Cronkite

by Douglas Brinkley

  An aftereffect of Cronkite taking the Clintons to safe harbor was an invitation to sleep at the White House. “On principle my dad never accepted that overnight offer from other presidents,” Chip Cronkite recalled. “But both Mom and Dad saw it as an historic opportunity for young Walter—who would get to sleep in the Grant anteroom during the visit—so they said yes.” Not only did the Cronkites sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom, but they gossiped for hours with Bill and Hillary as if they were at a co-ed slumber party. The president was extremely grateful that Cronkite had shown him such compassion during his darkest hour. “President Clinton was in awe of Cronkite,” the former White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers recalled. “You know how your childhood heroes die hard in your heart? That’s the way it was for Clinton with Cronkite.”

  Cronkite’s main sustainable hero remained John Glenn. On January 17, 1998, NASA announced that the seventy-seven-year-old Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, would become the first senior citizen in space. Desperately, Cronkite lobbied NASA to appoint him as Glenn’s sidekick. After the Challenger shuttle had exploded in 1986, Cronkite had been reassured by NASA that he was still under consideration. But upon closer investigation, a NASA administrator nixed the possibility because of his 1997 heart surgery. Cronkite, carping that NASA was discriminating against octogenarians, telephoned Glenn in Columbus, Ohio, hoping to arm-twist the famed Friendship 7 astronaut and U.S. senator to help him fulfill his lifelong dream. “I told him if they wanted to test an older guy in Space, I ought to go,” Cronkite recalled. “Or I could go with him, play canasta up there.”

  Just when Cronkite felt jilted by NASA, he got an unexpected telephone call from CNN Newsgroup chairman Tom Johnson. Always wanting to get Cronkite in the mix, Johnson had a wonderful offer. Would Cronkite co-anchor the Glenn mission live on CNN with John Holliman?

  Oh boy, would he! Johnson had done a sweet thing. Throughout the summer of 1998, CNN correspondent Cronkite boned up on space. He regularly talked to Glenn by telephone, determined to “own” the story. When CBS heard that the eighty-one-year-old Cronkite had been poached by CNN for “Glenn’s Second Trip into Space,” it issued a short, funny comment as press release: “Gosh, we wish we’d thought of it.” (At CBS, “gosh” and “by golly” were still considered lingering Cronkitisms.) Cronkite, in an effort to allay CBS News’ concerns about him working for CNN, agreed to interview Glenn for an exclusive segment on 60 Minutes.

  When press wags suggested that the whole Glenn-Cronkite pairing was a giant publicity stunt, a way for NASA to milk more federal tax dollars, Cronkite bristled. “John Glenn going back into Space is serving the purpose of reminding a blas�� public that we’re still in Space,” he said. “The flights of the shuttle have become so routine that newspapers don’t cover them. Broadcasters don’t cover them, really, we’ve almost lost track of the fact that we’re making these flights on a very regular basis now. I think there’s a whole generation out there, the under-29ers, who are hardly aware that we’re in Space.”

  A deal was struck with NASA that Cronkite would get preferential treatment for the Glenn liftoff at Cape Kennedy, Florida, and then would fly to Houston to work for CBS Radio News. By once again linking Glenn’s patriotism to Cronkite’s performance, NASA was hoping to garner a tidal wave of great publicity. But a setback occurred. In late October, a week before the Glenn trip, Mike Freedman of CBS Radio News received a call from NASA asking for Cronkite’s questions in advance. Although Freedman explained that this would violate CBS News policy, NASA insisted. Freedman telephoned Cronkite at the UN Plaza and outlined the NASA request. The phone went silent for what seemed like an eternity (but was likely about three or four seconds). In that instant the jovial Cronkite turned back into managing editor of the CBS Evening News and said in a stern, powerful voice, “Mike, if they want the questions in advance, fuck ’em. There will be no interview.”

  Freedman was proud of Cronkite, who was ready to give up the big scoop interview with Glenn live on CBS Radio rather than compromise his integrity or that of the network. When Freedman told NASA what Cronkite had said, it smartly dropped the insulting request. All systems were go.

