Cronkite

by Douglas Brinkley

  The suddenly unemployed Rather signed up as a producer with HDNet, a high-definition cable television station, and in October 2006 he began to host Dan Rather Reports.

  For the next thirty or forty minutes, Cronkite and Moonves chatted about Memogate and what it meant to television history. The weight of the world had been lifted from Moonves’s shoulders. For nights, he had suffered from insomnia, tormented at having to fire a bevy of longtime CBS employees. But Cronkite’s generous gesture, completely unnecessary, much like when he took the Clintons on the Wyntje during the Lewinsky scandal or wrote Bob Simon after his Iraq hostage ordeal, choked Moonves up. The CEO of CBS had long treated Cronkite with deference. Now he saw him as family. “You’ll never know what that meant to me,” Moonves later recalled, eyes clouding. “Everything came into focus. I’m getting goose bumps just talking about it. I went home able to sleep, able to feel whole. Walter said it was okay.”

  On March 15, 2005, the Cronkite family suffered a devastating blow when Betsy Cronkite, the auburn-haired beauty from Missouri, died of cancer just two weeks before her sixty-fifth wedding anniversary. Betsy had held her own in the New York–Edgartown social whirl without losing any sense of her own midwestern roots or taking on the pretensions of the nouveau riche. One had the impression that she and Walter would have been content living in a cold-water flat in Kansas City with an old Victrola playing Count Basie records for company. Betsy was so down-to-earth, she made forks drop at dinner parties with what Barbara Walters called her “wry and acidic” bluntness. Whenever anyone called Cronkite the Most Trusted Man in America, he would invariably offer the line, “They didn’t poll my wife.”

  Now Betsy was no more. Feeling unprotected and lonely, he wondered whether he could persevere on his own. “Everything just crashed around him,” Cronkite’s daughter-in-law Deborah Rush recalled. “Betsy was the glue that held him together.” Hundreds of people, including celebrities, attended Betsy Cronkite’s memorial service at St. Bartholomew’s Church in Manhattan. Rev. C. Welton Gaddy of the Interfaith Alliance gave the principal eulogy. All the other speakers were dwarfed and overshadowed by Hillary Clinton—who wasn’t in the program but showed up unexpectedly. People gathered outside the church to offer Cronkite condolences and in the hope of catching a photographic glimpse of the first lady on their cell phones. To the surprise of Cronkite’s kids, Dan Rather attended the service. That afternoon, Cronkite chatted with Joanna Simon, the real estate broker who sold him his UN Plaza co-op. Weeks later, Simon invited Cronkite for a drink. Her husband, Gerald Walker, had died the previous year of a stroke while working on the novel Witness (unpublished). “Walter was bereft and lost,” Simon recalled. “His plan was to go to the British Virgin Islands, where Wyntje was moored for the winter months, with his kids for a week. And then he wanted to take me out on a date.”

  Coincidentally, Bill Small’s wife died the same day as Betsy Cronkite. A few weeks after the funerals, Small received a telephone call from Walter. “Let’s go commiserate together over lunch,” he said. Upon arriving at a private midtown Manhattan club, the two old-timers were ushered into what was almost a private room to compare notes about losing their mates. Cronkite spoke of his deep grief and of sitting on his sofa at UN Plaza surrounded by a small theme park’s worth of memorabilia. “I just wander around the apartment completely lost,” he confided to Small. “All I do is puddle up and cry from morning to night.”

  When the conversation turned to Dan Rather’s twenty-four-year career as CBS News anchorman, Cronkite stiffened, no longer convivial. He told Small horror stories about how Rather had purposely tried to humiliate him time and time again. He was glad that CBS had removed Rather from the chair. Cronkite relayed how the paranoid Rather had poisoned his well at CBS News by badmouthing him to other employees. “I don’t believe that’s true,” Small told Cronkite. “My long experience with Dan was that if you had a problem he was always willing to listen. In fact, he was practically solicitous about avoiding bad blood or feuds.”

  “Should I call him?” Cronkite sheepishly asked. Small at first thought that was the right thing to do but then hesitated, understandably not wanting to play the middleman. “It’s not a bad idea,” he said, “but that has to be up to you.”

  Cronkite didn’t call Rather for lunch. Instead, he remained hateful toward him till death. It can be said Rather was the only man whom Cronkite despised. “I could talk to Walter about anything,” CNN anchorman Aaron Brown, a regular lunch companion, recalled. “But not [about] Rather.” Both Cronkite and Rather had behaved badly toward each other. “Dan didn’t have many friends,” Jeff Fager recalled. “Walter had everybody on his side.”

