Ever since Hunter S. Thompson started excoriating Richard Nixon in Rolling Stone in the 1970s, Cronkite had become a fan of the rock-n-roll magazine. What he liked most about the Stone was its unflinching investigative articles about the four major dangers to civilization: pollution, depletion of natural resources, proliferation of nuclear weapons, and world hunger. Befriending the magazine’s founding owner and editor, Jann Wenner, whom he first met aboard tycoon Malcolm Forbes’s private plane (The Capitalist Tool) on a trip to France, Cronkite liked hearing Wenner’s stories about Altamont, the Beatles, and Bruce Springsteen. A devilish Forbes thought it would be amusing for Jann and his wife, Jane, to spend four days at his Château de Balleroy in Normandy along with Reagan’s friends Charlie and Barbara Zwick, Jay and Mavis Leno, and Jean MacArthur, the widow of Douglas MacArthur. “What a wonderful time we all had,” Wenner recalled. “Betsy was a hoot, so funny, calling an ace an ace, a spade a spade. What surprised me was that Cronkite was much more than a gentleman—he was knowledgeable about everything.”
A lucky break came Cronkite’s way when he was given the opportunity to collaborate with pianist Dave Brubeck—whose 1959 album Time Out was Cronkite’s favorite—on an oral history project about West Coast jazz. When composer Irving Berlin turned one hundred, Cronkite emceed a gala celebrating the songwriter’s career at Carnegie Hall. During the summers at Martha’s Vineyard, Cronkite gladly sang for his guests. It was like a karaoke hoedown. After a few cocktails, he would lead sing-alongs to “Bill Bailey” and “I’m Gonna Just Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter.” According to daughter Kathy, he “didn’t have a good singing voice, but, boy, was he full of gusto.” Cronkite never turned down an offer to help out the New York Opera—or opera companies in other cities. When John Adams and Alice Goodman were looking for a celebrity type to promote their new opera, Nixon in China, which premiered at the Houston Grand Opera in 1987, they turned to the veteran newsman for help. Cronkite volunteered to be emcee and promo man for the opera, which he thought was more fun than newsreels of his trip with President Nixon back in 1972.
Just how spontaneous and uncautious Cronkite became as an interviewee was on marvelous display in Jonathan Alter’s Rolling Stone interview in November 1987. Cronkite was casual, funny, endearing, and unplugged. Cronkite had also befriended pop artist Andy Warhol in the 1980s. One evening the artist and anchorman sat down together barefoot at a black-tie dinner thrown by Yoko Ono. Cronkite had told Rolling Stone that Carter was the smartest cold war president—a minor dig at Reagan. It made for fun dinner conversation. Cronkite told Warhol that when he went to interview Richard Nixon in 1968, the GOP candidate’s staff sat him outside the boss’s door and he overheard the former vice president on the phone saying “piss” and “cocksucker” and “fuck.” “Walter Cronkite thought it was a setup to have him hear all this so he would think Nixon was really macho,” Warhol wrote in Diaries. “But then years later when the Watergate tapes came out he was surprised to hear Nixon talking like that all the time.”
Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart became one of Cronkite’s most trusted friends during the same period. In early 1987, Hart had been asked to score a Cronkite documentary on the America’s Cup along with rock guitarist Stephen Stills. “While in the studio, I bumped into Cronkite,” Hart recalled. “I told him I wanted to hear his narration so I could write around his voice.” After they finished rehearsal, at which Stills had failed to show, it was getting to be late in the evening. “Hungry?” Cronkite asked Hart. “Want to go grab dinner?” Hart said sure. The seemingly unlikely duo ended up at the nearby CBS-favored diner, chatting unhurriedly about the 1962 America’s Cup as if they were boarding school friends. Mutual admiration came easily for them. The Grateful Dead were scheduled to play a few sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden, and Hart invited Walter and Betsy to be his guests. The answer was . . . you betcha.
