Cronkite

D
EDICATION

To
Brian Lamb

and

David Halberstam

(1934–2007)

E
PIGRAPHS

If we cannot produce a generation of journalists—or even a good handful—who care enough about our world and our future to make journalism the great literature it can be, then “professionally oriented programs” are a waste of time. Without at least a hard core of articulate men, convinced that journalism today is perhaps the best means of interpreting and thereby preserving what little progress we have made toward freedom and self-respect over the years, without that tough-minded elite in our press, dedicated to concepts that are sensed and quietly understood, rather than learned in schools—without these men we might as well toss in the towel and admit that ours is a society too interested in comic strips and TV to consider revolution until it bangs on our front door in the dead of some quiet night when our guard is finally down and we no longer kid ourselves about being bearers of a great and decent dream.

—HUNTER S. THOMPSON,
The Proud Highway

The stalwart kingpin of CBS News . . . Walter Cronkite, who has earned for himself, and in turn for CBS that which we have wanted from the very start of our News Division: the highest degree of credibility in the world of journalism. . . . Walter has been so characterized—if not immortalized—with the oft-heard line: “If Walter says it, it must be so.”

—WILLIAM S. PALEY

When the history of journalism is written about our era, it will be divided into separate eras—B.C. and A.C.—before Walter Cronkite and after Walter Cronkite. And the great division here is that Walter had in spades what today is lacking in huge proportion—and that is trust. It’s probably hard for Walter himself to fathom how the profession of journalism has declined in public trust and, I’m bound to say, public esteem since he left it. But the decline has been sharp and precipitous. In a profession, as with currency, it’s good to have a gold standard, and Walter is simply the gold standard of network, national, shared news experience.

—
G
EORGE
F
.
W
ILL

C
ONTENTS

P
ROLOGUE

Walter Cronkite—for godsake, there are millions of people out there, 19, 20, 21, ridiculous ages like that, who think there has always been a Walter Cronkite. After the fashion of Franklin Roosevelt, Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny. Every time there would be one of those great hulking Moments in History, an election, a national convention, a man in space, Kennedy’s assassination, there would be the face of Walter Cronkite on TV, with his hair combed straight back over his sagittal suture and his mustache spreading out like Melvyn Douglas after a good rousing heigh-ho afternoon at the St. Regis barbershop and his head tilted with him holding an earphone over one ear and then his voice coming out flue-cured Southern with the drawl trimmed off.

–TOM WOLFE

W
hen novelist Kurt Vonnegut heard that, on March 6, 1981, after nearly nineteen years of service, Walter Cronkite was retiring at sixty-four years old from his job as anchorman of the
CBS Evening News
, he wrote a heartfelt paean for
The Nation
titled “A Reluctant Big Shot.” Vonnegut worried about what Cronkite’s abdication meant for the future of American democracy. Over the years he had come to equate Cronkite, a fellow midwesterner, with a Father Christmas character who in self-deprecating fashion insisted that he was “only a newsman.” Now Vonnegut fretted that the most trusted reporter, one who remained “as entranced by the unfolding of each day’s news as a child with a new kaleidoscope,” was sailing off into the retirement horizon. There were no consolation prizes for the American people. With cable TV news as the emergent driving force, Vonnegut worried that the era of
thoughtfulness
in news broadcasting was over. “The actual crisis is upon,” Vonnegut lamented. “A subliminal message in every one of his broadcasts was that he had no power and wanted none. So now we feel that a kindly and intelligent teacher is leaving our village. It turns out not to matter that the village happens to be as big as all outdoors.”

Since the CBS heyday of Edward R. Murrow in the 1950s, no television broadcaster had been so omnipresent in American life as Cronkite. He was as familiar to TV watchers as the “Star-Spangled Banner” at the end of late-night programming before the static ruled. Whether it was chronicling astronaut John Glenn’s orbit of Earth, lamenting the JFK assassination, sharing his post–Tet Offensive doubts about the Vietnam War, dubbing the Chicago police “a bunch of thugs” at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, or celebrating the nation’s bicentennial, Cronkite was the clarion voice in network news. Instead of the error some TV anchors made of babbling constantly through special coverage of a presidential inauguration or a moon walk, Cronkite had mastered the intentional pause, the need for frozen seconds of long silence at certain historic moments. Nobody before or after Cronkite had mastered the art of communicating news on television nightly without ever becoming an irritant. What Murrow had been to radio, Cronkite was to TV—though they were as different in style as night and day, their overmastering legacies at CBS News represent high-water marks of twentieth-century electronic journalism. Cronkite trained himself to speak at a rate of 124 words per minute in broadcasts so that TV viewers could easily absorb the newscast. Americans typically average about 165 words a minute, and hard-to-understand speakers average 200. Blessed with a mellifluous voice, Cronkite slowed the verbiage down like an old muddy river, and TV viewers approved en masse.

