Cronkite (56 page)

At summer camp in Vermont, Kathy Cronkite, like so many other schoolchildren, was monitoring the historic launch on CBS. “The principal let me go into his office to watch Dad,” she recalled. “It wasn’t a big deal seeing him, but the Moon was a big deal. We grew up with the space program in our family, and this was our payoff.”

Her sister, Nancy, only nineteen, was living in Hilo, Hawaii, with her husband. She opposed the space program. “I had deep reservations,” she said. “I was almost anti-NASA. We had no TV. I was living back to nature. I thought we were just now bringing our own junk, golf balls, lunar module, to pollute the Moon.”

At least one of the Cronkite kids, twelve-year-old Chip, was delirious about
Apollo 11
. His favorite childhood memories were of Cocoa Beach at Henri Landwirth’s motel talking space and collecting seashells. Along with his mother that day, Chip attended a viewing party in Connecticut with family friends. “My previous Apollo experience had been bone-rattling,” he said. “I had been at Cape Canaveral, and I felt it right down the spine. So I was really pumped up for Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins. What impressed me most was watching Dad broadcast at night. And when I woke up many hours later he was still on TV extemporizing. I was like wow . . . you go, Dad!”

Although Cronkite and Schirra were the only on-air talent in the CBS News studio at liftoff, they had a lot of technical help. Working in CBS’s central room, beneath the studio, was producer Robert J. Wussler. Ever since that fateful moment at Kennedy’s inaugural when Sig Mickelson assigned him to cover space, Wussler had been preparing for the history-making event. He usually stayed at CBS News in New York during space missions, but not for this seminal launch. Now, quite comically, this TV wunderkind pulled out his own little personal camera during liftoff to snap a few photos that wouldn’t belong to CBS. “I wanted to be able to say,” Wussler later recalled, “that these were the pictures I took on the day man left for the Moon.”

All the dignitaries around Cape Kennedy were hoping to be on CBS News with Cronkite. Vice President Spiro Agnew, for example, arrived in the CBS News booth to talk with Cronkite. When former president Lyndon Johnson arrived at the CBS studio Cronkite turned deferential. Just fifteen months earlier, he had damaged Johnson considerably with his Tet prime-time special. “I was—how to put this,” Cronkite’s producer Joan Richman recalled, “not a big Lyndon Johnson fan.” But LBJ seemed to hold no grudge against what he called “the Cronkites” at CBS. All present remembered just how warm Johnson was to Cronkite that afternoon. For a while it seemed that LBJ might replace Schirra as Cronkite’s new astrobuddy; they got along that well. While all Cronkite’s on-air friends spoke about
Apollo 11
, LBJ honed in on the Great Society. Cronkite nodded admiringly in agreement. “Our family never held a grudge against Walter for a second,” Lynda Johnson Robb, daughter of the president, explained. “Both Mother and Father admired him.”

Cronkite’s most imaginative guest was Arthur C. Clarke, author of the novel
2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968). The British-born science fiction popularizer augmented the Cronkite broadcast perfectly. Clarke had first auditioned to be Cronkite’s astrobuddy during
Apollo 10
in May 1969 and imagined the world of the twenty-first century. He comprehended the vastness of space. Unlike Aldous Huxley, who feared the “global village” in
Brave New World
, Clarke celebrated that all countries were tuned into the celestial spectacle. Cronkite had chosen Clarke over Isaac Asimov because he considered him something of a prophet. Back in 1956, in a letter to space law pioneer and expert Andrew G. Haley, Clarke had written with great prescience about what would become Telstar, GPS, and satellite TV. What Clarke envisioned was the world of a thousand-channel cable TV systems providing “global TV service” that would make possible a “position-finding grid” whereby “anyone on earth could locate himself by means of a couple of dials on an instrument about the size of a watch.”

The CBS Television network was in full swing for the
Apollo 11
mission, coast to coast and beyond. Cronkite could talk directly to stations in eight U.S. cities. A roving mobile unit drove all over Greater New York collecting the opinions of everyday people. Cronkite didn’t want to hear anything negative about NASA on his broadcast. Bill Plante, for example, clashed with him over CBS’s
Apollo 11
reaction coverage. Plante had been asked to conduct the man-on-the-street segment in New York City, and in Harlem and the Bronx he got a surprise: a lot of New York residents thought
Apollo 11
was a waste of money that would be better spent winning the war on poverty. There were many Nancy Cronkites in America who saw the Apollo program as a bad use of time and money for environmental reasons. “Walter had so bought into space,” Plante recalled, “that any criticism of the moon launch in 1969 was anathema to him. But he let it air.”

