south to Cape May, New Jersey (a favorite anchorage). “He has the rapscallion look of a Welsh pirate—which he is by blood inheritance,” Cronkite said of Ellis at a gallery opening. “A benign pirate, however. The hero rather than the villain of a children’s book. He might terrify with a leer but restore utter confidence and affection with a hug.”

  The first Cronkite-Ellis volume was published in 1983, the last in 1990. Although Cronkite was a Cape Cod man at heart, he conceded that Puget Sound and the San Juan Islands of Washington state represented America’s true nautical paradise. “Boating in the Pacific Northwest, in season,” he would write in Westwind, “comes pretty close to perfection.” As for the most beautiful town in the world, Cronkite chose Homer, Alaska, refusing to include the Kenai Peninsula seaport (the halibut capital of the world) in his writings, to give “the folks who live there hope to stave off as long as possible the pressure of development.”

  When each volume of the sea trilogy was published, Cronkite and Ellis hit the road together on a massive book-signing tour. Long lines of people would queue up for hours just to meet Cronkite. “I’ve been broadcasting for years,” a gleeful Cronkite told Ellis at an independent book shop signing, “and this is the first time I met my audience. It’s a treat for people to walk up and say, ‘You’ve been in my bedroom every night for decades.’ ”

  Eventually Cronkite, the proud father of three, would have four grandkids. Kathy lived in Austin with her husband, Bill Ikard, and hosted her own radio talk show. Chip was a film editor in New York City and was married to the beautiful actress Deborah Rush (best known for her roles in the Woody Allen films Zelig and The Purple Rose of Cairo). Nancy was a yoga teacher, living at alternate times in Hawaii, California, and New York City. In the mid-1970s she married Gifford Whitney in New York, a descendant of Cornelius Vanderbilt who also listed among his ancestors William C. Whitney, secretary of the navy under President Grover Cleveland.

  Besides doting on his children and grandchildren, Cronkite tried to spend as much time as possible at sea. Ever since being turned on to yachting by Lew Wood back in 1962 during the America’s Cup, Cronkite had incrementally upgraded his vessels until at last he had his dream boat. In lieu of book advance money, Cronkite had Oxmoor House sink his cash into financing a new, state-of-the-art sloop; it was a tax dodge. The upgraded Wyntje was a sixty-four-foot yacht (a Hinckley 64 built in 1979), equipped with the latest technology, including an electronic GPS-like navigator that served as an autopilot. When Cronkite told Betsy about it, he said that, in theory, he wouldn’t have to touch the wheel of the ship all day long. “That is wonderful,” Betsy replied. “Now we can just send the boat and we don’t ever have to go!” Betsy often got seasick on the Wyntje, but she still regularly went with Walter on excursions. “Mom loved Dad so much,” Kathy recalled. “She didn’t want to be away from him for those sailing hours.”

  Cronkite’s best friend in the 1980s, besides Betsy, was his sailing companion Mike Ashford. One summer afternoon Cronkite pulled up to Ashford’s place in Martha’s Vineyard and said, “Mike, I’ve got the best table at the Edgartown Yacht Club to see the Fourth of July fireworks. Do you want a date? I know a woman perfect for you.” Because Ashford was recently divorced, he jumped at the opportunity. He was too much of a gentleman to crassly ask what the woman in question looked like. “I was imagining Lesley Stahl or some weatherwoman type,” Ashford said. “That’s not how it played out.” At the appointed hour, Ashford found out that his date was Cronkite’s over-one-hundred-year-old mother, Helen. Cronkite, in modern parlance, had punked him. “How far back do you remember?” Ashford recalled asking Cronkite’s mom. Helen started storytelling about the days at Fort Leavenworth pre–World War I. She told in vivid detail of being chased around by a desirous sex hound named Douglas MacArthur.

  Another new Cronkite sailing friend was singer Jimmy Buffett, whom he first met at the America’s Cup in Perth, Australia, in 1987. Before long he became a Parrothead (the name given to Buffett’s most devo
ted fans). Not only did Cronkite play Buffett’s songs—“Son of a Son of Sailor,” “Margaritaville,” and “He Went to Paris”—when the Wyntje was docked, but he also enjoyed catching the guitar-strumming Alabaman’s New York concerts. Like everybody Cronkite “let in,” Buffett was amazed by the broadcaster’s down-homeness. Oftentimes in New York, Ed Bradley joined Cronkite and Buffett for drinks at P.J. Clarke’s. “I’d get up to Martha’s Vineyard to sail and check up on Walter’s view of the world,” Buffett recalled. “I’d have him as my guest at Madison Square Garden. I knew how to make him happy. I sat him by the showgirls.”

  Besides Buffett and Ashord, the two old-time friends whom Cronkite enjoyed clowning around with in the 1980s were Washington Post columnist Art Buchwald and Andy Rooney. They made him laugh. In 1986, Rooney produced an entire column on the subject of savoring the wine of life with his pal Cronkite, who was occasionally a libertine but never a prig. “The greatest Old Master in the art of living that I know is Walter Cronkite,” Rooney wrote. “Walter works and plays at full speed all day long. He watches whales, plays tennis, flies to Vienna for New Year’s. He dances until 2 a.m., sails in solitude, accepts awards gracefully. He attends boards of directors meetings, tells jokes and plays endlessly with his computers. He comes back from a trip on the Queen Mary in time for the Super Bowl. If life were fattening, Walter Cronkite would weigh 500 pounds.”

  Washington’s favorite wit Art Buchwald had developed a shtick about how Cronkite’s burning career ambition had lifted him upward from a Missouri cradle to the moon exploration and finally to being the Most Trusted Man in America. After Cronkite retired as anchorman in 1981, Buchwald maintained that the American people just couldn’t find a suitable replacement for him. “With a population of only 220 million to choose from,” Buchwald wrote, “it isn’t going to be easy.”