As Cronkite prepared to step down as CBS News anchorman, on a Friday night, one network executive postulated that the broadcaster had come to represent “God, mother, the American flag, the four-minute mile, and Mount Everest” to an adoring public traumatized by Vietnam and Watergate. Every physical feature of Cronkite told the same story, from the glacial blue of his receptive eyes to the perfect grooming of his Walt Disney–like mustache. By all outward appearances, he looked like a serious man. His French-cuffed shirts, many bearing the monogram WLC (for Walter Leland Cronkite), were always starched. Only his large knot ties—some of them with fat stripes or polka dots—hinted toward humor. As a child of the Great Depression, Cronkite found that frugality came naturally. Even his best friends called him stingy. He hated picking up tabs or tipping. Committed to being a top-tier reporter in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Cronkite habitually worked ten to twelve hours a day. Swirling around him were always scores of producers, writers, runners, typists, and cameramen—but only he was the calm eye of the news-gathering storm, creating an overall impression of gentility, equanimity, and decency. Cronkite, the quintessential team leader, perceived introspection as self-indulgent. “I never spent any time examining my navel,” he boasted as an octogenarian. “And I’m bored with people who do.”

Another chief factor of Cronkite’s success was that he cared deeply about TV scripts. What Cronkite’s key producers understood was that the veteran broadcaster had a full-bore ardor about certain issues such as civil rights, space travel, and the environment. The greatest moments in TV broadcasting history—Walter Cronkite on the Apollo missions, Dan Rather from Tiananmen Square, Peter Arnett from Baghdad, Christiane Amanpour from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Brian Williams during Hurricane Katrina, Anderson Cooper from Haiti, and others—all gelled because the scriptwriters felt the passion of the on-air reporter. Instead of being fully objective, they spoke from the heart. The intensity index was ratcheted up a few notches to garner dramatic effect.

Broadcasters are notorious for having big egos. Many conflate TV face time with being important figures in the same league with Washington, Lincoln, and the Roosevelts. Cronkite wasn’t like that. He had a rather matter-of-fact, humble, and benevolent disposition that was borderline heroic. “It can be said of three men that, in their time as communicators, this nation hung on their words, waited in eager anticipation of what they were going to observe and report and treat in their special way,” H. D. Quigg, a senior UPI editor, wrote. “Mark Twain, Will Rogers, and Walter Cronkite.” Obviously he had become more than a mere TV anchorman to the American public. “You can’t overestimate Walter’s life experience during World War II working for the United Press,” Roger Ailes, the president of the Fox News channel explained. “He had the voice, calmness, and organic writing style of a wire reporter who knew what he was doing. There was
something
comforting about his nuts-and-bolts approach. Just seeing Walter—in person or on the air—meant everything was going to be okay. He guided us through the cold war with more steadiness than flare. He had an enormous life.”

At a 1981 seminar at Columbia University Fred Friendly, Murrow’s alter ego, offered an unvarnished assessment of Cronkite upon his retirement from anchoring. Friendly, a CBS News producer for decades and president of CBS News from 1964 to 1966, compared Cronkite to the erudite columnist Walter Lippmann—a high compliment indeed. “Cronkite has the capacity to make people believe him,” Friendly explained. “I hate it when people talk about his avuncular quality. I don’t know how that ever started, but he was no more of a nice old man than Walter Lippmann was.” As a journalist, Lippmann had the capacity to truly understand the complexity of an issue. Murrow had a marvelous ear for news. But Cronkite was
the
master of modern communication. His act in this regard has yet to be surpassed. “I don’t suppose,” Friendly wrote, “you’ll see another Cronkite.”

With torches and trumpets, Friendly claimed that Cronkite’s greatest gift was for recognizing his own limitations, an unusual quality in the narcissistic broadcast medium. To Friendly, Cronkite was a genius at boiling down and clarifying complex issues for middle-class Americans, even physics and astronomy. He wasn’t a great philosopher or writer. But he was a marvelous teacher and a willing student. This made it hard, Friendly believed, to judge Cronkite’s stratagems in a historical way. You couldn’t compare them to that of a brilliant polemicist such as Lippmann or a you-are-there reporter such as Murrow. How do you really classify Cronkite’s anchorman coverage for CBS News of
Apollo 11
or President Nixon’s resignation from the White House? Was it really journalism? Or was it neat-and-tidy showmanship? Or hand-holding? Or babysitting? The genius Cronkite showcased was the steadfast ability to reassure millions of TV viewers, in a manner at once authoritative and convincing, that no matter what, they could depend on him to calm the waters and convey the truth. As corny as it sounded, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Frances FitzGerald spoke for many reporters when she told
The
Washington Post
in 1981 as Cronkite prepared to step down as CBS anchor, “I guess Dad is leaving us.”

