Cronkite (60 page)

The most controversial transcript Colson read was Cronkite’s CBS Radio News broadcast in December 1969 that criticized the U.S. government for the 1968 My Lai tragedy, in which hundreds of South Vietnamese civilians were brutally murdered by U.S. Army soldiers belonging to Charlie Company, Eleventh Brigade, Americal Division. Cronkite editorialized aloud why more Americans weren’t livid with the U.S. Army for trying to cover up the massacre. Discontented with the narrow confines of the
CBS Evening News
, Cronkite sowed his wild oats, as Friendly had suggested back in 1966, on his radio broadcasts. It was sort of the five-minute broadcast version of I. F. Stone’s newsletter. Sensing that the
CBS Evening News
wasn’t the place to praise reporter Seymour M. Hersh for breaking the news of My Lai, Cronkite could nevertheless lend support for his impeccable research on his radio soapbox.

Decades later, Cronkite admitted that Colson wasn’t wrong to interpret his CBS radio commentary as profoundly antiwar analysis. “I was certainly always amazed by what I got by with on the radio and why it never caught up with me,” Cronkite reflected, “because I lashed out on the radio.” Not only was Cronkite liberal on his radio show, but he also attacked the Nixon administration with some regularity for abandoning the poor, race-baiting, and violating the U.S. Constitution—not lighthearted stuff. “I thought that some day the roof was going to fall in,” Cronkite laughed years later. “Somebody was going to write a big piece in the newspaper or something. I don’t know why to this day I got away with it! We just got deeper and deeper and went further and further testing the waters and I never got called on it.”

The horror of Nixon’s continuation of the Vietnam War obliged Cronkite to become a left-leaning CBS Radio editorializer, which raises the question: how
did
he get away with such over-the-top commentary full of pro-Democratic partisanship? The “fun part of it,” Cronkite maintained, was taunting Nixon and Colson to come after him. They tried. But after reading a batch of Cronkite’s radio broadcasts, it became obvious to Colson that the anchorman used generic qualifiers to protect himself from slander. Lines like “people feel that” or “it is believed by some people” were routinely used by Cronkite to provide plausible deniability.

The war between the White House and CBS News had deteriorated into litigation. CBS News reporter Daniel Schorr accused Pat Buchanan’s brother, Henry, of laundering money on behalf of the Nixon administration. That was no small story. In May 1973, Cronkite ran this as the lead story on the
Evening News
. Henry Buchanan brought a libel suit against Cronkite. Following the money was complicated; there was never sufficient evidence against Buchanan to prove his guilt. CBS News assembled a hotshot legal team to flog the Buchanans in court and clung to
The
New York Times Co. v. Sullivan
case (in which the Supreme Court held that libel or defamation could be proved only if a publisher had prior knowledge that printed information was false or otherwise acted with a reckless disregard for the truth) as its defense. Henry Buchanan was a de facto public figure, and therefore malice had to be proved for Cronkite and Schorr to be guilty of libel. The whole lawsuit ended in a stalemate. “The Cronkite-Schorr charge against my brother was false,” a still-irate Pat Buchanan maintained over forty years after the case had disappeared. “History proves it was false.”

In February 1970, the White House, newly incensed by a perceived slight by David Brinkley on TV in regard to the defense budget, returned to its original plan of maligning the Big Three. “Concentrate on NBC,” White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman ordered Jeb Magruder, working under the umbrella of Nixon, “and give some real thought as to how to handle the problem that they have created in their almost totally negative approach to everything the Administration does.” It appeared Nixon was gaining the upper hand, but not on Cronkite. Many journalists were timid about not ruffling White House feathers. They didn’t want to get slimed by Agnew.
The New Yorker
printed a rare, five-page editorial denouncing the new journalistic environment. “In hundreds of tiny ways,” the esteemed magazine charged, “news coverage now seems to reflect an eagerness to please the people in power.” In March 1970, Cronkite agreed in an on-air interview with
The New Yorker
’s premise. “I feel that perhaps subconsciously,” he said, “things are happening, but I’m trying to rise above it. But I think the industry as a whole is intimidated. Yes, I think that was the intention and I think it worked.”

