Cronkite (55 page)

Cronkite was what the young generation called
square
. He was part of the
establishment
, a dirty word in the hippie universe. He was fifty-two and rich (two more reasons for suspicion)—a yachtsman, no less, who enjoyed summer sailing with the conservative William F. Buckley in the Atlantic. (Historian Garry Wills noted in
Outside Looking In
that Buckley “admired Cronkite’s mind,” actively seeking his counsel from time to time.) The generation gap wasn’t just a news story that Cronkite reported on; his family was its living embodiment. Yet his reaction to the protesters in Chicago, like his “Report from Vietnam,” showed just how fairness-driven the anchorman could be. As Chicago police savaged demonstrators, Cronkite was in a CBS broadcast booth at the International Amphitheatre, a good five miles away. When he first heard about the rioting, his information was incomplete, and he blamed the peace activists. “The anti-war demonstrators,” Cronkite reported, “have gotten particularly unruly and are even battling in the lobbies of the hotels with police, who sent for reinforcements.” Yet while the Yippies in Chicago, led by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, were undoubtedly there to cause a ruckus, the police response was downright criminal. Assault and battery became commonplace police procedures.

As Cronkite gazed down on the convention floor from his CBS anchor booth, he saw scuffling and fistfights as unidentified security men and uniformed police next turned on the delegates. The intimidation infuriated Cronkite. Credentialed Democrats who dared demonstrate against the war were removed from the hall—an action entirely against convention rules. Cronkite, as usual, refused to wear an IFB (interrupted feedback ear device), so he relied on producers Jeff Gralnick, Stanhope Gould, and Ron Bonn to keep handing him updates on the air.

On the convention floor, Mike Wallace was roughed up and hit in the face. Dan Rather took a hard blow to the stomach from security guards trying to keep him from interviewing a Georgia delegate who was himself being ejected. Both Wallace and Rather were trying to gather information on the removal of individual delegates. Cronkite saw the unprovoked attack on Rather, sucker-punched to the floor, as a national disgrace. “I think we’ve got a bunch of thugs here,” Cronkite told viewers with unmasked anger. Filled with fury, he suggested that the roughed-up reporters and cameramen leave the floor. More gently, he advised Rather to go and get medical help if he needed it. (Rather, having risen from the floor, said he’d be all right.)

Cronkite, like all the CBS leadership, considered the brutalizing of Rather inexcusable. Writing about the Rather incident in
Air Time: The Inside Story of CBS News
, Gary Paul Gates posited that it was the “only time in his long career that Cronkite displayed such undisguised wrath on the air.” Democratic Party leaders issued all sorts of apologies, but the film footage lived on. In one fell punch, Rather had become an icon of freedom of the press. Joining CBS in First Amendment complaints were top executives of
Time
,
Newsweek
, and five newspapers. “An investigation by the FBI is under way to ascertain whether this treatment of news personnel involved violation of federal law,” a joint protest letter to Mayor Daley read. Many conservative Democrats applauded Daley for organizing the security detail that manhandled Rather. The Chicago congressman Roman Pucinski, from the Polish-American Eleventh District, called CBS’s coddling of protesters “outrageous and unfair, the zenith of irresponsibility in American journalism.” Joining the anti-CBS chorus was Congressman Ed Edmondson of Oklahoma’s Second District. “Network media personnel such as Cronkite,” he said, “have done violence to the truth by their unfair coverage at Chicago, and the public deserves better at the hands of this great industry.”

Eventually, the Daley machine’s worst nightmare became a reality as CBS motorcycle couriers managed to evade police and deliver film of the battle outside the convention hall. “We put it on the air,” Cronkite proudly recalled. “Delegates watched, first in disbelief, then in rage.” The images shocked Cronkite, too, and his commentary from that point on no longer blamed the Yippies for the Chicago unrest. Anger was exploding in all directions. CBS’s coverage alternated between convention business—Hubert Humphrey’s grand moment on the national stage—and strong-arm tactics on both the convention floor and on the streets of downtown Chicago. This was Daley’s grotesque street show. As CBS broadcast the film across the country, the Democratic Party itself sustained a body blow. Because Humphrey didn’t respond strongly to the clashes all around him, the violence consumed his campaign from its start. He looked like a liberal weakling afraid to confront Mayor Daley. If he couldn’t control a Democratic mayor run amok, how could he possibly face up to bullies like Ho Chi Minh and Mao?

