Cronkite (24 page)

For the only time in his life Cronkite felt like kissing Nixon’s ring. He now headed back to Kennedy’s office. When told that Cronkite had gotten Nixon to sign up for the series without hesitation, Kennedy blanched. His eyes barely concealed his utter contempt for Cronkite. Kennedy now felt hemmed in. “I suppose if you’ve got Nixon,” the senator snapped, “we’ll have to do something. You talk to my campaign manager.” That was a reluctant yes, but a yes nevertheless. Cronkite, his luck holding, headed over to CBS’s Washington, D.C., bureau to gloat about his impending triumph.

Thus was born
Presidential Countdown
. Nixon, as promised, taped the special first. As choreographed, Cronkite and Nixon each marched into a studio from different doors and shook hands on the center mark. Then, following a few formalities, they were off to the races. Cronkite’s first question was direct: “Mr. Vice President, you’re a skilled politician,” he began. “You certainly can’t have missed what people say about you. Many of them say, ‘I don’t know what it is about the man, I just don’t like him.’ What do you think it is they just don’t like about you?”

Instead of being rattled, Nixon wrapped himself around the question with self-evident glee, gazing fixedly at the CBS reporter’s face. “Well, I think it’s three things, Mr. Cronkite,” Nixon said. “I think the first is my physiognomy. I have a rather heavy beard and a dark complexion and between those things, I just can’t shave closely enough. I always look a little blue in the face, like I have a little growth of beard, and that’s unfortunate. The second thing is those campaigns for election to the U.S. Senate against Helen Douglas and to the Congress against Jerry Voorhis, which I would probably do a little differently. I wouldn’t take back any of the charges I made, because I think they were perfectly justified, but I would handle it a little differently with the experience I have now. And third is my leadership in the House Un-American Activities Committee. I’m not one bit ashamed of that, but that created a body of propaganda . . .” And on and on, Nixon answered with great skill. It was quite an acrobatic performance for the Californian known for robotic stiffness. Cronkite threw unexpected questions at Nixon about his Irish ancestry and Quaker background, and he in turn hit them over the fence. By Cronkite’s closing question about Nixon’s fitness for the White House, it was clear that, surprisingly, the
Presidential Countdown
format worked in the vice president’s favor.

A week later, Cronkite interviewed Kennedy at his Federal-style Georgetown home at 3307 N Street NW. The house had been a gift from Kennedy to his wife, Jacqueline, after the birth of their daughter, Caroline, in 1957. Cronkite recalled the handsome Massachusetts senator being, at best, a “reluctant guest” on
Presidential Countdown
. Unlike Nixon, Kennedy blew the entire CBS interview. It was clear that he hadn’t properly boned up for the program, confusing even his own résumé on film. Once the camera rolled, Kennedy was all hems and haws. Every other line was a clumsy “Well . . . uh . . . I think, well . . . I believe, I, well . . . uh . . .” Not only was he unfocused and dithering, but also, the entire hour, he seemed to be grasping at straws. If this had been his opening night on Broadway, he would have gotten the hook. “When it was over, we thanked him, and he was kind of mean about it,” Cronkite recalled. “He gave me a rather perfunctory good-bye.”

While Cronkite was watching Kennedy’s botched interview in the CBS truck outside the candidate’s house, the producer of
Presidential Countdown
, Warren Abrams, came barging in, clearly panicked.

“We’ve got to do the program over,” Abrams said.

“What’s the matter with it?” a perplexed Cronkite asked. “It’s all right in here. I’m looking at it.”

“Well, the senator says we have to do it over,” Abrams said.

“But we don’t do it over again,” an incredulous Cronkite sputtered, his muscles taut. “That’s part of the deal.”

“Kennedy insists,” Abrams shot back. “He won’t let it be shown this way.”

“Well,” Cronkite fumed, “what right does he have?”

Abrams considered. “I don’t know,” he said. “His complaint is that we had him sitting in a big soft sofa, and he didn’t look right.”

“Oh come on,” Cronkite scoffed. “We know better than that. It’s because he blew that last question. Where is he?”

“Up in the bedroom,” Abrams said.

“Well,” Cronkite said, hurrying out of the truck, “I’ve got to talk to him.”