It was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Friendly believed, that turned Cronkite into this patriarchal figure for millions of TV watchers. “There’s no way of explaining what he contributed,” Friendly told the 1981 class of Nieman fellows, describing Cronkite’s professionalism during the Dallas tragedy. “In many countries during four such traumatic days there would have been a revolution. Television, which stayed on the air for four straight days, played a role. All the things that are wrong in that billion-dollar penny arcade paid off in those four days, and that’s the tragedy of television—at its best it is so very good. But television can make so much money doing its worst that it can’t afford to be its best.”

On March 3, 1981, just three days before Cronkite ceded the
CBS Evening News
spot to Dan Rather, President Reagan sat down with the broadcast legend for an hourlong exclusive interview from the White House. Reagan had been a bona fide fan ever since Cronkite took over the anchor chair in 1962. The cordiality between the two was self-evident. Cronkite started out by asking Reagan about the Middle East, the Soviet Union, and the struggling economy. Toward the end of the interview Reagan, in a reversal, became the kindhearted inquirer. “I know you must be having a little nostalgia,” he suddenly interjected with a smile, “the many presidents that you’ve covered in this very room . . .”

“Indeed so, sir,” Cronkite replied. “I was counting back. It’s eight presidents. It’s been a remarkable period in our history.”

And then Reagan said, with genuine warmth, “Well, may I express my appreciation. You’ve always been a pro.”

The avalanche of press stories marking Cronkite’s high-profile retirement that month was mind-boggling.
Newsweek
put Cronkite on the cover in a large box screen surrounded by the dwarfed faces of Dan Rather, John Chancellor, and Frank Reynolds. The banner read, “After Cronkite.” CBS purchased more than fifty full-page newspaper ads featuring Cronkite with the headline, “Introducing Our Newest Correspondent”—a happy reminder that the retiring legend would get paid $1 million a year to occasionally host a
Special Report
. A thoughtful ABC News—Cronkite’s third-place competitor (after NBC News)—countered with a full-page advertisement in
The New York Times
in tribute to his broadcast career. Other newspapers likewise printed their own “Thank you, Walter” ads before he went into eclipse.

From coast to coast Cronkite’s good-bye broadcast was billed as if it were game seven of the World Series: must-watch TV. Accolades, telegrams, and special awards came pouring in full force from so many quarters that Cronkite, with amiable amusement, hired a special secretary for two weeks to manage the deluge of mail. When Betsy Cronkite was asked by
Parade
why her husband seemed to be liked by
everybody
, her answer was both funny and probably true. “I think,” she said, “it’s because he looks like everyone’s dentist. Both his father and grandfather were dentists, you know.”

Sixty-eight-year-old Eric Sevareid of CBS News, still the erudite Minnesota silver fox, appeared on ABC’s
Good Morning America
to say that more media attention was being paid to Cronkite’s departure than to Jimmy Carter’s farewell address. “The image of Walter Cronkite is a national symbol,” Mark Crispin Miller and Karen Runyon wrote in
The New Republic
. “When it no longer appears at the anchor desk, it will be as if George Washington’s face had suddenly vanished from the dollar bill.”

Circumspect and unemotional, Cronkite, in the fullness of his fame, wasn’t memorable on his farewell broadcast. The loyal
CBS Evening News
audience was hoping for a dramatic departure that March evening, with the venerable man-of-the-half-hour saying something worthy of
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations
. It was instead all business as usual. Cronkite’s wife, children, and agent watched the public adieu in the studio. Dan Rather did the same, only on a TV set in the office of executive producer Sandy Socolow. The assumption was that the last broadcast would be a memory-lane affair, a triumphal procession of his greatest moments.

But Cronkite’s last news story as anchorman was a NASA space shuttle update, his demeanor typically low-key. During the final commercial break, Cronkite told the crew, “Don’t get nervous, everybody; we’ll try to do it just like we rehearsed.” Ironically, his last two minutes on the air as anchorman—simulcast by NBC News and ABC News—represented perhaps the first time that Cronkite was out of sync with his viewing audience. To his loyal fans he seemed visually awkward and self-conscious. Of his own accord, Cronkite turned to a shopworn cliché to close the broadcast: “Old anchormen, you see, don’t fade away. They just keep coming back for more.” Rather, time would prove, did not like those last seven words.

Cronkite told the TV viewers that his retirement was “but a transition, a passing of the baton” to a younger Turk. And with that, he uttered the trademark sign-off, “And that’s the way it is,” one last time, continuing, “Friday, March 6, 1981. I’ll be away on assignment, and Dan Rather will be sitting in here for the next few years. Good night.”

The CBS cameras pulled back, and the image of Cronkite got smaller. As a parting gesture, Cronkite reached across the desk to shake hands with Jimmy Wall, his beloved stage manager, in an emotional farewell. When the camera went dead, Cronkite, no longer an anchorman, shoved his glasses in his pocket, moved a pencil a few inches, glanced at a stopwatch, popped a stick of gum into his mouth, and threw his script in the air like confetti. “School’s out!” he said. And then he left the building.