A hubristic Mayor Daley was outraged at CBS’s portrayal of Chicago as a fascist city. In a speech at the convention, Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut called Daley out by name and condemned the “Gestapo tactics” of the Chicago police. Daley loyalists stepped up to defend the mayor. Frank Sullivan, director of public information for the Chicago Police Department, held his own news conference after the convention ended. “The intellectuals of America,” he declared, “hate Richard J. Daley, because he was elected by the people—unlike Walter Cronkite.” Sullivan claimed Cronkite and CBS were among the mayor’s enemies in the media.

That August 29, just hours later, Daley gave Cronkite an exclusive interview for CBS. Every journalist wanted a chance to drill him down to a damaged bit. But because Eleanor Daley, the mayor’s wife, loved the
CBS Evening News
, Cronkite won the exclusive. Cronkite was certain he could outfox the mayor by asking him simple questions and giving him plenty of room to hang himself with his own words. But with millions watching, Cronkite botched the interview by being overingratiating. “I can tell you this, Mr. Daley,” Cronkite said, “that you have a lot of supporters around the country as well in Chicago.” Daley claimed he possessed secret reports that named him and three other leading Democrats on an assassination hit list. The strong measures taken by the police, he told Cronkite, had been necessary. “You could tell that Cronkite had decided to be very courteous to Daley,” recalled newsman Brit Hume, who had worked for UPI. “It wasn’t in him to climb all over Daley. He seemed embarrassed for having used the word
thugs
on air.”

Cronkite’s exclusive interview with Daley was beyond lame. It constituted the low-water mark of his journalism career. Everyone at CBS News knew that Cronkite thought Daley was behaving like a mobster that week. Full of civic pride, disdainful of supposedly unpatriotic, filthy hippies filling Chicago’s parks and streets, Daley had turned bully.

In Adam Cohen’s and Elizabeth Taylor’s biography of Daley,
American Pharaoh
, the authors criticize how Cronkite allowed the Chicago mayor to spin one untruth after another in the interview without properly challenging the assertions. Cronkite seemed intimidated by the mayor’s bluster and raw power. Daley had entered the CBS anchor booth as the bane of American TV viewers and almost miraculously emerged as a public service champion. On air, Daley claimed that certain reporters had been beaten by his Chicago police force because they were, in essence, plants for the antiwar movement. Cronkite merely nodded, seemingly in acquiescence. One CBS News executive, embarrassed by Cronkite’s kowtowing to Daley, said sadly when the interview was finished, “Daley took Cronkite like Grant took Richmond.”

Once retired from CBS, Cronkite made a lot of fanciful excuses for having allowed Daley to dominate him in the big interview. (The gist was that the mayor had startled him by walking straight onto his set without knocking.) Producer Stanhope Gould was there at the time and felt contempt for Cronkite for the one and only time in his life. “He just didn’t know how to interview Daley,” Gould complained. “Just let him off the hook.”

What Cronkite was trying to do in the interview was heal the rift between Daley and CBS by being conciliatory; it was the worst tactical approach imaginable. The tension between television news and politicians of both parties was probably inevitable. Mayor Daley had provided a particularly vivid example of the shift in dominance between the two. Film drove the transition. It made every TV viewer a potential witness to police brutality. Newsreels had existed before, but they weren’t distributed into millions of homes in real time, and they lacked the authority that came with a journalistic enterprise such as CBS. If a police superintendent in pretelevision days had stated, “The force used was the force needed to repel the mob,” as Chicago police superintendent James B. Conlisk Jr. did say after the Chicago unrest, citizens would never have known the truth. Some would have believed the reporters on the scene. But many more would have believed the superintendent. In 1968, by contrast, as CBS News president Richard Salant would write, “The pictures and sound of the Chicago police department in action speak for themselves.”