  On October 29, 1998, Cronkite played wise old man on CNN as Glenn returned to orbit, lifting off on Discovery STS-95 to study the effects of space on senior citizens. Cronkite reminisced about Kennedy-Johnson NASA efforts, seemingly teaching anchorman Miles O’Brien on the air about the history of space. It felt wonderful to be back at Cape Kennedy. He reminded viewers that during Apollo 11 he was on the air for twenty-seven of the thirty key hours it took the astronauts to complete their mission. To help O’Brien and Cronkite out were former astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Bernard Harris. A Florida reporter joked in the Vero Beach Press Journal that it was the “Cronkite School of Broadcasting and Space” on CNN. When Cronkite’s buddy from the Bohemian Grove, Jimmy Buffett, stopped by the CNN booth he was immediately placed in the hotseat. “Walter waved me to sit next to him,” Buffett recalled. “How cool was that? Co-anchoring a John Glenn mission with Walter Cronkite? It just doesn’t get any better.”

  After broadcasting liftoff from Florida for CNN, Cronkite moved his show to Houston for CBS Radio. On November 4, his eighty-fourth birthday, Cronkite and Mike Freedman gathered for NASA’s fortieth-anniversary luncheon. During the event, after everyone sang “Happy Birthday,” Cronkite anchored what would be his final CBS News Special Report: a fifteen-minute conversation—from Earth to space—with John Glenn and the other astronauts on the mission.

  Sounding for all the world like long-lost brothers thousands of miles apart, Cronkite and Glenn chatted about everything from weightlessness to the crew’s release of the Petite Amateur Naval Satellite (which tested innovative technologies for the capture and transmission of radio signals). Then, for the last time in his life, Cronkite, milking his broadcast farewell like numerous other impresarios had done before him, used his signature close: “And that’s the way it is, November 4, 1998. This is Walter Cronkite for CBS News in Houston.”

  Glenn’s mission was merely a theatrical sideshow to the Clinton impeachment imbroglio. On the afternoon of February 19, 1999, when the impeachment came to its end, Cronkite was working with Freedman on a series called “Postscripts to the 20th Century” for CBS Radio News (short radio clips to help inaugurate the twenty-first century, also known as “Millennium” spots). Freedman suddenly got an inspired idea. Why not have Cronkite break the historical news of the Clinton verdict for the noon CBS Radio broadcast that would go out to all four hundred affiliates? “I asked Walter, and he looked a little surprised,” Freedman recalled. “Then his eyes twinkled and he said, ‘Sure.’ ”

  And so it happened. The dah-dah-dah Teletype opening for the CBS hourly news alert hit the airwaves, and Cronkite spoke into the microphone from a booth at the CBS Network Radio Studio on Fifty-seventh Street. He opened the radio newscast crisply. “The impeachment case,” he said, pausing a half second for operatic effect, “is about to finally come to the end.” He went on to elaborate how the Senate Republicans didn’t have a two-thirds majority to force Clinton to resign. Then Cronkite handed off the breaking news to the CBS News congressional correspondent Bob Fuss in Washington, D.C. “I had people from our affiliate stations around the country calling after that newscast like never before,” Freedman recalled. “They were beyond thrilled. One guy in Wisconsin called and said ‘UNBELIEVABLE! I drove off the road when I heard his voice.’ ”

  Throughout the summer of 1999 at the Vineyard, Cronkite plotted with friends over how to stop real estate mogul Donald Trump from building an 861-foot residential tower on New York’s East Side. It devoured all of his energies. Cronkite considered Trump-style unfettered development an abomination. Why did Trump need to build the world’s tallest residential tower, which would “completely overshadow the United Nations and its beautiful gardens”? The Cronkite-versus-Trump squabble got heated in the tabloids. Trump claimed that Cronkite
was a “totally preposterous” man who simply didn’t want his rich-guy view marred. When a mediation meeting was held over the issue, Cronkite, walking into Trump’s office with his NIMBY posse, was bowled over. Trump leapt out from behind his desk, came around with his arms outstretched and said, “Walter, it is soooooooo good to see you again!” Such breezy familiarity irked Cronkite because he had never met Trump before. (The contentious issue was soon resolved in Trump’s favor: construction started on Trump World Tower on First Avenue.)

