Cronkite (43 page)

All of that might have happened, except that the problems at San Francisco were serious enough to concern the chairman of the corporation. Paley was out of patience with CBS News’ second-place position in convention coverage and appalled by Cronkite’s boorish behavior. Why had Cronkite brought his family to San Francisco, as if the convention were a Disneyland vacation? Couldn’t his anchorman have tried to make peace with Goldwater over the German flap? Why had Eisenhower—his ultimate hero—seemingly turned sour on CBS? Paley called Friendly and Leonard to a meeting in late July, back in New York City. Frank Stanton asked the first question, as Leonard recalled in
In the Storm of the Eye
:

“What the hell happened to Walter?”

“Walter wasn’t quite himself,” Friendly offered weakly.

“Why not?” snapped Paley. “Was he sick?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t think so.”

“Well,” said the chairman, “I thought the idea was that Walter was going to do a little less, and you were going to spread the load around, so the pace would pick up. Wasn’t that the idea, didn’t you tell me that’s what you all had in mind, Fred?”

Fred looked at me, as if to say, You tell ’em.

“Well, sir, that was the idea, but Walter sort of . . . I guess you could say . . . resisted it.”

“What does that mean?”

Leonard described how Cronkite would sometimes ignore instructions to go to a floor report from Mudd or Rather. He continued, in his recollection of the conversation:

The chairman’s voice rose perilously. “You mean he would get what amounted to an order and he wouldn’t obey it?! Is that what would happen? Did you actually give him orders and he wouldn’t carry them out?”

I realized we were sinking fast.

“I wouldn’t put it quite that way,” Fred interposed. “You know, Walter is Walter.”

“I don’t know anything about ‘Walter is Walter,’ ” snapped the chairman. “It sounds to me as if Walter wouldn’t do what he was told and you weren’t able to do anything about it!” Paley had hit the nail on the head.

Friendly and I fell silent, praying that his outburst might put an end to the matter.

It was just the beginning.

“Who do you think could replace Walter?” Paley asked a few minutes later.

Paley, brooding angrily, knew about media stars and their egotistical conviction that they had a unique understanding of the TV audience and thus had to have their own way. In the recent past, Paley had tangled with Jackie Gleason, Arthur Godfrey, Lucille Ball, and Jack Benny—and while he would have liked to win every time, he often had to capitulate to their diva demands. The difference was that each of those stars had top-rated shows; Cronkite didn’t. The tooth-and-claw dictates of television therefore made Cronkite expendable. Paley didn’t want to hear about what a great job Cronkite had done during the JFK assassination drama. That was eight months ago. He’d blown San Francisco. “One trouble with this business is it’s like Hollywood,” Cronkite grumbled to Peter Benchley of
Newsweek
a day after the news broke that he was being dropped as the CBS anchorman for the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. “No one tells you—you can’t get an exact reading of what’s going on.”

Fred Friendly and Bill Leonard flew out to the San Diego yacht basin, where Cronkite was vacationing with his family at Hotel Del Coronado. They had come all the way from New York to inform him of his demotion from the approaching Atlantic City convention, and of the promotion of Bob Trout and Roger Mudd as co-anchors. Cronkite was devastated. Reporter Tom Wolfe, in a
New York Herald Tribune
article, wrote that Friendly and Leonard had “expressions on their faces like the college-liberal doctors at the cancer clinic who believe every patient is owed the simple human dignity of being told the truth.” Cronkite also found out from a mole that CBS’s ad agency, Batten, Barton, Durstine, & Osborn, was told to pull his name from the print ad campaign that fall season. A gutting was taking place, and he was the fish. He couldn’t believe that Paley had the audacity to sideline him. All Cronkite was offered by Fred Friendly for Atlantic City were a few interviews with a random U.S. senator or housewife from Peoria; he rejected that humiliating toss of a bone. Cronkite tried to stand up straight when Friendly told him the news, but inside of him everything was painted black.
Newsweek
ran a comical photo of the ascendant Trout with Cronkite next to him under the caption: “The anchorman was hoisted.” When Benchley asked Cronkite if he was going to fulfill his recent nine-year commitment to CBS, Cronkite responded affirmatively, but with the arch qualifier that “any contract is breakable.”