  Nearing the end of his life, Cronkite decided to mend fences with all of his past CBS News colleagues—except Dan Rather. The very last special Roger Mudd did at the History Channel, where he hosted a show, was an interview with Cronkite at the Vineyard. Whatever disagreements they’d had in the past were either ignored or left unspoken. It was obvious how much they cared for one another. When Cronkite had trouble hearing, Mudd helped his old boss by devising a special feed (with the help of an expert soundman) that would get crystal-clear audio. He “was overjoyed.” At the very end of the taping, with the cameras still rolling, he complimented Mudd for being a fine reporter, a gentleman, and a great American. Cronkite deeply regretted not having pushed for Mudd to replace him back in 1981.

  One evening, just weeks after Betsy’s death, two of Cronkite’s good-time friends, Jimmy Buffett and Mickey Hart, were worried that poor Walter wouldn’t know what to do with himself without his wife. They decided to take him out for a “cheer-up” night on the town in New York.

  “Walter,” Buffett said after they sat down, touching his hand for added compassion, “Mickey and I know what hell you’re going through right now having lost Betsy. I’ve never known a marriage that worked so well, that was so close. We—”

  Cronkite interrupted Buffett’s spiel. “Boys,” he said, beaming. “Stop! Stop! Stop! There’s something you should know. I’ve got a new girlfriend.”

  Just weeks after Betsy died, Cronkite started dating Simon in earnest. Before long they moved in together. Chalk the romance up to loneliness and the hope of having a last hurrah. Marlene Adler joked that Simon had beat all the other “casserole ladies” to the punch. Joanna, the daughter of Richard Simon, founder of Simon and Schuster Publishers, was an Emmy Award–winning on-air arts correspondent for The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour before she became a Manhattan real estate broker in 1996. Her sister was the popular singer Carly Simon. Simon’s first sale in 1997 was to Walter and Betsy Cronkite: their UN Plaza co-op. Widowed a year before Betsy Cronkite died, Simon soon became Cronkite’s girlfriend (a term Simon thought belonged to high-schoolers only). They were regarded as an inseparable couple in New York, Washington, and Vineyard social circles until the end of Cronkite’s life. The New York Post and New York Daily News both gossiped that she was Cronkite’s new “gal pal.”

  In a perfect world, Cronkite should probably have waited longer to begin dating, out of respect for Betsy. Connie Chung remembered getting her nails done at a Manhattan day spa with Barbara Walters shortly after Betsy’s death. Chung, admitting they were “terrible gossips,” kibitzed about how tawdry the Cronkite-Simon relationship was. “Walter didn’t wait very long to strike,” she said, laughing. “How girls-day-out is that? Sitting in our pedicure chairs chatting about Walter’s sex life.”

  When Peter Jennings of ABC News died in August 2005 from lung cancer, it deeply affected Cronkite. A life decision was made: he was going to go out in a blaze of glory with his lover Joanna at his side. Cronkite, the old-age survivor, enjoyed being around pretty women after Betsy’s death. He offered them fatherly advice while getting to unspool the newsreel highlights of his eventful life. His old CBS News associate Carol Joynt became one of his closest friends (in a strange moment, when she was struggling financially, he proposed marriag
e to her). Beverly Keel, a young professor at Middle Tennessee State University, came to interview Cronkite at his Black Rock office not long after Betsy’s death in 2005. “It was like I was reunited with my grandfather, I was so totally at ease,” Keel recalled. “When he sat down in the chairs that we had placed close together because of his hearing issues we were about eighteen inches apart.”

  “My,” Cronkite joked, “we’re close!”

  Feeling appreciated by Moonves at CBS, glad that Couric had replaced Rather as anchor of the Evening News, dating the sixty-five-year-old Simon (a teenager by comparison), enamored of Amanpour, and close to all three of his children, Cronkite entered his twilight years a happy man in the full flush of love. One night Cronkite and Simon walked to a Chinese restaurant on Second Avenue for dinner shortly after they moved in together. People kept coming up to Cronkite to shake the great man’s hand. “You know, Walter,” Simon said, “you really are American royalty.” He looked at her lovingly and said, “As long as I’m your King of Hearts.” Simon swooned.