Film had the power to expose politicians and police betraying public trust. Martin Luther King Jr. had learned this early on, in his nonviolent effort to reach the nation, when motion pictures of Bull Connor’s men billy-clubbing well-behaved, churchgoing protesters in Birmingham, Alabama, came to light. President Johnson learned it, too, when film of children screaming in terror after U.S. bombing raids undermined both the troops and the very rationale for U.S. intervention in Vietnam. The power of truth itself belonged to cameramen as they chose their shots; it belonged to network news producers; and at CBS, it belonged to Cronkite in his role as managing editor. Viewers believed Cronkite in the 1960s for reasons of character but also because he had the truth-telling cameras on his side. In the Daley interview, it was Cronkite who came out as cowardly. When told that Gary Paul Gates in
Air Time
used the Daley bungle as Exhibit A of Cronkite’s inability to go after the jugular like Mike Wallace, Cronkite cried foul. “I think he missed the point by a wide margin,” he snarled. “My interview technique is not to have blood spurt from the open vein, but to have it drain slowly from the body until you see the white corpse sitting there.”

The Justice Department would soon go after the “Chicago Eight,” a tangentially connected cabal of antiwar activists charged with conspiring to cross state lines to incite violence at the Democratic National Convention: David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Lee Weiner, John Froines, and Bobby Seale. Yippie leader Hoffman and Cronkite actually became minor friends of a sort. Daring and a convivial genius at street theater, Hoffman made for good television. Not long after the Chicago convention, Hoffman, full of mischief, wrote Cronkite an unsolicited letter suggesting that he abandon horn-rimmed glasses in favor of contact lenses. Hoffman thought the glasses made Cronkite seem Goldwater-square when he really wasn’t. Cronkite accepted Hoffman’s suggestion. “I took your advice, you know,” Cronkite told him over the phone. The odd couple liked each other. (Or was Cronkite only flattering a valuable new source?) Whatever the reason, the charismatic Hoffman was an exception for Cronkite. In-your-face protests, Yippies, and LSD-high hippies generally left him cold.

Cronkite looked back on the decade of his ascendancy at CBS and called it “the terrible sixties.” The era was marked by more internecine anger than any other in the twentieth century. Daggers flashed everywhere. Tear gas and urban riots had become fairly commonplace. Assassinations were the recurring theme between 1963 and 1968—the Kennedys, King, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X. Something seriously bent showed within an American society rife with violence. Sickening and degrading news segments fouled the
Evening News
, with only Charles Kuralt offering an insular salute to the Norman Rockwell era, when sarsaparilla cost a nickel and we were fighting the “good wars” against totalitarianism.

Yet Cronkite kept looking for a way for CBS News to play a healing role. The opportunity presented itself with the Apollo program. Americans turned away from all the anarchy to unite with relief and pride behind the well-financed gambit of sending astronauts to the Moon. “This is something we’ve been aiming at for all of these years,” said Cronkite, still NASA’s biggest booster. “We’ve been building toward this. Only thing comparable to it was splitting the atom, but we couldn’t cover that. It was done in secret.”

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-
F
OUR

Mr. Moon Shot

NEW MOON RISING—WE ARE CHILDREN OF THE SPACE AGE—ONWARD IN THE FACE OF DEATH—DOWN PAT WITH THE NASA LINGO—THE CHRISTMAS MAGIC OF
APOLLO 8
—HIGH TIMES AT THE HOLIDAY INN—CBS’S SPACE GIZMOS—HIGHS WITH SCHIRRA AND CLARKE—OH BOY REDUX—ONE GIANT LEAP—DAY 1 IN THE YEAR 1—A RELIEF FROM EARTHLY NEWS—DRILLING NEIL ARMSTRONG—ONWARD WITH APOLLO
—
TOUCHING MOON DUST

W
hile other CBS newsmen staked claims on Castro’s Cuba (Sevareid) or Ho Chi Minh’s North Vietnam (Collingwood), Cronkite’s reportorial beat was central Florida. At Fat Boy’s, the Cocoa Beach barbeque joint, there were eight photos blown up large hanging behind the cash register—the Mercury Seven astronauts and the indomitable Walter Cronkite. Nowhere was Cronkite happier, not even on a sailboat circling Martha’s Vineyard on a golden summer day, than at Florida’s Space Coast.