The news that Paley had deposed Cronkite from Atlantic City blew up into a major news story itself. Newspapers across the country carried long pieces full of trenchant commentary and analysis. No one wrote about the incident more succinctly than Wolfe, exclaiming, “Walter Cronkite—demoted!” Adding insult to injury, Friendly told
The New York Times
that Sevareid and Reasoner would also play larger roles in Atlantic City while Cronkite stewed in the doghouse. The common assumption was that if Trout and Mudd were a hit, Cronkite would next lose his job on the
CBS Evening News
. In fact, Friendly feared that Cronkite would move first and quit the network altogether.

During the last week of July, Cronkite was inundated with interview requests. Though in low spirits, he held his emotions in check. “We took a clobbering in San Francisco,” he told Robert J. Williams of
The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin
with appealing frankness, “and it seems perfectly reasonable that management at CBS would like to try something else to regain the audience.” Privately, Cronkite was far more irate. The
Times
ran a leaked story saying that Cronkite might not be allowed to anchor Election Night in November and that Paley was thinking about firing him. Americans had revered Cronkite in the wake of the Kennedy assassination and now he was headed toward obscurity like Douglas Edwards. What saved Cronkite was his loyal viewership. Letters came pouring into CBS headquarters by the thousands, saying
Don’t you dare fire Walter
. A Cronkite counterinsurgency was underfoot. Doing damage control, Friendly spun an old cliché for public consumption: “We’ve got a team here—the best team in electronic journalism. We just change the batting order from time to time.”

Cronkite recognized that, in those terms, he was still batting cleanup: anchoring the
CBS Evening News
and hosting
The Twentieth Century
. He astutely saw that he had an opportunity to solidify his power if he moved his
CBS Evening News
to Atlantic City during the convention, so he and Hewitt could broadcast their regular 6:30 p.m. EST show there. Retreat was not an option. CBS producer Ernest Leiser had the temerity to tell a
New York Times
reporter that Cronkite, like Bartleby the Scrivener in Herman Melville’s short story, had decided he
preferred
to broadcast from Atlantic City instead of New York. Talk about hubris. “I’m not bitter yet,” Cronkite said. “But I might be later.”

When Paley heard about the Cronkite plan to broadcast the half-hour
CBS Evening News
from Atlantic City, he grew choleric. While Leonard tried to defend Cronkite, Paley would have none of it. When Leonard threatened to quit CBS, Paley said, “Well you can quit or not quit, but I want Cronkite out of the anchor booth in Atlantic City.” Leonard tried to tell Cronkite to go zen, not Bartleby. Cronkite rejected the advice. Chris Wallace was horrified: if Cronkite squared off against Leonard, his stepfather, and Paley, Chris couldn’t keep making romantic progress with Cronkite’s daughter. “From my worm’s-eye view of history,” Wallace later joked, “I kept thinking this is really going to screw up my relationship with Nancy.”

Murrow used to tell his Boys that any self-respecting journalist who vigorously investigated stories and challenged bosses should always be willing to clear his or her desk in twenty minutes flat. To Cronkite, who had three children to support, that notion was arrogant bravado. The key to broadcast journalism, he believed, was survival. His strategy was public contrition followed by the stubborn refusal to play a minor role in New Jersey. Cronkite admitted to having been too hard on Goldwater. And then he bore down to stick it out like Bartleby the Scrivener, to weather the storm. Instead of clearing his anchor desk, Cronkite set up in Atlantic City and proceeded to deliver the
CBS Evening News
in martyrdom even though he had lost the convention assignment to Paley’s underlings, Mudd and Trout. Taking aim at both Huntley-Brinkley and Trout-Mudd, Cronkite opined that a “two-man team is less efficient than one.” He also admitted that he had “fifth person feelers” headhunting a new job for him away from CBS.

When Gould of
The
New York Times
praised CBS for shelving Cronkite even before the Mudd-Trout debut, Paley smiled. Cronkite was about to be left behind like an old junker, encrusted in the old-style UP wire journalism and solo-flight anchoring to which he clung out of habit. The assumption was that he would soon be replaced on the
Evening News
by the surging duo of Trout-Mudd. At best, Cronkite would revert to hosting
The Twentieth Century
and covering space launches, which no one could take away from him post-Shepard, Grissom, and Glenn. Paley now envisioned his news division with Cronkite gone: Trout-Mudd would be carried by the critical momentum of the Atlantic City convention to ratings victory on the
Evening News
.