What differentiated Cronkite from Armstrong was the effusiveness with which he spoke about the Moon. To Armstrong—the Korean War fighter pilot of seventy-eight missions—the lunar walk was an assignment. Armstrong was repulsed by the efforts of journalists who insisted that fame could supercede true accomplishment. While Cronkite had to make
Apollo 11
seem romantic for television ratings, Armstrong demurred. When asked decades later in an interview whether he ever looked into space in the summer of 1969 and thought how beautiful the Moon was, a stony-faced Armstrong replied, “No, I never did that.”

Although Cronkite stayed his on-stage avuncular self, he didn’t respect critics of
Apollo 11
. Kurt Vonnegut, riding the wave of publicity generated by the recent publication of
Slaughterhouse-Five
, appeared on Cronkite’s
Apollo 11
broadcast full of scorn toward all things NASA, even calling the astronauts “short-haired, white athletes” infatuated with pressure cookers. Cronkite was “bitter” toward Vonnegut, a friend, for being so cruel to the bravest Americans he knew. When Norman Mailer belittled the
Apollo 11
astronauts in his book
Of a Fire on the Moon
, deriding them with bohemian bravado as “three young executives announcing their corporation’s newest subdivision,” Cronkite cut ties with him for five or six years.

Amused by Cronkite’s lunar devotion, Schirra decided to play a long-running “gotcha” gag on Cronkite when they were live and killing time during slow moments of the
Apollo 11
broadcast. “Walter,” Schirra said, “you are a world-class journalist. You were a wire-service writer, a war correspondent, and you are respected by us in the military. Now, what I want to know, Walter, is this. What are you going to say when a man first steps on the moon? What are the words you will utter at this historic moment?”

Cronkite was tongue-tied, giving Schirra a scolding look that was priceless. Cronkite hemmed and hawed. And then he just moved onto a different subject. “This was the first—and last, for that matter—time that I ever saw him flustered,” Schirra recalled. “I put it to him again shortly before lift-off. ‘Walter, have you any great words in mind?’ Cronkite can be terribly intense, and he’s very serious about his broadcasts. He’s not one for kidding around. But I had gotten hold of a bone, like a naughty puppy dog, and I wasn’t going to let go.”

Over the course of the coverage, Cronkite had on-air help from two hundred prerecorded film “bank pieces” he could draw upon (such as short biographies of the key scientists who had masterminded the mission). Also available to vary the mix: entertainment segments and remote feeds from a full-scale simulated lunar module. Cronkite, however, was the personality who held all the pieces and segments together. “Walter and his guests discussed the epochal events evolving a quarter of a million miles away,” CBS science advisor Richard C. Hoagland recalled, referring to Cronkite’s elevated chair as a “megalithic throne.” The voices of Mission Control could always be heard clearly, staccato advisories under or next to the comments of Cronkite, Schirra, and Clarke.

By Thursday, July 17, Cronkite had left Cape Kennedy to broadcast from Studio 41 at West Fifty-seventh Street in New York. His desk had been raised twenty-four feet above the studio floor. An artist had created a mock Milky Way as a background. Serving as bookends for Cronkite were two globes, each six feet in diameter: a Rand McNally model of the Moon and a Plexiglas conception of what Earth would look like from the astronauts’ perspective. A record-breaking sixteen CBS cameras were trained on Cronkite sitting at his anchor desk. Four additional “slave” cameras were locked on clocks offering countdown information for the various stages of the Apollo mission. To keep the coverage from feeling stilted, dolly cameras were used to seek out different angles.

Joel Banow—CBS News’ go-to director for its space coverage from Mercury to Skylab—got an idea from MGM’s adaptation of
2001: A Space Odyssey
: the talking computer, HAL. Much like UNIVAC back at the 1952 and 1956 political conventions, the hooky HAL was now hired to liven up the Cronkite broadcast by offering color commentary.

