Cronkite (45 page)

Just how much power Cronkite had to sway public opinion became self-evident when the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was firebombed on September 15, 1963. Four young black girls were murdered. Eugene Patterson, the editor of
The
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
editorial page, wrote a heartrending column that lambasted the “sick criminals” and “politicians who beat the kettle of heat” and “little men who have their nigger jokes.” Cronkite thought Patterson had written an evergreen column for the ages and directed a CBS crew to film him reading it aloud as a camera scanned the church rubble. Patterson thought that the
CBS Evening News
might run a five- or ten-second sound bite of him. But Cronkite went to town on his telecast, giving Patterson full say:

I tuned it in and, sure enough, Cronkite had given up a huge chunk of his time for me, just sitting at my desk [reading] the column from beginning to end. That was the beginning of my education as to the impact of television. Within a week or two I received close to two thousand letters, telegrams, or phone calls from all over the nation. When a newspaper editor gets 20 letters he usually feels he has scored big with a column. The magnified reach that television brought to this piece bewildered me. For every one who felt moved to communicate there must have been a hundred or a thousand who responded [in spirit] but stayed silent.

The CBS reporter whom Cronkite tapped into most on civil rights issues was Hughes Rudd, a native of Waco, Texas. Cronkite hired the thirty-eight-year-old Rudd away from UP in 1959 to be his writer. Rudd had attended the University of Missouri from 1938 to 1941 before enlisting in the U.S. Army during World War II. Cronkite was awed by Rudd’s bravery in flying Piper Cubs as an artillery spotter in Africa and Europe. He was awarded a Silver Star, a Purple Heart, and six Air Medals. After the war, Rudd wrote for
The
Kansas City Star
and
The
Minneapolis Star
; that’s when Cronkite poached him from print journalism. Sardonic and a marvelous raconteur, Rudd was tasked by Cronkite with serving abroad in Moscow, Bonn, Berlin, and Vietnam. At Cronkite’s suggestion, the gravelly voiced Rudd also opened CBS News’ southern bureau in Atlanta, spearheading coverage of protest marches and sit-ins. “Back then you were really on your own,” Rudd recalled of CBS in the early 1960s. “You told New York what you were gonna do. You didn’t have to run all over hell because somebody in New York got up in the morning with a bright idea. You didn’t have any of this nonsense with ‘bureau managers.’ You just had a reporter . . . and a camera crew.”

Without question, Cronkite belonged in the pantheon of pro–civil rights reporters who made a historic difference in ending institutionalized racial discrimination in the South. Cronkite’s
CBS Evening News
stage manager was African American vaudevillian Jimmy Wall, who eventually became known to schoolchildren of the era as Mr. Baxter on CBS’s
Captain Kangaroo
. Wall joined
Captain Kangaroo
as a stage manager in 1962, and from then on he worked as the stage manager on several other CBS shows, including the
Evening News
, for nearly fifty years. Cronkite depended on Wall to count down the minutes to airtime in his rich baritone voice five nights each week. “TWO MINUTES TO AIR,” he would shout out, all the way down to “IN FIVE.” Wall, in essence, was the eyes and ears of Cronkite’s director. A natural-born storyteller, Wall regaled Cronkite over the years with stories of bootlegger stills during Prohibition, USO shows in Europe, and hanging out with Jackie Robinson in Brooklyn. They were almost the same age and shared a long and prosperous history at the Tiffany Network.

Nobody thought Cronkite harbored prejudice. Although Cronkite was an ally of Dr. King, some liberals were irritated by how the term
negro
was used on the network. This came to a head in 1966, when CBS correspondent Steve Rowan reported on “negroes” in Vietnam and then generically referred to them as “men,” rather than giving their surnames, as was done with white soldiers. One of Cronkite’s assistants flagged the Rowan report as discriminatory. Cronkite, embarrassed by the accusation, blanched as he read an irate letter from Mrs. Allie F. B. Stanford in Willingboro, New Jersey: “The CBS Evening News on this date [August 3, 1966] is not yet over as a matter of fact, not half of it is over and I am sick, sick, sick! I am so infuriated that I am even nauseated,” she wrote Cronkite. “The report by Steve Rowan from Andrews AFB, MD referred to the
Negro
wounded only four (4) days ago as ‘this man.’ When two others—whites—were interviewed with their names and hometowns on screen. ‘This man’ happens to have been coming from the
same place
, wounded for the
same purpose
and in the
same damn way
as the whites were!”