Right before the Atlantic City convention began on August 24, Don Hewitt, in an act of solidarity with Cronkite, asked to be relieved of his duties helping Trout and Mudd. He would instead work only with Cronkite, whom Lady Bird Johnson had agreed to do a
Person to Person
–style exclusive interview at the Texas ranch (she willingly shared personal details of her First Family life like never before, creating buzz). Dick West of UPI helped the Cronkite cause by lambasting the Mudd and Trout performance on day one of the convention. West detected on-air jockeying for supremacy between the CBS co-anchors, something he’d never seen with ABC’s duo of Howard K. Smith and Edward P. Morgan. Nor did Trout-Mudd pull off the warmth of Walter Cronkite flying solo. “Once after Mudd had given the viewers some information,” related West, “Trout responded with some contradictory tidbit of his own, which he described as ‘the exception that proves the rule.’ ” Critic Richard Martin of
The Salt Lake Tribune
likewise thought that Mudd’s “rather desperate attempts at being funny were contrived. . . . This preoccupation with showmanship, I feel, tends to cloud, rather than clarify convention proceedings.” A whole line of critics, in fact, countered Gould’s view that Trout-Mudd had “stylish punch”: Cronkite had anchored seven previous presidential nominating conventions and three presidential elections and there was no good reason to sideline the still-blooming legend in 1964.

With the power of the dial, TV audiences had a similar reaction. According to results provided by Arbitron, CBS garnered its highest share in the first half-hour of the first night’s coverage. That figure dropped as the evening and the week wore on. Overall, NBC walked away with its highest convention ratings
ever
. CBS’s woeful numbers were even lower than they had been in San Francisco with Cronkite as helmsman. Paley, in retreat, not wanting Cronkite and Hewitt to defect, quietly dissolved the team of Trout and Mudd. He had buyer’s remorse. Friendly, Leonard, and Midgley later claimed that they had been reluctant participants in Cronkite’s 1964 unseating. These were ahistorical claims of convenience, a distancing from a failed coup. Feeling hung out to dry, Mudd considered a career change, perhaps teaching journalism at a university. While he served as scapegoat for the “Cronkite loyalists,” of whom there were suddenly many, the blame actually rested on Bill Paley’s shoulders. Brooks Atkinson, critic-at-large for
The New York Times
, wrote a column ten days after the Atlantic City convention, castigating CBS for its lousy treatment of Cronkite. “By brutally dumping and publicly humiliating its ablest newsman,” he wrote, “it equated [political] conventions with the box office.”

Paley, in his 1979 memoir
As It Happened
, didn’t mention the abrupt change in convention anchors, but he did pay tribute to Cronkite as “the stalwart kingpin,” choosing to forget how he neutered his star anchorman in 1964. “Walter is so objective, careful, and fair in his presentation of news,” Paley said, “that he has been characterized—if not immortalized—with the oft-heard line: ‘If Walter says it, it must be so.’ ” Paley’s change of opinion was understandable; by 1979, Cronkite was his North Star, blazing a way through a galaxy of lesser lights. Yet other news anchors contemporary with him were just as objective and as fair. Others shared the qualities Paley praised in Cronkite, his “sheer hard work, attention to detail, and a sense of journalistic honesty, integrity and fairness.”

It took some kind of magic to get eighty-sixed by Paley only to become a broadcasting folk hero because the public missed your mug and the First Lady rallied in support of your cause. The Cronkite game plan was to outlast all the Mudd-Trout commotion, in a defiant act of refusal, then massacre his in-house rivals when they weren’t looking. He believed that for all of the spectacle and entertainment in TV news, there was still a flickering hunger for Main Street authenticity. “Walter said, ‘I’m a newsman and I’m going to cover the story,’ ” Chris Wallace recalled. “This was a masterstroke. Because the scuttlebutt was that Cronkite, in truth, was a serious print newsman at heart. His defiance in Atlantic City, his refusal to throw in the towel as a newsman covering a story, endeared him to all the print reporters who still saw TV as a playing field for pretty boys.”