With almost everybody else at CBS News seemingly consumed with the Humphrey-Nixon-Wallace presidential race in the late summer and early fall of 1968, Cronkite kept one intense eye fixed on the
Apollo 7
flight scheduled for October 7. “Walter had grown very sick of the 1968 election,” said the CBS News producer Jeff Gralnick. “All I remember was Walter going on and on about how having George Wallace on the CBS News was a waste of time. Cronkite was a Wally Schirra man. After the convention, I got the feeling that Walter just said, ‘A pox on all of their political houses’ and reintensified his commitment for CBS to cover space.”

Apollo 7
was a smashing success for both NASA and CBS News. Even though the astronauts suffered horrible colds and assorted technical problems, the men splashed down safely. While Cronkite dutifully broadcast Election Day 1968 for CBS News from New York—with Nixon winning 301 electoral votes to 191 for Humphrey and 46 for Wallace—his enthusiasm was still with Cape Kennedy, where NASA was gearing up for the
Apollo 8
mission, billed as the first human voyage to the Moon.

For Cronkite, the Christmas season of 1968 was the most memorable of his life. Based at the hundred-room Holiday Inn in Cocoa Beach, he was on hand for the
Apollo 8
liftoff on December 21. The astronauts—Frank Borman, James A. Lovell, and William A. Anders—orbited the Moon ten times beginning on Christmas Eve. This yuletide space endeavor, a crucial circumlunar precursor to the
Apollo 11
lunar landing, was the most-watched TV event in history at that time. It was hard not to feel the healing and unifying effects of
Apollo 8
, when images of Earth (the first ever taken by humans of the whole planet) were shown on Christmas and the astronauts read the opening verses of Genesis. When atheist activist Madalyn Murray O’Hair claimed the Apollo crew, as U.S. government employees, were constitutionally prohibited from promoting religion on the taxpayer dollar, Cronkite shot her down like a clay pigeon.

In a year when the assassins James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan received so much press attention,
Time
magazine inspiringly chose Borman, Lovell, and Anders as its “Men of the Year.” Cronkite applauded
Time
managing editor Henry Grunwald for his inspired choices. “We are the lucky generation,” Cronkite enthused. “Not only were our achievements in space important in restoring our self-respect, they enabled us as well to enter the history books.”

Every new capability NASA introduced on a mission was more exhilarating than the last. When
Apollo 9
launched in March 1969, a spacewalk was televised live for the first time ever. Cronkite was at Cape Kennedy for the historic moment. CBS News was now devoting more and more resources to the impending moon mission. Cronkite spent most of his waking hours that summer preparing for the
Apollo 11
liftoff with the intensity of an attorney rehearsing for trial. His NBFs (new best friends) were meteorologists and aeronautical engineers. “Never before had I seen Dad with such thick binders,” Chip Cronkite recalled. “We all knew he was studying like never before.”

Whenever Cronkite was on his NASA space beat, he rented a convertible from Jacksonville or Tampa Airport and headed down the central Florida coast. Sometimes he’d take boat rides down the Banana and Indian rivers for relaxation. “Walter would have on a Hawaiian shirt, drinking some fruity drink poolside,” author Norman Mailer recalled. “If you just arrived to Cape Canaveral, like I did from New York or Boston, feeling jet-lagged or perhaps hungover, the sight of the straitlaced CBS anchorman in full tan mode was jarring. But I admired his relaxed panache. . . . Walter was right. Why not take full advantage of the remote Florida lifestyle while the fools up East, the suits, even
I
, thought Houston or Cape Canaveral was hardship duty?”