Fueled by his righteous indignation, Cronkite stomped up the stairs of Kennedy’s home to encounter a startled JFK lying on one twin bed and Ted Sorensen—his best friend, speechwriter, and special assistant—on the other. Sorensen recalled that Cronkite had frightened them by walking stealthily up the stairs, and that he hadn’t knocked. Kennedy and Sorensen both saw “a fire in Walter’s eyes that they didn’t know he had.” For his part, Cronkite was surprised at how young and petulant Kennedy and Sorensen looked, like a couple of graduating prep school kids sleeping off a hangover on a rainy Sunday. “They had their shoes off and their ties undone,” Cronkite recalled. “There was this big Harvard banner up on the wall, and football pictures; it looked like a college dorm room. They were lying there, dangling their feet.”

Suddenly Kennedy, looking straight at Cronkite and, clearing his throat ominously, said, “Tell me when you’re ready.”

“Senator,” Cronkite replied. “I don’t think we ought to do this again.”

“I’ve already discussed it with your producer,” Kennedy retorted. “We’re going to do it.”

Overwhelmed by the unremitting tension, filled with the desire to assert himself as the superior power, Cronkite tried a sly new angle. “But you know,” he told Kennedy, “we’re going to have to carry a disclaimer. We’re going to say that Nixon’s was unrehearsed but that you requested to do yours over.”

“I can live with that,” Kennedy said.

“I don’t think you understand the impact of that disclaimer,” Cronkite continued. “I don’t think it’s going to make you look very good.”

“I’m not concerned about that,” Kennedy said, holding his ground.

“All right, Senator,” Cronkite said in disbelief. “We’ll do it over. But I’ve got to tell you, I think it’s the lousiest bit of sportsmanship I ever saw in my life.”

Suddenly Kennedy turned gray with embarrassment. Cronkite, in a thespian gesture, turned around and started heading down the stairs.

“Wait a minute,” Kennedy shouted, sitting up in bed with pronounced dislike on his face. “Let it run!”

B
ecause Cronkite had bagged his big Kennedy and Nixon interviews that fall and a ratings bonanza for
Presidential Countdown
, his place as a CBS broadcaster was secure. That was important, because shake-ups were imminent at CBS, but not just because Jack Gould of
The New York Times
had publicly mocked the news division. NBC was now the established ratings leader: CBS had been running second to the Peacock Network in the evening news for more than two years. The convention ratings showed all too bluntly the same thing. And then, in the fall of 1960, NBC shed its former runner-up humility once and for all by launching an attack directed at the very heart of CBS News: investigative documentaries via the program
NBC White Paper
. Frank Stanton was genuinely shaken by NBC’s forward-driving hubris. Five years before, NBC would have had neither the talent nor the budget to produce hard-hitting documentaries.

What worried CBS executives the most—why they had tried making Cronkite and Murrow compete with Huntley and Brinkley—was that NBC had a knack for creating successful new TV formats. After all, NBC had introduced the desk-and-sofa talk show (
Today
,
Tonight
), the TV special, the prime-time movie showcase, the made-for-TV movie, the Sunday press conference (
Meet the Press
), and, later, free-form comedy shows (
Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In
and
Saturday Night Live)
. You couldn’t blame Stanton for not wanting to be left in the dust by Huntley-Brinkley as Election Day approached.

CBS News had a special problem to face in the fall of 1960 as it tried to regain the top spot in broadcast news: the eminent Ed Murrow, the one employee who couldn’t be fired. He was the news division’s greatest asset, a tall, chain-smoking, handsome icon who still demanded the respect accorded a statesman or a war hero, both of which he had been. At the same time, Murrow was barely accommodated by CBS management, treated as an antiquated pariah figure best kept at arm’s length. After the widespread protests from U.S. agribusiness over his program “Harvest of Shame,” a documentary that showcased the dire situation of migrant workers in the United States, Murrow’s dark brow seemed increasingly furrowed as he paced the halls of CBS. He was always fatigued and displayed teeth marred by nicotine stains. Paley often complained that he was sick and tired of controversial news shows such as those that Murrow regarded as worthwhile for
CBS Reports
. They literally made Paley sick to his stomach, already aggravated by ulcers, as he anticipated the viewer backlash that typically resulted. If Murrow were to be given any more leash, Paley fretted, CBS News would become a doomed sinkhole as corporate advertisers held a quiet boycott. “CBS is not the Ministry of Justice, not an avenging angel,” Paley carped. “We are a big business and we are being hurt.”