Six months previously, the
CBS Evening News
had broadcast footage of a South Vietnamese soldier stabbing an unarmed Vietcong prisoner to death in the hamlet of Bau Me. It was powerful stuff, showing the soldier knifing the prisoner in the side, laboriously pulling the blade out and then stabbing the prisoner’s stomach. Cronkite had made a real commitment to the story. In spring 1970 a sudden spate of newspaper columns charged that the incident was staged and that fakery was a common practice on the network news shows. Cronkite considered this “an undercover campaign to discredit CBS News.” He suspected the Nixon administration was trying to build support for its latest commitment to the South Vietnamese army and had fed themes and half-truths to columnists. White House director of communications Herb Klein, a former reporter for
The
San Diego Union-Tribune
, was the troublemaking culprit for CBS News.

Under Cronkite’s marching orders, CBS News reinvestigated the Bau Me footage and located the South Vietnamese soldier who had killed the prisoner. The soldier admitted to knifing the Vietcong guerrilla but claimed it was an act of self-defense, as the man was reaching for a gun lying nearby. The CBS News film showed that another prisoner had been reaching for the weapon. The
Evening News
reran the original story. Afterward, Cronkite did not try to disguise his attitude. “We broadcast the original story,” he said starkly, “in the belief it told something about the nature of the war in Vietnam. What has happened since then tells something about the Government and its relations with news media which carry stories the Government finds disagreeable.”

In late 1970, CBS president Frank Stanton received a letter from Senator J. William Fulbright (D-Ark.), who informed him that the Pentagon itself was guilty of the very artifice the White House had accused CBS News of: “fraudulent press practices.” Fulbright described incidents staged by the Department of Defense to provide film supporting its war policies. Determined to embarrass Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, Fulbright detailed his charges in his 1970 book
The Pentagon Propaganda Machine
. CBS News subsequently produced a
CBS Reports
documentary, titled “The Selling of the Pentagon,” about the Defense Department’s propaganda activities. Its investigation exposed how the Pentagon wasted huge sums of taxpayer money to promote what President Eisenhower had called the military-industrial complex. CBS News had acquired from DoD’s public affairs office all the anti-communist propaganda films made by the department in the cold war.

One segment included a clip from a U.S. military film espousing a Red Scare ethos that smacked of McCarthyism (or so it seemed to the 1970s youth). Called
The Eagle’s Talon
, the 1962 Pentagon propaganda film warned that “an aggressive Communist tide has spread in Europe and Asia to engulf its neighbors. Communist China even now has plans to dominate Asia by mass murder—destroying ancient civilizations.” The narrator for
The Eagle’s Talon
was none other than Walter Cronkite. His distinctive voice lent a measure of credibility to the harsh anti-communist opinions delivered in the DoD film. This uncomfortable fact was going to be highlighted in “The Selling of the Pentagon,” narrated by Roger Mudd and scheduled to air on February 23, 1971.

With the documentary a lock, someone had to inform Cronkite that this old footage was going to be aired . . . and that he looked and sounded like an idiot in
The Eagle’s Talon
. But no one jumped up to volunteer. The problem was discussed at some length, and finally Gordon Manning, vice president of the CBS news division, was assigned the task of telling Cronkite during a long overseas trip the two were taking. But somehow, Manning never found the right time to bring it up.

Dick Salant, CBS News president, then stepped up. He screened the
CBS Reports
documentary with Cronkite and Peter Davis, its producer. “Fine job,” Cronkite said to Davis afterward, as the lights were turned on. “All right,” Cronkite then said to Salant, in self-defense, “get that piece out of there.”

Recognizing the frangibility of CBS News’ position, Salant replied that
The
Eagle’s Talon
clip had to stay in. Cronkite, to put it mildly, wasn’t a happy camper. “It seemed to some,” recalled Bill Leonard, “Walter included, that we were going out of our way to inflict damage on ourselves in public if we included a clip from that film in ‘The Selling of the Pentagon.’ ” The reason Cronkite’s 1962 flacking for anti-communism couldn’t be excised, Salant maintained, was that the Nixon White House would come roaring back at them for hypocrisy. After all, the Pentagon had provided a print of
The Eagle’s Talon
to CBS in its shipment of propaganda films. The die was cast. “You can be sure,” Leonard wrote, “it would have been a part of the ammunition hurled at CBS if we had suppressed it.”