The
CBS Evening News
was being accused of treating blacks, specifically Vietnam servicemen, as distinctly second-class citizens. A concerned Dick Salant ordered an overview of all CBS News broadcasts to make sure they were being, as the 1980s phrase puts it, “politically correct.” Mrs. Stanford had scored a policy change. (While Cronkite supported the major equal rights movements of the day—for women, gays, Native Americans, Hispanics, et al.—the idea of political correctness seemed to him a kind of language-police fascism.) CBS correspondent Ed Bradley, first hired to WCBS Radio in 1967, believed that Cronkite and Rudd were the “least bigoted guys in media.” And it wasn’t just because Cronkite aired broadcasts helpful to the NAACP, SNCC, and CORE. Or that he was an early promoter of Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a national holiday. “Black people can detect prejudice in a person,” Bradley explained. “We’ve got radar. When I ate lunch with Walter and Rudd, which wasn’t often enough, they didn’t think of me as a black correspondent. I was their friend and colleague, Ed. It was that simple.”

Anytime Cronkite did a pro–civil rights segment in the 1960s or 1970s, the CBS switchboard would light up with angry callers. Cronkite’s chief manager was a tough Brooklyn Jewish woman named Hinda Glasser. “You didn’t want to mess with Hinda,” CBS writer Ron Bonn recalled. “She’d peel off a couple layers of your skin if she got mad at you.” But when she took anti-black calls from the Deep South, a different Glasser emerged. “The content of the calls, invariably, was ‘nigger,’ ‘nigger,’ ‘nigger,’ with a couple of ‘kikes’ thrown in for good measure,” Bonn explained. “And Hinda, all sweetness, would tell the caller, ‘I’m sure Mr. Cronkite would like to hear your opinion in person; do you mind if I put you on hold until he can come to the phone?’ Well, no, the caller never minded.” The Bell System office phones had five buttons for different lines. From 7:00 to 7:30 p.m., Bonn, Socolow, Benjamin, and others would sit in the fishbowl watching the buttons from all those angry racist callers blinking, as they waited for their chance to tell Walter Cronkite off. “When we left to go home at 7:30,” Bonn later laughed, “most of those lights were still flashing.”

By 1965, Cronkite’s favorite beat, space, was satisfying in all the ways that other stories of the day, such as Vietnam and civil rights, were confusing. The Gemini program, the follow-up to Mercury, marked the return of manned space flight after Alan Shepard’s historic suborbital flight in 1961 and Glenn’s orbits in 1962. Gemini would test a wide variety of technological feats in anticipation of the first moon shot. The program began with unmanned flights in April 1964 and January 1965, hitting full stride in March 1965 when Gus Grissom and John Young went up in
Gemini 3
; there were four others that year. Five Gemini launches went ahead in 1966. Each shot was different from the one before, presenting its own engineering marvels and risks. Gemini had four primary and newsworthy goals that served as stepping-stones to the Moon: subjecting two men to a long-duration flight, working out the rendezvous and docking (linkup) technique, practicing “space walks,” and perfecting reentry from orbit and landing at predicted target areas.

Cronkite would be at Cape Kennedy for all the Gemini flights. This was not just news, it was history presented on a schedule so a CBS news crew could be camera-ready for liftoff. It was possible to prepare for Gemini missions. In the 1950s, when Cronkite had been the host of
You Are There
, he pretended to be a newsman on the scene at the high points of history. Now, in 1965, he was on a historic scene, this time a real one, as the rockets blasted off from Florida. With each liftoff, another chapter in space exploration began. Fuel sources, new docking, navigation, and propulsion systems were all initiated and mastered, as was long-term “station-keeping.” The most exciting flight was that of
Gemini 4
. On June 3, 1965, Edward White became the first American to walk in space, leaving the confines of the space capsule for a twenty-one-minute walk in the infinite void. (The first person to walk in space was a Russian cosmonaut, Alexey Arkhipovich Leonov, on March 18 of that year.) “Jules Bergman of ABC and Walter Cronkite of CBS were the iron men of the day in television,” Jack Gould of
The New York Times
wrote, “carrying the burden of running the report practically by themselves.”