Paley’s position was not based entirely on expediency. Trained as a financier, he had learned much of what he knew about journalism from Paul White, whom he had hired as CBS’s first news director in 1935. At the time that White and Paley introduced serious journalism to radio, newspapers—the only other time-oriented news media—were mired in partisan viewpoints. Nearly every paper in the nation was understood by its readers to tilt in one political direction or another. (The major wire services were far more evenhanded, catering as they did to a variety of papers; United Press, Cronkite’s alma mater, was regarded as the least slanted of them all.) White convinced Paley that for a number of economic reasons, CBS radio was in a position to start fresh and assert itself as a wholly objective news medium.

White convinced Paley that “honesty” (objectivity) was the element that could make or break journalism. Murrow had agreed wholeheartedly when he joined the network under White’s aegis in the 1930s, but with his increasing stature during World War II, he added his own editorial viewpoint when he felt compelled to do so. White and Murrow clashed on that very issue. After the war, when their differences came to a head, Paley sided with his star and allowed White to be fired. Such was the power of Murrow.

A dozen years later, Murrow and the reporters he influenced at CBS worked under the theory—antithetical to White’s philosophy—that the power of broadcasting increased with the addition of some point of view, carried in the words, the pictures, or the invisible hand of the editing. White would have argued that the impact increased temporarily, but that a steady diet of slanted reports would only train the viewer to think twice about every report, and to take none at face value. The Murrow legacy in TV news was the desire to counter the entertainment industry’s effort to inject bottom-dollar values into the sacred world of fact.

By the end of the 1950s, Paley had returned to White’s teachings. His motives were questioned, as some suspected that he was giving in to pressure from his GOP friends in government and Wall Street to make CBS News shallow and nonthreatening. Paley’s reversal was crucial not only to CBS but also to broadcast news in general. The degree of “analysis,” “commentary,” and “editorialization” tolerated in news shows has been the subject of passionate debate ever since. The benchmark broadcast of Murrow’s
See It Now
program on McCarthy has been looked on as a magnificent moment—and a Pandora’s box. In that documentary’s riptide, bad opinions and sensationalized commentaries have been able to masquerade as serious news shows. Paley, in trying to reduce the slant, probably raised the objectivity level of broadcast journalism overall as he backtracked from Murrow even as he stymied the ambitions of some excellent reporters at CBS News. Broadcast news was a rotten business in 1960, but the American public had a growing appetite for it—CBS aimed to please its consumers just like any other big business.

While Murrow had received garlands from intellectuals (“the Harvards,” as Lyndon Johnson called them) for “Harvest of Shame,” Cronkite was the ever-embraced anchorman of CBS by the general public. Although the privations and inhumane treatment of Mexican migrants were horrifying, the big story of September 1960 was the presidential election. TV was becoming a reflection of America itself, and Cronkite had emerged as the medium’s most consistently trustworthy mirror. The hottest thing in television in 1960 was the coming Kennedy-Nixon debates. And it was Cronkite, not Murrow, who was chosen as one of four reporters—along with Frank Singiser (MBS), John Edwards (ABC), and John Chancellor (NBC)—to ask the candidates questions at the all-important October 21 fourth (and final) debate, which was moderated by Quincy Howe of ABC News. Knowing that foreign policy would be the subject du jour, Cronkite boned up on topics such as Cuba, Berlin, and NATO so he could make his mark on the broadcast. “The networks had insisted that the interrogators on programs one and four be selected exclusively from network news staffs,” Sig Mickelson explained in
The Electric Mirror
, “and picked by the networks themselves.” In the end Cronkite was so mild-mannered an inquisitor, handicapped (to be fair) by time restrictions, that he was an almost invisible presence in the square-off. But being part of the Kennedy-Nixon debates was, at the very least, an impressive résumé booster and a historical feather in his cap.

Besides the
Presidential Countdown
interviews and a Kennedy-Nixon debate, Cronkite served as host of a special on November 4 in anticipation of Election Day. All CBS News’ contributing reporters summed up for host Cronkite what their gut told them with only four days left before voters went to the polls. Determined to outshine ABC’s competing
Presidential Round Up
, CBS News spent a fortune taking out display ads in newspapers for the show, with Cronkite’s name in boldface letters. Cronkite’s guests included two-time Republican presidential nominee Thomas Dewey, Adlai Stevenson, Senator Eugene McCarthy (D-Minn.), and Henry Cabot Lodge. Cronkite’s “Final Campaign Report” seemed to put Kennedy in a more favorable light than Nixon. But Kennedy—still miffed at Cronkite—didn’t think so. Convinced that Cronkite was an Eisenhower Republican, Kennedy thought the show pro-Nixon.