  While Cronkite didn’t become a spaceman, NASA, as compensation for not allowing him into orbit with Glenn, presented him with an Ambassador of Exploration Award on February 28, 2006. He was the only nonastronaut ever to win the honor, which he deemed “beyond anything I could have ever believed.” As a token of appreciation, NASA also gave Cronkite a sample of lunar material encased in Lucite. This wasn’t just any old piece of moon rock. It had samples of all 842 pounds of moon rock brought back to the Earth from the six Apollo expeditions that took place between 1969 and 1972. Instead of keeping this special present on his mantel in New York or Edgartown, Cronkite donated it to the University of Texas’s Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, the archival home of more than three hundred linear feet of Walter Cronkite Papers.

  Professor Don Carleton of the University of Texas continued to parlay Cronkite’s years with The Daily Texan (1934–1935) into assets for UT’s Briscoe Center. With Cronkite’s help, Carleton acquired the papers of Morley Safer, Joe and Shirley Wershba, Harry Reasoner, Andy Rooney, Robert Trout, and other broadcast standouts to complement the Briscoe Center’s existing holdings. All things dubbed Cronkitiana were welcomed. Cronkite, his fondess for Carleton growing over time, allowed the professor to become the custodian of his life. Together they would sail Wyntje, drink Maker’s Mark, and discuss current events. Carleton conducted two extensive oral histories of Cronkite that are Studs Terkel models of genre excellence: one for the Briscoe Center (used as the basis for the 2010 book Conversations with Cronkite) and another for the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (available online). Cronkite also parceled out his fading energies to helping the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University prosper. He had helped start the Cronkite School in 1984 and participated in the downtown Phoenix groundbreaking ceremony on February 21, 2007. What particularly tickled Cronkite was that the Arizona PBS affiliate would also be housed in the school, allowing students real hands-on learning about how to report on television.

  Once Mike Wallace retired from 60 Minutes after the most extraordinary career in broadcasting, he started spending quite a bit of time with Cronkite. Not only did they like the same quiet Manhattan restaurants, but they also had houses near each other on the Vineyard. One late afternoon in Edgartown, Cronkite and Simon had Mike and Mary Wallace over for cocktails on their enclosed terrace to gossip about friends and family. That’s when Wallace dropped a bomb.

  “Walter,” he said, “don’t you want to die? I’ve done everything I’ve wanted to do. How about you?”

  Cronkite, taken aback, said, “No. Absolutely not! I want to live forever. I get one look at the water, the sunshine, the beach, and the trees here! Every day, Mike, is a blessing.”

  After the Wallaces left, Walter and Joanna mused about all the wonderful places they wanted to go to together. Life was intoxicating. In the coming year, they visited Portugal, Italy, Austria, Hawaii, and the Caribbean. With Cronkite as a guest lecturer, they went on a Silver Seas cruise, making scores of new friends. They spent a week with George Clooney at his home on Lake Como, speedboat racing and outfoxing the paparazzi. At the Vineyard, Cronkite would bang out “Stars and Stripes Forever” on the drums for friends while Simon sang the patriotic Sousa lyrics with operatic bravado. The whole scene was a hoot. In Manhattan, they dined out with friends four or five nights a week. The other two were spent eating meals on TV trays watching the CBS Evening News (pulling mightily for Couric), CNN’s Larry King Live, and other news shows.

  Cronkite realized that Simon was the perfect woman for him because, as an opera singer, she knew how to modulate her voice to decibels that he could hear. His pet name for her was “The Translator.” Because he was taking various medications, he didn’t handle his usual scotch well anymore. “Walter and I had a great romance,” Simon recalled. “It came to us later in life. I wish I’d met Walter when he was twenty-five and I was one.”

  Every celebrity adopts a nonprofit cause, and one of Cronkite’s, surprisingly enough, was decriminalizing marijuana. Joanna Simon’s brother, Peter, remembered in the late 1970s having Cronkite over for a party at Gay Head on the Vineyard. There were two cliques out side of year-round residents in the yard: on one side were hippies smoking pot and on the other was the boozehound establishment. “Mar-a-juana,” he said to Simon. “I’m quite familiar with that drug.” When offered a joint, however, he stoutly refused. “The fact that he didn’t stereotype people into ilks or cults had a huge influence of me,” Peter Simon recalled. “That was a lesson to me. He treated pot people as equals.” Feeling he had one big fight left in him, Cronkite—who had earned cult status in the legalization of marijuana movement because of his 1995 The Cronkite Report episode, “The Drug Dilemma: War or Peace?” on the Discovery Channel—had come to think that a little reefer was perhaps better than a lot of booze.