Cronkite’s narration, a patriotic gesture in 1962 when Kennedy’s New Frontiersmen were in charge, nine years later reeked of Nixonian anti-communist propaganda. Everybody knew that Cronkite was partial to NASA. But had he also been in the tank with McNamara? Was he a Kennedy patsy? The documentary left that unfortunate impression. Cronkite had lent his coveted voice to all sorts of documentary projects in the early 1960s. Every museum imaginable had asked him to narrate multimedia exhibits. Residual fallout from “The Selling of the Pentagon,” it seemed, was the price he paid for those lucrative Kennedy-era commissions. How Cronkite wished in 1971 that he could be edited out of the embarrassing documentary. “I felt that I was being singled out,” Cronkite complained. “In fact, a lot of people had done those films. It was a popular thing to do in Washington. They made it appear as if I was the only one that did it, and I didn’t think that was fair.”

Cronkite held a long grudge against Mudd for agreeing to narrate “The Selling of the Pentagon.” Andy Rooney thought it cost Mudd the
CBS Evening News
anchor chair when Cronkite retired. It was all beyond embarrassing to Cronkite. There he was, a civilian broadcaster, dressed in the full uniform of a U.S. Marine colonel, narrating gobbledy-gook about the “Red Threat.” Not that he was averse to the documentary’s central message: that responsible citizens should consider what the government tells them and, if warranted, take the trouble to question it. On a
CBS
Evening News
broadcast, Cronkite delivered one of the shortest editorial commentaries on record, no doubt spontaneously. Jack Gould mockingly described it in
The
New York Times
. “Walter Cronkite,” he wrote, “one of the anchormen most careful in keeping himself out of the news personally, on Tuesday night reported the involved, convoluted language used by the military to explain American air strikes in Indochina. ‘Oh,’ Cronkite said, after a pregnant pause.” One word shorter than his “Oh, boy” outburst when Armstrong walked on the Moon.

In a public lecture, Cronkite spoke of the widening of the Vietnam War into Laos to illustrate why TV news was an essential part of democracy. CBS News had reported on illegal U.S. military engagement in Laos. The Nixon administration, hoping these true accounts would fizzle out, denied them. Conservatives claimed that the
CBS Evening News
had fabricated the Laos story to embarrass the president, an accusation that left Cronkite incredulous. “There are a couple of hundred correspondents in Vietnam who have reported it,” Cronkite said in a speech to the Economic Club of Detroit. “Now does anybody seriously think they’re sitting in a back room in Vietnam somewhere . . . saying ‘Listen, let’s put Americans in Laos this week. That’ll be a whale of a story. Let’s do that.’ . . . Does anybody believe the press can sit there and dream that up? And yet people say, ‘Are we really in Laos? I mean because the administration hasn’t said we’re there.’ Well, I think we better start believing the press again.”

On five or six occasions, to soften his stock image as an Eastern establishment figure at odds with the Nixon administration, Cronkite opened his personal life to magazines and newspapers. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to spend time with Walter and Betsy. When cavorting with reporters, Cronkite preferred dining on loaded-up cheeseburgers at P.J. Clarke’s to discuss the circus aspects of American political life. His two favorite interview venues were his CBS News office or The Slate, a popular CBS News hangout on the West Side with low ceilings, sawdust on the wooden floors, and a homestyle menu. Best of all, Seymour Rand, the proprietor, allowed Cronkite to run up a huge tab. At times he’d even tell Cronkite that drinks were on the house—music to the tight-walleted anchorman’s ears.

Including Betsy in profiles, to prove that Cronkite was a family man, was the norm. But her quick wit didn’t always help his cause. Betsy’s barbs at First Lady Pat Nixon sometimes reappeared in the tabloids. One example: When a group of Republican women Betsy was with discussed Richard Nixon’s defeat by Pat Brown for the California governorship in November 1962, a sympathetic female friend cooed, “I felt sorry for Pat Nixon last night.” To which Betsy caustically responded, “I feel sorry for her every night.” Defending Betsy’s mouth, Cronkite called his wife’s comment “the definitive observation on Dick Nixon.”

The two—Walter and Betsy—saw a dull New York evening as a shared tragedy. The gregarious couple often took in shows at the Copacabana and dined at hotel restaurants such as the Café Carlyle and the Waldorf-Astoria. Elaine’s on Second Avenue became one of their favorite spots. They sometimes arranged for all three of their kids—or just one of them—to swing by the CBS News studio to watch Dad’s nightly broadcast live. If they made so much as a peep during taping, they would be quickly ushered away, barred from the studio for months as punishment. Some nights, the family would then go out to dinner at Gallagher’s Steak House or the 21 Club or Sardi’s post-broadcast. Broadway plays were also a great family night out, and after CBS bought 80 percent of the Yankees baseball team in 1964, Cronkite would take Chip on the subway to the stadium for the games.