Frank Stanton knew that Cronkite was doing an inspired job as
Apollo 11
anchorman. All the key CBS reporters of the
Apollo 11
mission—Ike Pappas and Ed Rabel among them—were doing the best work of their careers. Cronkite was slated to be live for twenty-four and a half of the crucial thirty-one hours surrounding the moon landing. He had only one extended break, lasting six and a half hours. The UPI writer Dick West described what it was like to watch more than twenty-four hours of moon coverage—as millions of people did, all over the world. Halfway along, he wrote, he developed a condition “in which one’s eyeballs become uncoordinated as a result of peering too long at Walter Cronkite.” The sense of global togetherness was called Cronkititis. “His sustained presence and attractive self-confidence,” Jack Gould wrote glowingly in
The New York Times
, “were nothing short of remarkable.”

Through pooled TV coverage, the global audience on July 20 was glued to the Tube waiting for the
Eagle
to make its powered descent to the Moon’s surface. After boning up on NASA trivia before going on air, Cronkite started his live broadcast at 10:00 a.m. EST, offering a five-minute progress report on the
Apollo 11
mission right off the bat. At 11:00, after a religious program called
Nearer to Thee
, on which theologians and artists talked about God in space, Charles Kuralt did an ethereal piece to open what CBS News called “Man on the Moon: The Epic Journey of
Apollo 11
.” Using Genesis as his text
—
harking back to that poignant Christmas Eve of 1968—the virile-looking Kuralt spoke about the spiritual aspects of space travel, showing beautiful images of planet Earth taken by other NASA astronauts and satellites. Cronkite, combining ad-libbing and filler material, turned the nerve-racking journey of the
Eagle
to the Moon into high-suspense theater. The interplanetary drama began when Michael Collins, aboard
Apollo 11
, released the module
Eagle
carrying Armstrong and Aldrin to their destination.

Eagle
:
Roger, understand. Go for landing. 3000 feet. Second alarm.

Cronkite
:
3000 feet. Um-hmmm.

Eagle
:
Roger. 1201 alarm. We’re go. Hang tight. We’re go. 2000 feet. 2000 feet, into the AGS. 47 degrees.

Cronkite
:
These are space communications, simply for readout purposes.

Capcom
: Eagle looking great. You’re go.

Houston
:
Altitude 1600. 1400 feet. Still looking very good.

Cronkite
: They’ve got a good look at their site now. This is their time. They’re going to make a decision.

Eagle
:
35 degrees. 35 degrees. 750, coming down at 23. 700 feet, 21 down. 33 degrees.

Schirra
:
Oh, the data is coming in beautifully.

Eagle
:
600 feet, down at 19. 540 feet down at 30—down at 15 . . . 400 feet, down at 9 . . . 8 forward . . . 350 feet down at 4 . . . 300 feet, down 3½ . . . 47 forward . . . 1½ down . . . 70 . . . got the shadow out there . . . 50, down at 2½, 19 forward . . . altitude-velocity lights . . . 3½ down . . . 220 feet . . . 13 forward . . . 11 forward, coming down nicely . . . 200 feet, 4½ down . . . 5½ down . . . 160, 6½ down . . . 5½ down, 9 forward . . . 5 percent . . . quantity light 75 feet. Things still looking good, down a half . . . 6 forward . . . lights on . . . down 2½ . . . forward . . . 40 feet, down 2½, kicking up some dust . . . 30 feet, 2½ down . . . faint shadow . . . 4 forward . . . 4 forward, drifting to the right a little . . . 6 . . . drifting right . . .

Cronkite
:
Boy, what a day.

Capcom
:
30 seconds.

Eagle
: Contact light. O.K. engine stopped . . . descent engine command override off . . .

Schirra
:
We’re home!

Cronkite
: Man on the moon!

Eagle
:
Houston, Tranquility Base here. The
Eagle
has landed!

Capcom
: Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You’ve got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.

Tranquility
:
Thank you.

Cronkite
:
Oh, boy!

Capcom
: You’re looking good here.

Cronkite
:
Whew! Boy!

Schirra
: I’ve been saying them all under my breath. That is really something. I’d love to be aboard.

Cronkite
: I know. We’ve been wondering what Neil Armstrong and Aldrin would say when they set foot on the moon, which comes a little bit later now. Just to hear them do it. Absolutely with dry mouths.