There was a lot of speculation that NASA’s public relations office and CBS News were in cahoots to make a big show of
Apollo 11
. Though NASA had declined to let Cronkite join astronauts on a survival exercise in the Mojave Desert, he was essentially accorded carte blanche treatment by the powers at NASA; information embargoes were often lifted for him. Cronkite, NASA believed, was the ideal conduit to reassure U.S. taxpayers that $25 billion of their money was being spent nobly. “We were given absolute freedom to report the story, and a great flow of information from NASA,” Cronkite told
TV Guide
. “I would suggest that this freedom and the comparative reluctance of the Soviet Union to tell the facts until after the fact is an indication of the difference between an open and a closed society.”

Just how close NASA and CBS News were during the Apollo program period has never been properly analyzed by scholars. The paper trail linking the two organizations is quite thin. Gentlemen’s agreements, in the end, aren’t easy to footnote, but in a thirty-day period around the time of the
Apollo 11
mission, other startling events occurred (Chappaquiddick, the Manson murders, and the Woodstock music festival among them). At CBS, all else took a backseat to coverage of the moon shot. Don Hewitt, producing CBS News’
60 Minutes
, came closest to explaining the Tiffany Network’s collaboration in his memoir,
Tell Me a Story
. “Nobody ever said it because nobody had to say it,” he wrote. “But I always figured that there was an understanding between television and NASA—never spelled out, never even whispered, never even hinted at, but they knew and we knew. If we continued to help the space agency get its appropriations from Congress, they would in turn give us, free of charge, the most spectacular television shows anyone had ever seen.”

Cronkite understood that the
Apollo 11
mission would put American technology to the test in one tremendous, almost miraculous, public display. That a rocket—an invention made practical less than thirty years before—could go to the Moon had been demonstrated by two previous Apollo missions. Now the big moment was upon NASA.
Apollo 11
added several bold steps: a lunar module would detach from the mothership, navigate its way to the Moon’s surface, find a suitable landing spot, and later lift off and then rendezvous with the main ship. Each step and a hundred in between offered moments of gripping drama. But the most stunning possibility of all was that so much of the mission could be captured on video and sent back to Earth live. Cronkite credited John F. Kennedy for declaring in a May 25, 1961, speech to Congress that America would put a man on the Moon “before the decade is out.” To Cronkite, the fact that Kennedy insisted that the space program be conducted in the open was another testament to his greatness.

A space geek from Norfolk, Virginia, wrote Julian Scheer, NASA’s assistant administrator for public affairs, at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., about making Cronkite an honorary Apollo astronaut in the spring of 1969. “We do not have an official or unofficial ‘honorary astronaut’ title to bestow,” Scheer informed her. “But I can assure you that many of us in the program—including all the astronauts, I’m certain—consider Mr. Cronkite an honorary astronaut, officially or unofficially. He is a most knowledgeable reporter with experience in the space effort that dates back to the days when we were firing ‘big’ rockets, which now seem to be mere ‘firecrackers.’ ”

America was plagued with the Vietnam War quagmire, high inflation, campus upheavals, pollution, and race riots, but moon exploration lifted the national spirit in the summer of 1969. Three All-American
Apollo 11
astronauts—Neil Armstrong of Ohio, Buzz Aldrin of New Jersey, and Michael Collins of Oklahoma—were rewriting the Icarus myth and flying nearer the sun than anyone before them. Approximately one million people were in Cape Kennedy to witness the
Apollo 11
liftoff on July 16. Thousands of police officers tried to control the jam-up of cars and boats that kept arriving on Florida’s Space Coast.

There were hippies in VW bugs, retirees on Social Security looking for reduced fares, Pontiac station wagons crammed with antsy kids, and 4-H Club buses that had driven down from the upper Midwest—all participating in the Fourth of July–like festivities.
Reader’s Digest
had distributed an astonishing sixty-eight million American flag bumper stickers for the moon launch extravaganza, and they were everywhere to be seen on the cars in the parking lots around Cape Kennedy.