Cronkite and Hart shared an enthusiasm for sailing, an affinity for drums, and a deep commitment to save the world’s rain forests. “Once I got away from the idolatry, I found Walter to be a real classy, straight-up gent,” Hart recalled. “He allowed me in, and I allowed him in. My father was a common crook. Walter became the father I never had. His Vietnam dissent saved the lives of tens of thousands of people. He was a broadcast warrior. Walter walked the walk as well as talking the talk.”
Whether in the San Francisco Bay area or Nantucket Sound, they often escaped the rat race together for a few days at sea. While Cronkite didn’t become a Dead Head, he was something akin to an auxiliary member of the band. “We played drums together a lot,” Hart recalled. “He started falling in love with music . . . it allowed him to be fluid and free. We would play all day, have mini-sessions. I was amazed one time to see that he had twenty drums set up in his living room. We’d regularly spend Thanksgiving together in New York. We’d play before dinner and after dinner. The music made him alive as he was losing his facility. The music connected him to life and the world at large. After a session, he was really articulate. The vibrations were therapeutic and meditative.”
While the Grateful Dead might have been Cronkite fans, the ex-anchorman’s stature at CBS News had faded to almost nothing, and his seven-year contract with the network expired in 1988. The darling of Rolling Stone and Interview, the disgruntled TV news star would be free to move to another network and publicly intimated that he just might do so. He was still openly critical of CBS Evening News (which intermittently regained the lead in the ratings race in the late 1980s and ’90s). Sometimes it seemed that Cronkite, an ombudsman in exile, couldn’t wait to renounce Rather. On September 11, 1987, CBS was forced to cut into the CBS Evening News when coverage of a U.S. Open tennis match between Steffi Graf and Lori McNeil ran long. Told that the broadcast would start fifteen minutes late and run on an abbreviated format, Rather stalked out of the Miami studio. “I was—and am—a great believer in Dan,” CBS Evening News producer Jeff Fager recalled. “But when he walked out in Miami, I understood his fault. He put a strange pride over the organization. I remember thinking, ‘Walter would never have done that.’ ”
Rather was widely criticized for the lapse of judgment in Miami, and Cronkite didn’t pull any punches. Sounding like a rioter screaming “off with his head,” he publicly claimed that he would have “fired” Rather outright for gross insubordination. Rather was understandably hurt by Cronkite’s smackdown. How was it good, Rather asked, for CBS News to have Cronkite maliciously carping about him? “Walter, I long knew, was competitive down to his marrow,” Rather recalled. “It was like he woke up in 1987 and saw me in his old job with successful ratings, making more money than he ever did—and I was relatively young to boot. He wanted to destroy me. I didn’t know what to do. I kept wondering how to handle his venom. I decided I didn’t want to fight him. So I hunkered down in the fetal position and just took it. I just let him take big chunks out of my ass.”
Given the insularity of the upper management at CBS News, exactly who banished Cronkite in 1988 remains unclear. But Van Gordon Sauter (president of CBS News from 1985 to 1986) and Howard Stringer (president of CBS News from 1986 to 1988) seem to be left holding the bag. From 1962 to 1981, CBS News had ridden Cronkite’s voice and work ethic to TV dominance. No more. The attitude toward him on West Fifty-seventh Street was an unspoken “get your mail and get out of here, old man.” Why couldn’t Cronkite go gently into that good night like Douglas Edwards? He should just go moor Wyntje in Sarasota, Florida, and stay put. The power circle around Rather maintained an oh-how-the-mighty-have-fallen disdain toward Cronkite. Peter J. Boyer of The New York Times published an article on June 8, 1988, about his dissatisfaction with being persona non grata at Fifty-seventh Street. Two former CBS News presidents—Van Gordon Sauter and Edward M. Joyce—acknowledged that Cronkite had been deliberately “shut out” of CBS News because they didn’t want Rather to throw a tantrum.
What caused the Rather-Cronkite feud to escalate even further
in 1988 was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the JFK assassination. Earlier that year, Cronkite had floated a detailed proposal to Sauter about hosting a prime-time Special Report on the anniversary of the Dallas tragedy. Everything would be looked at with fresh eyes, including Oswald’s ties with Cuba, LBJ’s fears of a conspiracy, and what the Warren Commission got wrong. Cronkite thought this was a no-brainer, the perfect special for him to host. Instead, the CBS network (not the news division) passed on it. Cronkite blamed Rather for dogging him out of the gig. Whenever an opportunity arose, Cronkite dumped Rather into the warlock’s pot and stirred. “I think it’s unfortunate that any other person feels about another as I do about Dan,” Cronkite said. “But to me, I guess, Dan just reeks of insincerity.”