  In October 1999, Cronkite spent a week at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena filming a Chip Cronkite–produced documentary titled Beyond the Moon, about the robotic devices of the future that would one day hopefully take astronauts to Mars. He flew back to New York from Pasadena in time to accept the World Federalist Association’s Norman Cousins Global Governance Award on October 19 at the United Nations. Cronkite used the occasion to promote Earth Day, one world government, the United Nations, and the new George Soros book, The Crisis of Global Capitalism. This wasn’t the accepted speech of a liberal. Cronkite had come fully out of the closet as a global-governance leftist, a political view more accepted in Copenhagen than Peoria. According to Cronkite, the notion of “unlimited national sovereignty” meant “international anarchy.” It all got back to the picture that Bill Anders had snapped back in 1968 during Apollo 8: there was only one Planet Earth, and it had no borders.

  At the UN, Cronkite uncorked his Interfaith Alliance–sponsored assault on the Christian Coalition and the religious right of the Republican Party. It was biting rhetoric aimed at Holy Roller crackpottery. The line between activism and journalism has always been imprecise, but Cronkite went off the Five Ws reservation at the UN with a shot of Network “I’m mad as hell” outrage reminiscent of his Roseland introduction of Barbara Jordan. “Their leader, Pat Robertson, has written that we should have a world government but only when the Messiah arrives,” Cronkite scoffed. “Any attempt to achieve world order before that time must be the work of the devil. This small but well-organized group has intimidated the Republican Party and the Clinton Administration. It has attacked each of our presidents since [Franklin D. Roosevelt] for supporting the United Nations. Robertson explains that these presidents were and are the unwitting agents of Lucifer. The only way we who believe in the vision of a democratic world federal government can effectively overcome this reactionary movement is to organize a strong educational counter-offensive stretching from the most publicly visible people in all fields to the humblest individuals in every community.”

  How did Cronkite get away with such World Federalist rhetoric and not cause Republicans to collectively turn on him the way Fox News Channel would against Wall Street financier George Soros? For starters, he had too many GOP establishment friends, such as Roger Ailes, John Lehman, and George Shultz. It was also disconcerting to them that, after sounding like Paul Robeson at the United Nations, Cronkite headed to the Kennedy Center Honors in a tuxedo looking for all the world like Captain Kangaroo. Nothing about his kindly demeanor was menacing in the least. There is also, it must be said, an unwritten rule that once you pass eighty years old in America you have earned the right to pontificate without much penalty.

  Election Day, November 7, 2000, redefined the term political cliffhanger in the United States. The square-off between George W. Bush and Al Gore seemed to be a dead heat. All the networks made predictions that Vice President Gore had won Florida that they were then forced to retract. Who actually won the 2000 election was eventually decided in Bush’s favor by the U.S. Supreme Court. While most Americans worried about the breakdown of the democratic process, Cronkite kept his ire focused on his media colleagues. “I think it’s up to the networks and the subscribing newspapers and press services to not call until all the states have closed,” he said. “I don’t understand the need for speed, although I was certainly one of the progenitors of the whole idea of exit polling. . . . The point is that nowadays, with the exit polling, we’re calling these states so early that there are some three hours left of voting time out on the West Coast, and it seems to me that very probably it could work just as well to withhold returns until all the states have voted.”

  Just after Thanksgiving, Cronkite had surgery on his right heel to replace a part of his Achilles tendon. While the procedure went well, he was in terrible pain. With weariness and disgust, he canceled all his Christmas obligations, including serving as host of the Kennedy Center Honors. It wasn’t like him to miss a gig, but his discomfort was very real. Gala producer George Stevens Jr. was shocked, saying that Uncle Walter was “irreplaceable.”

  That New Year’s Eve—ushering in Y2K—a still recuperating Cronkite was forced to cancel his hosting of PBS’s New Year’s Concert at the gilded Musikverein concert hall in Vienna. The Cronkites instead celebrated with their oldest Kansas City friends, Frantz and Dorothy Barhydt. “I had to think more about the millennium than anyone,” the eighty-three-year-old Cronkite would soon joke at a speech before the University of Wisconsin Medical School, “as the world’s oldest reporter.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  The New Millennium