Critics praised Cronkite’s relaxed cadence during the Gemini missions. He didn’t saturate the air with extraneous babble. He spoke only when his voice added to the outer space imagery. As he had learned in convention coverage since 1952, it wasn’t necessary to underscore what the viewer was seeing. The governing atmosphere during blastoffs on CBS was mostly prolonged silence. Then the stolid Cronkite would calmly pick up the storyline of the nerve-racking event. “One minute into the flight; she seems to be going well—very well,” he emphasized quietly on June 3. At times, he might have been providing hushed commentary on a golf match. “There’s the contrail that sets in at a given altitude. . . . It’s approaching Max-Q—that’s maximum dynamic pressure. Coming right now. Going through it right now. . . . Seems to be safely through.” Cronkite relaxed noticeably with that observation and brightened, though his tone was still muted. “Safely through the first dangerous point after liftoff and it looks like this baby’s going . . .”

Always exposing a vein of optimism, he was television’s best physics explainer, with an amateur’s grasp of the concepts and the terminology combined with a perfect understanding of the science deficit of the Tube-watching public. He knew when to be vague—“There’s the contrail that sets in at a given altitude”—so as not to dizzy the viewer with statistics or unnecessary detail. Viewers could see the muscles relax on Cronkite’s face when all the protocol necessary for a successful launch proceeded without a hitch. Before the first Gemini launch of 1965,
The Chicago Daily News
asked Cronkite how he prepared. “I don’t attempt to commit anything to memory, but somehow it gets there,” he said. “I learn by doing; I don’t learn by reading. I’ve been to the basic sources and tried to talk to people involved in the project. I’ve been to McDonnell Aircraft in St. Louis, where the capsule was made; to Houston, where the astronauts live; to the Martin Company near Baltimore, where the booster was built; to the Goddard Space Center. And I’ve been at Cape Kennedy for this week—talking, taking notes, reading. Then I sit down and write page after page of notes for my background material, organizing it chronologically—pre-launch, launch, orbit, etc. And then what happens is that after I’ve done all that, it’s all there in my mind. I haven’t consciously attempted to memorize anything. In fact, I have a lousy memory and a week later I can’t even remember the names of the astronauts. But I cram it in for the assignment, use it. After the job, it all flees.”

Cronkite thought that NBC News’ Huntley, Brinkley, and McGee were too dry when they bantered about space exploration. They were afraid of the gee-whiz factor (that is, they refused to say something like “Go, baby, go!” when a manned rocket was rising above the Cape).
The Huntley-Brinkley Report
team, in turn, thought Cronkite was pandering when he called rockets “baby”—like a patron encouraging a stripper at some Tenderloin District burlesque house. From a distance, the two networks might have seemed to be delivering much the same news in almost the same way. Up close, though, within the sausage factory of TV news, minor differences were meaningful. Just as Murrow owned the McCarthy era, Cronkite was the space age interpreter—nobody came in even a close second. In reality, he had more power than Murrow could have dreamed of, for in 1950, only 9 percent of U.S. homes had TVs. By 1970, that number was 96 percent. On TV he had defeated ABC’s Jules Bergman and NBC’s Frank McGee and Roy Neal for the heavyweight title of “Dean of Space.”

On April 29, 1965, Murrow lost his battle with lung cancer. Cronkite devoted much of that evening’s broadcast to recalling Murrow’s spirit of inquiry, repeating a large segment of the
See It Now
program of March 1954, which dealt with Senator Joseph McCarthy. Dr. Stanton lamented that “the first golden age of broadcast journalism” was now over. Eric Sevareid provided heartfelt commentary on the
CBS Evening News
, calling his mentor “incandescent.” There is no record or remembrance of how Cronkite felt. “He just didn’t say a word about the death,” Socolow recalled. “It was like it didn’t happen.”

Perhaps because of his feud with Murrow, Cronkite seemed to lean on other CBS reporters to frame their mentor’s life on air. But Cronkite himself choked up when at the end of that
CBS Evening News
broadcast, he ran a clip of Murrow signing off: “Good night—and good luck.” Four days later, Cronkite and Charles Collingwood cohosted a special-events broadcast, “An Hour with Ed Murrow.”

Cronkite, who attended Murrow’s funeral in Manhattan, understood that by doing documentaries such as “Harvest of Shame,” Murrow had alienated segments of the viewing public. Likewise, civil rights and Vietnam were polarizing topics. But almost everybody was cheering on the Gemini astronauts. Year in and year out, the NASA program dictated Cronkite’s schedule. He never missed a launch—for the sake of illness, vacation, or another assignment—during his entire career. “We all knew Walter owned Gemini,” Roger Mudd recalled, “It was his turf.”