Letterman: As someone who has seen and covered big stories all your life, when you heard of this, how did it feel compared to other big news stories in America?
Cronkite: Well, how do you think it felt? I mean, how do you really think it felt? I think the question is acceptable, I’m not criticizing your question, except that I think we all felt the same way. I really think that’s one of the unifying things about us. I don’t think there was an American with a different thought except invoking the deity, “My God, how could this happen?” and the shock of it happening, the terrible awareness of our vulnerability, that a small band of fanatics, idiots could commit such mass murder in the middle of the greatest city in the world.
For a few weeks in the fall of 2001, Cronkite refrained from overtly criticizing President Bush, but the mute button wasn’t on pause for long. He soon lost patience with the administration’s false linkage of Iraq to the al Qaeda terrorist network. The unconscionable mistake that President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld were making, Cronkite believed, was insisting that the United States needed a post-9/11 demonstration of war to prove national greatness. That October, Cronkite took to the CNN airwaves demanding that President Bush adhere to the War Powers Act, which required that the president seek congressional authorization before dispatching military forces abroad. That was just his opening shot. Cronkite decided in December 2001 to expose what he regarded as the Bush administration’s warmongering and its false linkage of Saddam Hussein with al Qaeda. “I was hot under the collar about Bush overreacting to 9/11 with the Freedom Fries and all that,” Andy Rooney recalled. “But Walter was hotter.”
And Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld weren’t Cronkite’s only targets. He also lashed out at the evangelicals Jerry Falwell (pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia) and Pat Robertson (host of the 700 Club). In a TV Guide interview, Cronkite said that Falwell’s remark about 9/11 (that the terrorist attacks were divine retribution for pagans, abortionists, feminists, and homosexuals) was “the most abominable thing I’ve ever heard.” As Cronkite prepared to host the Emmy Awards in Los Angeles, he took his criticism of the Christian right a bridge farther. “It makes you wonder,” he said of the evangelical’s post-9/11 remarks, “if [Falwell and Robertson] are worshipping the same God as the people who bombed the Trade Center and the Pentagon.”
With the November publication of his sailing memoir, Around America: A Tour of Our Magnificent Coastline (W. W. Norton), Cronkite attended book signings at what seemed like every Barnes & Noble, Borders, and independent booksellers from Marin County, California, to Portland, Maine. On the promotional stump, he saw his public role as championing America’s pristine national seashores, such as Cape Hatteras, Padre Island, and Assateague Island . He fell in love with old Savannah: the buggy rides, fountains, and parks. As the “Air War Dean” of World War II journalism, he was thrilled to learn that an Eighth Air Force museum was being built near the airport. However, autograph seekers didn’t want to talk about General Eaker or the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge’s dwindling whooping crane population when newspapers headlined anthrax scares and whodunit theories about Saudi Arabian treachery. Everybody, it seemed, wanted Cronkite to compare 9/11 to Pearl Harbor or the JFK assassination or the Oklahoma City bombings. So he did. Practically every time a TV viewer turned on CBS or CNN, Cronkite was holding court as the Great Eyewitness. “Somehow knowing that Walter was still around to put the terror acts in perspective,” Katie Couric, future anchor of the CBS Evening News, believed, “was cathartic.”
To the surprise of his family and friends Cronkite, riled up by 9/11, agreed to write a weekly column for King Features Syndicate, largely, it seems, to criticize President Bush. Ever since his Roseland speech in defense of liberalism, Cronkite told The New York Times, he had refused to be an “ideological eunuch.” Since he lived to read the morning papers, Cronkite figured, why not write for them? Operating out of UN Plaza, using his laptop’s search engine with great skill, he weighed in on the big foreign policy decisions facing the United States. What concerned Cronkite the most was that his two favorite papers—The New York Times and The Washington Post—were allowing the Bush administration to hype the unprovable notion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Cronkite had a deep and sickening feeling that the fourth estate, cowed by the intimidation tactics of the Bush White House, was failing spectacularly. To Cronkite, the whole class of American journalists, with a very few notable exceptions (namely the McClatchy chain and The Nation), had paved the way for Gulf War II by not asking the tough questions about the Bush administration’s rationale for the war. Why didn’t journalists explain the tension between the Shiites and Sunnis that was bound to keel into civil war?