Apollo 11
was slated to blast off at 9:32 a.m. on July 16, its huge Saturn V rocket propelled by 7.6 million pounds of thrust. For three days and three nights it would travel through space toward the Moon. The lunar module
Eagle
would land on the Moon with Armstrong and Aldrin, who would spend little more than a day on its surface while Collins remained behind to man the spaceship
Columbia
. The Holy Grail moment would be on July 21, when Armstrong would start to climb down off the
Eagle
on a ladder (pulling a lanyard as he descended that activated a television camera) and then take his first steps on the Moon. Buzz Aldrin would join him in the next hour to collect rock and soil samples to bring back to Earth. After about twenty-one and a half hours on the Moon, the module would take off from the Sea of Tranquility to dock with
Columbia
. On July 24, the
Apollo 11
mission would end with the astronauts splashing down in the Pacific Ocean as citizens of the world cheered, having watched the feat on television and hearing it on the radio.

All three U.S. networks vied to produce the most informed blastoff-to-splashdown coverage. NBC slated readings by performers such as James Earl Jones and Julie Harris—they were to read poems about the Moon. ABC commissioned the jazz legend Duke Ellington to compose a new musical composition—titled “Moon Maiden”—inspired by the landing; he would also sing its lyrics while the astronauts made their lunar debut. CBS lined up Orson Welles to narrate science fiction material from London, including a remake of his own infamous 1938 radio drama,
War of the Worlds
, in a panoply of race-to-the-moon nostalgia. “Now the Moon has yielded, not merely to man’s imagination,” Welles said with his great voice of authority, “but to his actual presence.”

Dick Salant of CBS News spoke for all the network presidents, in a sense, when he said
Apollo 11
presented some of the most “formidable challenges” in electronic history. The network’s main asset was Cronkite, covering his twenty-first manned flight. CBS had arranged for models and simulations to demonstrate (in color) what was happening whenever NASA footage (which was black and white) was unavailable. Cronkite would need a lot of cutting-edge techniques to compete with NBC and ABC. And Paley, recognizing that this was history in the making, opened his pocketbook wide.

At the CBS News studio at Kennedy Space Center’s press site, the preproduction team was chased away on Wednesday, July 16, as the
Apollo 11
countdown to liftoff grew closer and closer. Only Cronkite (attached to his Smith-Corona, like the editor in
The Front Page
) and former Mercury astronaut Wally Schirra, producer Joan Richman, stage manager David Fox, and a few cameramen and technicians were allowed to remain in CBS’s tiny Cape Kennedy studio. “I don’t suppose,” Cronkite confided to Schirra, “we’ve been this nervous since back in the early days of
Mercury
.”

There was a debate at CBS News over which veteran astronaut to have as Cronkite’s color man for
Apollo 11
. If fame was the main criterion, then Alan Shepard or John Glenn was the obvious choice. But Cronkite had developed a special affinity for “Wally” Schirra since he had done a half-hour prime-time
Sigma 7
preview broadcast from Florida in September 1962. To get Salant to offer Schirra a handsome retainer for exclusivity, Cronkite spread the rumor that ABC was after him. That quickly seized Salant’s attention. The Cronkite-Schirra chemistry worked so well that the duo broadcast together from
Apollo 11
all the way to
Apollo 17
, and became known in CBS display ads as “Walter to Walter” coverage.

When Mission Control in Houston said on the morning of July 16, “We are still a go with
Apollo 11
. . . 30 seconds and counting,” the tension in the CBS booth was overwhelming. At liftoff, Cronkite was speechless. Those present worried that he was so transfixed by the rise that he’d forgotten he was on air. David Fox broke the ice by whispering to Cronkite, “There she goes! It’s beautiful,” and giving a thumbs-up. But the CBS anchorman stayed quiet a little longer. Cronkite knew, from experience, that no voice should ever interrupt a reverie.

The towering Saturn V was 111 meters (363 feet) tall, about the height of a thirty-six-story building and 18 meters (60 feet) taller than the Statue of Liberty. Fully fueled for liftoff, the Saturn V weighed the equivalent of four hundred elephants. Its five large engines produced 160 million horsepower and 7.6 million pounds of thrust, generating more power than eighty-five Hoover Dams. Once Cronkite realized that the rocket wasn’t going to explode, he snapped out of his trance. “Oh boy, oh boy, it looks good, Wally,” he said joyously. “Building shaking. We’re getting the buffeting we’ve become used to. What a moment! Man on the way to the Moon! Beautiful.”