What Cronkite never fully comprehended was that Rather wasn’t the one who nixed his JFK special. No one at CBS News was getting an hour of prime-time TV in the 1980s—with vulture capitalist Larry Tisch as honcho—unless it was something like a Challenger disaster special. Rather himself could not have finagled an hour of such prime TV real estate; the very notion was laughable. Prime-time television was cage fighting—every ratings point counted. “He was pushing this Kennedy anniversary special ridiculously hard,” Rather recalled. “Believe me, it was a complete nonstarter from the get-go. It wasn’t even for a blinking instant a serious consideration. But Walter created this false scenario that I had somehow nixed his Kennedy special.”
When CBS News broadcast a two-hour Apollo 11 twentieth-anniversary special in 1989, it was hosted by Rather and Charles Kuralt. Cronkite was once again nixed from the entire nostalgic enterprise. Rather believed that only his resignation would have pleased Cronkite. Therefore, he just curled his mouth up and took whatever buckshot Cronkite fired at him. Over the summer of 1988, Black Rock determined that it was better to renegotiate Cronkite’s contract than have him debase Rather for sport. If CBS paid Cronkite, they could at least guarantee in writing that he couldn’t criticize company employees. After a protracted negotiation, CBS agreed to give Cronkite a ten-year contract. It was also a gag order, in the spirit of the old Arab proverb: “It’s better to have the camel inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.” The contract was nonexclusive, stipulating that Cronkite could work with most other media companies, the notable exceptions being NBC and ABC.
Getting his life in order, in 1988 Cronkite donated his papers to the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. He also asked Dr. Don Carleton, the center’s director, to help him organize the research for his memoir, A Reporter’s Life. A born-and-bred Texan—best known for his important anti-McCarthyism book Red Scare—Carleton conducted sixty hours’ of recorded interviews with Cronkite. Within a relatively short time, Carleton became a trusted confidant. An amiable rapport developed between the two men, one that grew steadily in importance to Cronkite over the years. Like so many of the friends Cronkite made late in life, the two men shared the brotherhood of the sea. “Every three or four months for a period stretching over four years,” Carleton wrote, “Walter and I met for two or three days, sometimes longer for me to interview him. . . . Those interviews were conducted in his office at CBS, his home in Manhattan, his summer residence in Martha’s Vineyard and in the British Virgin Islands on his sailboat.”
Cronkite didn’t have much of a role in the 1988 presidential campaign that eventually pitted Vice President George H. W. Bush against Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. But he nevertheless had CBS News pay his way to the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary that January. He circulated among the political stars—Bush and Dukakis included—with ease. One evening, New York magazine columnist Joe Klein joined Cronkite and Jerry Brown, former governor of California, for a drink at the Wayfarer Inn in Bedford, New Hampshire. “Walter was entirely shit-faced,” Klein recalled. “He was slurring his words but having a grand old time.” Suddenly, a very pesky right-to-life advocate interrupted their conversation with a rant against Roe v. Wade. This pro-lifer ripped into Governor Brown for being a faux Catholic, a promoter of abortion, a baby killer. After a few minutes of pontificating, her eyes locked on Cronkite for the first time. She was taken aback, thrilled to see the famous CBS News anchorman in person.
“Mr. Cronkite,” she said, “don’t you agree with me that abortion is wrong? What do you think?”
Whereupon Cronkite, with a dismissive wave of the hand and ironic expression, uttered the unutterable in his mellifluous voice.
“Kill them all,” he said.
The woman gasped. Almost fainted on the spot. At loose ends as to how to respond to such a deplorable remark, she just walked away discombobulated. “That put an end to the haranguing,” Klein said. “I don’t know whether Walter meant it or it was just a ploy to get her to go. But we laughed hard.”