Written with the assistance of Dale Minor, Cronkite’s weekly column was picked up by 153 U.S. newspapers from August 2003 to August 2004. At eighty-eight years old, he had a platform once again. Refusing to be intimidated by Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, who regularly took to the airwaves insulting antiwar liberal reporters like Ted Koppel, Cronkite promoted his secular, human rights–oriented, pro-NATO, pro-UN views of world affairs, with the conviction of Eleanor Roosevelt on the stump. Democrats lapped it up. His iconic status soared in deep blue precincts. “No longer was he trying to be Mr. Center,” Couric recalled. “He wanted to be a vital voice of dissent on war-related issues.”
The Cronkite of King Features Syndicate was a circumspect columnist who deftly wove fact, analysis, and morality. His liberal arguments—directed at President Bush in the spirit of bringing home the American soldiers from Iraq—were smart but homespun. “You might remember MAD—the Cold War policy of Mutually Assured Destruction in which the United States and the Soviet Union each planned to obliterate the other in the event of nuclear attack,” he wrote in his November 13, 2003, column. “Well, among themselves, the Democratic presidential candidates have triggered their own version of mutually assured destruction.” Cronkite thought John Kerry, John Edwards, Joe Lieberman, Dick Gephardt, Wesley Clark, and Howard Dean—all vying to be the Democratic nominee for president in 2004—were committing “political fratricide.” They needed to aim their collective fire at President Bush. The USA Patriot Act, Cronkite lamented, was stripping Americans of civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution while Democrats were engaged in silly intramural schoolyard fights. There were many primary sources and pieces of classified information being acquired that raised questions about the casus belli. If American journalists had simply done their due diligence, they could have thwarted the Bush administration’s hawkish moves vis-à-vis Iraq. It was the lack of any rigorous questioning that surprised and dispirited Cronkite. “Walter liked being in the ring,” Minor recalled. “After decades of trying to be objective, the columns meant he no longer had to abide by any strictures.”
Perhaps if the fourth estate had listened to Cronkite—their wise man—a trillion dollars and four thousand U.S. troops could have been saved. But they ignored him as the out-of-touch author of Around America. While Cronkite’s sustained hostility toward President Bush surprised even Socolow, Rooney, Wallace, and Safer—his four best friends in the media world—he pleased the progressive blogosphere to no end. In a column titled “Where Do We Go from Here?” (May 20, 2004), Cronkite suggested firing Bush on grounds of rank incompetence. Few other major U.S. media figures, except perhaps Michael Moore and Bill Maher, went after Bush with the impeachment vitriol of Cronkite. At Southern Illinois University that October, Cronkite, a gray-haired antiwar icon cheered as the ghost of John Reed, bluntly declared Bush’s Iraq War the “worst policy decision this nation has ever made.” The wire services transmitted Cronkite’s insult around the world. The Bush Doctrine of preemptive strike was to Cronkite a jingoistic atrocity destined to bankrupt America morally and fiscally. “Bush is setting an example for every nation in the world,” Cronkite carped. “If you don’t like what’s going on with yo
ur neighbor, it’s perfectly all right to go to war with them.”
Frank Rich of The New York Times praised Cronkite for trying to awaken America to the Bush administration’s distortions. “At the networks, Cronkite’s heirs were not even practicing journalism,” an incensed Rich wrote. “They invited administration propagandists to trumpet their tales of imminent mushroom clouds with impunity.”
If Cronkite thought one television broadcaster was brave during Mr. Bush’s war, it was Christiane Amanpour of CNN. Amanpour had grown up in Iran and had never watched Cronkite broadcast as a child. When she emigrated to the United States in 1981, Cronkite was already poised to retire the CBS Evening News anchor chair. Always with an eye toward the female foreign correspondents, Cronkite developed a schoolboy crush on Amanpour as her star rose. Every time she appeared on CNN from Baghdad, he turned the volume on the TV way up, adjusting his hearing aid, not wanting to miss a word. To Cronkite, Amanpour had the guts of Murrow for blowing a hole in the famous “aluminum tubes” defense for the Iraq War featured prominently in The New York Times.