  By 2006, Cronkite had become a warrior on behalf of the Drug Policy Alliance, a nonprofit advocating reform of the marijuana laws and alternatives to punitive drug war policies. Cronkite even lent his name to a New York Times ad promoting the use of medical marijuana and reduced incarceration time for drug offenders.

  Cronkite’s open letter was dated February 24, 2006. He put his reputation on the line for the cause of decriminalizing marijuana:

  I covered the Vietnam War. I remember the lies that were told, the lives that were lost—and the shock when, twenty years after the war ended, former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara admitted he knew it was a mistake all along.

  Today, our nation is fighting two wars: one abroad and one at home. While the war in Iraq is in the headlines, the other war is still being fought on our own streets. Its casualties are the wasted lives of our own citizens.

  I am speaking of the war on drugs.

  And I cannot help but wonder how many more lives, and how much more money, will be wasted before another Robert McNamara admits what is plain for all to see: the war on drugs is a failure.

  What Cronkite was asking in his open letter—as was William F. Buckley of National Review—was whether arresting 1.5 million Americans a year on drug charges (half of them marijuana arrests) made sense financially to taxpayers. Weren’t American prisons overcrowded enough? The Netherlands was his model of a modern society; it trusted its own citizens on whether to smoke pot.

  By linking the failed Vietnam War of Lyndon Johnson to the failed war on drugs of George W. Bush, Cronkite caused a firestorm. A platoon of right-wing commentators attacked him with a new degree of animosity. The Fox News television host and commentator Bill O’Reilly—who personally liked Cronkite—challenged his Drug Alliance views on The O’Reilly Factor for being too soft on dope peddlers. He hoped to expose Cronkite as a man of the left and didn’t pull any punches. “Listen, violent crime is induced by hard drug use, Walter,” O’Reilly said. “I don’t want to be too tough on you, you’re ninety.” But by the s
egment’s end O’Reilly, truly agitated, couldn’t refrain from jabbing at the legendary anchorman. “Now Walter Cronkite, the most trusted news broadcaster in American history [is] embracing every left-wing, crazy theory there is,” O’Reilly said, “and now says drug dealers cause little or no harm to others. I mean, it’s staggering! It is staggering!”

  Cronkite, it seemed, attended more funerals than anyone else in America in the first decade of the twenty-first century. He was always flattered to deliver a eulogy. At the Briscoe Center, there is a fat file of Cronkite-penned “last words” for his friends and colleagues. When Sig Mickelson died in San Diego in 2000, Cronkite flew out to California to console his family. Old Sig had made it to eighty-six, the age at which Cronkite said you could celebrate a death as they do in New Orleans funeral processions: with a blues stomp party. When Ed Bliss, who shared the JFK assassination drama with him, passed away the same year, Cronkite was able to comfort the old CBSer’s family with equanimity. He would do the same at Gordon Manning’s funeral in September 2006. But when Ed Bradley died at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan on November 9, 2006, from complications of leukemia, Cronkite collapsed at his stricken friend’s bedside in grief. Ed was too young to leave the Earth. Cronkite was beyond devastated. During a twenty-six-year stint on 60 Minutes, Bradley had interviewed everyone in music from Michael Jackson to Bob Dylan to Lena Horne to Ray Charles. Cronkite loved to hear the backstories of those music legends. “For Walter and I,” Jimmy Buffett recalled, “losing Ed was impossible to endure. It left us numb.”

  In July 2006, PBS aired the ninety-minute documentary Walter Cronkite: Witness to History (narrated by Katie Couric). The program elegantly drew Cronkite’s career into focus. Five months later, Cronkite had a flurry of health scares. On a couple of occasions, his daughter Kathy delivered public speeches he couldn’t make. At long last he seemed to have slowed down. A condition called cerebrovascular disease—with symptoms that included personality changes, loss of consciousness, loss of memory, inability to speak, difficulty reading or writing, paralysis of body parts, changes in vision, and strokes—debilitated him physically. You could talk to Cronkite about anything at all: sometimes he’d respond with a non sequitur; at other times, he was completely lucid. Word got around Manhattan that Cronkite had a brain disorder. Newspapers started polishing up Cronkite’s obituary. Holing up in the UN Plaza co-op with his two cats, Joanna, close friends, and family, he could tell stories about the Suez Crisis of 1956 but would forget that George W. Bush was the current president. “Sometimes, he would look out the window at the East River,” Chip Cronkite recalled, “And say, ‘that looks like New York. Not sure.’ ”