On February 28, 1988, Cronkite went to Houston for the Democratic candidates’ debate held at the George R. Brown Convention Center. The Sun Broadcast Group and the National Association of Television Program Executives International cosponsored the event. He had been chosen to moderate. The job was the highlight of his spring. On the day of the debate, he received a jolting call from Black Rock in his Four Seasons hotel room. Because the Democratic debate wasn’t airing on CBS News—was in fact airing on NBC News—company lawyers argued that Cronkite would be in breach of his million-dollar-a-year contract if he moderated. This was a cruel, embarrassing blow to him. As a last-minute replacement, Linda Ellerbee filled in. Although Ellerbee had been an NBC reporter on the Today show, she had turned in 1987 to producing children’s TV shows for cable channels. All Cronkite had for consolation was the press report that neither Dukakis nor Gephardt was going to participate in the Texas debate. “Cronkite watched,” Ann Hodges of the Houston Chronicle reported, “just like you and me.” Ellerbee, caught up in the moment, ignored Cronkite. All the press swarmed around Al Gore, Jesse Jackson, Gary Hart, and others, while Ellerbee was the toast of the town. Cronkite walked back to the Four Seasons alone, feeling old and useless. CBS had shot him down yet again.
His doldrums continued through the spring. That April, he joined forces with James Reston of The New York Times for a luncheon “conversation” with the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Every comment Cronkite made that afternoon in Washington had a curmudgeonly cast. Whether it was the Barbara Walters entertainment-as-news syndrome or the overscripted presidential debates or the mixing of celebrity with politics, everything sickened him. And even though the communications school at Arizona State was named in his honor, he dissed the notion of going from college straight into TV broadcasting. “It’s the glamour of the business that attracts them,” he grumbled. “I think that what some of the schools are committing is fraud. They don’t have to go to college to learn [the technical part] of TV news; they could learn that in a trade school in about three weeks.”
Cronkite did offer political commentary for the CBS Evening News from the Democratic Convention (July 18–25) in Atlanta and the Republican Convention (August 15–18) in New Orleans, but it didn’t add up to much. Bored by the 1988 presidential square-off of Bush-Dukakis, and dismayed that Mars exploration was not being embraced fulsomely enough by Congress, Cronkite decided that sailing his double-ended Wyntje around the Atlantic seaboard was the smartest thing to do. Although he personally liked Vice President Bush, whom he sometimes called “Poppy,” and thought his extensive résumé as CIA director and vice president was impressive, Cronkite was aghast at the political tactics of GOP cutthroat Lee Atwater. He was disgusted with the anti-Dukakis smear ad centered on Willie Horton. (While Dukakis was governor, Horton, a convicted felon, was released from a Massachusetts prison as part of a weekend furlough program, during which time he committed rape and carjacking.) But he was just as livid at Dukakis for running a lackluster campaign, running away from being dubbed a liberal.
That July Cronkite visited his longtime friend (and producer since the 1950s) Bud Benjamin in
a New York hospital; he was suffering from a just-diagnosed brain tumor. They held hands and reminisced about everything from The Twentieth Century to Watergate specials to Westmoreland v. CBS. On September 20, Benjamin died at age seventy. At the funeral in Scarborough, New York, Cronkite was a weeping mess. “Benjamin had been Walter’s backstop,” Andy Rooney recalled. “Living in a world without Bud wasn’t easy for Walter.”
Just a couple of weeks after Benjamin’s death, Cronkite watched Dukakis implode in a televised debate with Bush. CNN anchorman Bernard Shaw had asked Dukakis, a death penalty opponent, how he would respond if his wife were raped and murdered. Dukakis mistakenly tried answering logically instead of emotionally. It proved to be a watershed moment in the campaign, and it buried Dukakis’s White House odds.
Shaw: Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?
Dukakis: No, I don’t, Bernard. And I think you know that I’ve opposed the death penalty all of my life. I don’t see any evidence that it’s a deterrent, and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime. We’ve done so in my own state . . . one of the reasons why we have had the biggest drop in crime of any industrial state . . . the lowest murder rate of any industrial state.
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