When the insurgency against Americans in Iraq reached full murderous throttle, Cronkite had Adler set up a “date” for him with Amanpour. They greeted each other like old friends. “We met in the restaurant of the Mark Hotel in Manhattan,” Amanpour recalled. “He came alone, an elegant elderly dignified gentleman, walking slowly into the lobby. I think we both felt we knew each other, and there is a deep sense of camaraderie silently expressed between brothers- and sisters-in-arms. I myself had had a deep reverence for him and for everything he stood for. Anyway, after lots of chitchat over a couple of stiff whiskeys on the rocks, I asked him whether anyone today could do what he did back in Vietnam after Tet. And to my abiding disappointment, he gently told me, no, he didn’t think so, because unlike in his time, there are multitudinous voices and channels out there today.”
When it looked as if John Kerry had locked the Democratic nomination for U.S. president in the spring of 2004, Cronkite, instead of congratulating the Massachusetts senator, whacked him for ceding the “high ground” to conservatives and refusing to declare or even acknowledge his “liberal” principles. “If 1988 taught us anything, it is that a candidate who lacks the courage of his convictions cannot hope to convince the nation that he should be given its leadership,” Cronkite wrote Kerry. “So, Senator, some detailed explanations are in order if you hope to have any chance of defeating even a wounded George II in November. You cannot let the Bush league define you or the issues. You have to do that yourself. Take my advice and lay it all out, before it’s too late.”
For the 2004 election season, Cronkite watched Tom Brokaw of NBC News during his final season as anchor. The contrast between Brokaw’s classy comportment and Rather’s look-at-me arrogance told Cronkite who his real heir was. CBS News faced one of its darkest moments shortly after Labor Day: anchorman Rather claimed that President Bush had often been AWOL from duty when he was a lieutenant in the Texas Air National Guard from 1968 to 1973. Convinced that a document he’d obtained from Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian’s personal files was genuine, Rather took to the CBS airwaves on 60 Minutes Wednesday (an offshoot of the original Sunday program) on September 8, 2004, and leveled the accusation at the president. Rather had broken Cronkite’s cardinal rule of always confirming information before reporting it.
During his twenty-three-year career as CBS News anchorman—four years longer than Cronkite’s stint—Rather, a gambler, often ran stories that were confirmed by only one solid source. His batting average of being right was high, but he was playing with fire. Eventually he had to get burned. The same razor-sharp investigative instincts that allowed Rather to help break the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse story betrayed him on the Texas Air National Guard story just as the election year stakes were jacked up sky-high. President Bush was running against Kerry in a dead-heat contest for the White House. Questions were raised over whether Kerry deserved the Silver Star, Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts he had been awarded for his Vietnam service in the U.S. Navy. Vietnam had emerged as part of the 2004 presidential election fisticuffs. At a Museum of Radio and Television conference about “breaking news” around this time, Cronkite warned that a single false on-air report could destroy a brilliant career; Rather had just stepped on a claymore mine in a career-killing way.
When forensic experts determined that Rather’s crucial 60 Minutes Wednesday document could not be authenticated because of seemingly anachronistic typography, that it easily could have been cooked up by some forger out to damage Bush (or planted by GOP operatives to embarrass Rather), CBS News’ obdurate anchorman was forced to offer a humble, almost indignant, retraction. “This was an error made in good faith as we tried to carry on the CBS News tradition of asking tough questions and investigating reports,” Rather said, “but it was a mistake.” Subsequently, Rather retreated from his apology, claiming he was coerced into making it. He then claimed he had nothing to do with the report itself, that he was only a talking head. Further, he denied that any mistakes had been made at all.