  9/11/01 IN ITALY—CONSOLING AMERICA WITH LETTERMAN—AROUND AMERICA—KING FEATURES SYNDICATE COLUMNIST—ANTI-IRAQ WAR—SCOLDING JOHN KERRY—MEMOGATE—THE FLUSHING OF DAN RATHER—CHEERING UP MOONVES—DEATH OF BETSY—THE LOVELY JOANNA SIMON—WC ARCHIVES AT UT—WORKING WITH CARLETON—LEGACY IN PHOENIX—CHALLENGING THE WAR ON DRUGS—ATTACKED BY THE RIGHT—FADING AWAY—STANDING FOR THE GENTLEMAN—TOM SHALES’S FINE GOOD-BYE

  After watching the U.S. Open tennis tournament at Flushing Meadows on September 7, 2001, Walter and Betsy Cronkite packed their bags for an Italian holiday. The last of the broadcasters from the golden age of TV was going to receive an honorary degree from La Sapienza University (founded in 1303 and still Europe’s largest university). While in Florence, Cronkite heard the ghastly news of September 11: nineteen al Qaeda terrorists had hijacked four commercial planes and crashed two into the World Trade Center in New York City; the third into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia; and the fourth into a fallow field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Nearly three thousand people were killed in the most gruesome string of terrorist attacks in American history.

  Cronkite was glued to CNN in his Florence hotel near the Uffizi Gallery, watching anchorman Aaron Brown broadcast the nonstop, commercial-free coverage. Scenes of people plunging to their deaths and plumes of smoke and ash rolling down Wall Street made Cronkite shudder. Scores of New Yorkers were fleeing from the crumbling towers with cloths over their mouths to avoid breathing in the smoke. Walter and Betsy desperately tried reaching their three children, determined to make sure they were safe. It took a while, but they eventually succeeded. “When Dad reached me, I suggested that he stay out of New York for a while,” Chip Cronkite recalled, “but he was very anxious to get back to Manhattan. He wanted to get back to cover the story.”

  Marlene Adler was with the Cronkites in Italy, managing her boss’s various entrepreneurial ventures when the news of 9/11 broke. “Get me out of here!” he demanded of Adler. When she explained to him that U.S. airports were in lockdown mode, planes grounded, he groused, “Then get me a private plane!” Adler frantically tried to book a flight, to no avail. With thousands of miles of sea separating him from New York, Cronkite told Adler in exasperation, “OK, then we’ll take a boat.” His impatience had become almost debilitating. It was the first time Adler had seen her beloved boss so demanding and rigid. His helplessness frustrated him terribly. “He had to see Ground Zero for himself while it was smoldering,” Adler recalled. “He had to use his reporter’s eye on the front line. Nothing would satisfy him until I got him to New York. Nothing.”

  Feeling useless and detached, Cronkite pottered around the Piazza della Signoria, pondering the gloom of 9/11. He wondered if World War III had started. He digested the gruesome reality that New York City, his adopted hometown since the early
1950s, was in a state of emergency. One supposes that a cramp of envy consumed him because Dan Rather of the CBS Evening News was anchoring fifty-three hours and thirty-five minutes of coverage. He felt again like a has-been broadcaster. Instead of canceling his La Sapienza speech in Rome, though, Cronkite spoke to the Italian audience, including in his remarks a brief interlude of silence for victims of the 9/11 attack.

  On September 12, Cronkite, still glued to CNN’s marathon coverage, telephoned Brown in New York, urging the broadcaster to hold up under the intense pressure. Even though seeing the jagged jawbone of the smoking World Trade Center towers was traumatizing, he nevertheless had the wherewithal to critique Brown’s on-air performance. “This is your Kennedy,” Cronkite told Brown. “This is how people will think of you.” Brown said that “no call had ever meant more” to him.

  Once back in New York and reunited with his family, Cronkite hugged all of his kids. Turning down dozens of interview requests, he ultimately accepted an invitation from CBS’s Late Night with David Letterman, hoping to offer healing remarks about the 9/11 wickedness. It proved to be a sentimental segment between the great comedian and the great broadcaster. Letterman and Cronkite, pros at banter, held a somber chat about how the Bush administration shouldn’t overreact to al Qaeda’s diabolical attacks. A sedate Cronkite admitted that his immediate reaction while in Italy had been to “get even, for heaven’s sake,” with the murderous foes. Retaliation, he said, was a natural instinct against “Bin Lad . . . Bin Adam . . . whatever that idiot’s name is. I’m trying to forget it already, as if that would help somehow.” But rushing to war to get even wasn’t the solution.