Rather, blaming everyone but himself, reluctantly announced that he would step down from the anchor chair in early 2005, while remaining at CBS News. Unable to emulate Douglas Edwards and just retreat to the graveyard shift show Up to the Minute, Rather fought like a wildcat to protect his reputation. For forty-three years, he had represented the CBS Eye tradition of Murrow. Now he was being dismissed as a pariah. Everybody at CBS News knew Rather had essentially been demoted. Not just for Memogate: CBS Evening News was sagging far behind NBC’s Nightly News and ABC’s World News Tonight. The Big Three anchors were Brokaw, Jennings, and way down the line, Rather. The 60 Minutes gang wanted Rather publicly flogged for Memogate. Hewitt had built 60 Minutes into an American institution and now Rather, looking for glory, had given the entire news-gathering operation a blinding black eye. Cronkite, refusing any connection to CBS’s Judas, told a reporter that he didn’t watch Rather’s poorly produced show, just couldn’t stand it. “There’s nothing there,” he said, “but crime and sob sister material . . . tabloid stuff.”
A number of old-time CBS reporters—including Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, and Andy Rooney—recalled how jubilant Cronkite was that Rather’s career crashed so dramatically that fall. “Walter’s hip was bad,” Rooney explained. “He couldn’t move well. But that ol’ boy danced a jig when Dan went down.” Cronkite long knew that Rather’s Achilles heel was his tendency to jump the gun. What surprised him wasn’t Memogate but that Rather hadn’t botched a story sooner. What irritated Cronkite even more was how Rather was going after some chicken-shit story about Bush and the National Guard that had nothing to do with 2004. For once, Cronkite actually felt some sympathy for President Bush.
Rather was insistent that his departure from CBS had been illegal and filed a $70 million breach-of-contract lawsuit against CBS and its former parent company, Viacom. A New York state court of appeals dismissed Rather’s frivolous suit. Many historians think Rather’s 60 Minutes blunder contributed significantly to President Bush’s reelection in an extremely close contest, with Bush winning 286 electoral votes to Kerry’s 251. Rather hadn’t just had an oops moment. He had self-immolated in front of seventy million 60 Minutes Wednesday viewers. “It surprised quite a few people at CBS and elsewhere,” Cronkite said on CNN’s American Morning, “that they tolerated his being there for so long.”
Easing Rather out of the chair wasn’t atonement enough for Les Moonves. In early January, as Rather was starting to clear his desk, Moonves asked four CBS executives associated with Memogate—Mary Mapes, the story’s producer; Josh Howard, executive producer of 60 Minutes Wednesday; Howard’s top deputy, Mary Murphy; and CBS News’ senior vice president, Betsy West—to resign from the network. Moonves’s decision was based on an independent study chaired by former U.S. attorney general Dick Thornburgh claiming that Team Rather had “myopic zeal” in trying to embarrass George W. Bush. Moonves thought
Rather’s use of “unsubstantiated documents” was the low ebb of CBS News history, a “black mark” against the reportorial house Cronkite, Murrow, and the 60 Minutes gang had helped build. Determined to be the new Murrow, a crusader for social justice in the twenty-first century, Rather had inadvertently become the Soupy Sales of TV news gathering.
When Mike Wallace bumped into Rather in a CBS bathroom in the 60 Minutes offices, a nasty verbal clash erupted between the men. Wallace called Rather, to his face, a shameless creep, a public disgrace, who instead of manning up for Memogate, allowed the fine talents of Mapes, Howard, Murphy, and West to suffer humiliation. Was that Rather’s idea of courage? “We know it as the battle of the bathroom,” longtime executive producer of 60 Minutes Jeff Fager explained. “It’s never been reported, but it was bad.”
The day that Moonves undertook the dismissals, he asked that nobody disturb him in his office at Black Rock, then on the nineteenth floor, refusing even to take phone calls. Ensconced at his desk, a huge Peter Max painting of the CBS Eye behind him, listening to soft music, he was suddenly startled by a light rap on his door. Before he could get up, it cracked open. It was Walter Cronkite, white-haired and ruddy, his eyebrows raised like splayed brushes, fidgeting with his hearing aid and radiating a sympathetic warmth.
“Well, Les,” Cronkite said, having charmed his way past the pool of secretaries, “you’ve just done the hardest thing a man has to do in his life. You let good people go. . . . But you had to do it for journalism, for fairness, and for the CBS brand. I just want you to know you did the right thing. I’m proud of you.”
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