Cronkite (62 page)

Media critics said Cronkite was too gentle interrogating Ellsberg. Pro-war Americans said far worse. The very fact that Cronkite had the temerity to treat Ellsberg as anything more than a traitor irritated thousands of viewers. They didn’t give a damn what the treasonous weasel Ellsberg said; the thief should be shot. According to the
National Review
, the Ellsberg interview was part of a liberal plot to undermine the Nixon administration. “It is the anti-Nixon CBS-Establishmentarian Walter Cronkite who got the interview,” it editorialized. Criticism from the GOP mounted. “The Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc., led by Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid, have almost destroyed this great country,” wrote the Kingsport, Tennessee, mayor. “Never have I seen men so dedicated to demoralizing and tearing their country apart. This is due to blind hatred or prejudice of the President and Vice President and seemingly sanctioned by president Frank Stanton of CBS.”

While Cronkite was beloved for his
Apollo 11
commentary, his cozy interview with Ellsberg infuriated many conservatives throughout the Midwest, the South, and the West. Owners of CBS affiliates threw conniptions. The hate mail that Black Rock received multiplied and became more vicious. In June 1971,
TV Guide
journalist Edith Efron, an Ayn Rand acolyte, published a book titled
The News Twisters
. Underwritten by the little-known Historical Research Foundation (which gave grants to authors with conservative themes),
The News Twisters
followed Nixon White House henchman Jeb Magruder’s strategy to “arrange for an exposé” to be written by pro-Nixon scribes Earl Mazo or Victor Lasky. Published simultaneously in hardcover and paperback,
The News Twisters
became a bestseller, with a blurb from the president himself. Once on the
New York Times
bestseller list, Magruder believed, the book would find its own readership.

The News Twisters
begins by excoriating Cronkite. Based on Efron’s study of the three network evening news programs over a seven-week span in the fall of 1968, the book concluded that 31 percent of the material presented on the
CBS Evening News
was opinion. Efron found that NBC was slanted 18 percent of the time, and ABC, because it devoted more time to designated commentators, 48 percent. CBS countered
The
News Twisters
by commissioning a study from a nominally independent organization (headed by former CBS director Ed Bliss Jr.) at American University. It examined the
Evening News
over the same span and found, not surprisingly, that the program was entirely objective. Cronkite, in other words, was given a clean bill of health when the study was released in 1974.

After the first round of confrontation over Ellsberg, the Nixon administration decided that CBS News, not NBC News, was the bigger threat. The White House now targeted Cronkite. The anchorman had gotten under Nixon’s skin. In his Watergate memoir,
Witness to Power
, White House counsel for domestic affairs John Ehrlichman wrote of how the president was now obsessed with Cronkite. “I have watched Nixon spend a morning designing Walter Cronkite’s lead story for that evening,” he recalled, “then send it to Ron Ziegler, Kissinger or me, to send out to a press briefing to deliver it in such a way that Walter Cronkite simply could not ignore it.”

Magruder and Colson were flummoxed over how best to take the avuncular Cronkite down a notch. On September 30, 1971, Cronkite testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, which, under Senator Sam J. Ervin Jr. (D-N.C.), was very supportive of the press. With unblinking directness, Cronkite lambasted the Nixon administration for curtailing First Amendment rights “by fiat, by assumption, and by intimidation and harassment.” CBS News continued to hold its substantial lead over NBC News in the Nielsen ratings for evening news. Cronkite was quoted as saying “ratings didn’t matter,” but his attitude was different in the newsroom, where he could be heard to mutter darkly—or yell—when another network gained a point.

After Chet Huntley retired in 1970,
The
Huntley-Brinkley Report
(renamed the
NBC Nightly News
) faltered. Still Cronkite’s major competitor, the NBC news program had difficulty finding the right anchor replacement before eventually settling on John Chancellor, a former
Today
host and correspondent for
The
Huntley-Brinkley Report
. Cronkite considered Chancellor, a fellow college dropout with whom he served as co-inquisitor for the fourth Kennedy-Nixon debate, merely a safe bet for NBC News, not a potential usurper of his ratings supremacy. On December 10, 1971, a confident Dick Salant, just in time for Christmas, promoted everyone at CBS News in a single memo: Bill Leonard and Gordon Manning (senior vice presidents), Sandy Socolow and Bill Small (vice presidents), Russ Bensley (executive producer of the
Evening News
), and John Lane and Ed Fouhy (producers for Cronkite). Instead of having CBS News on the run, the Nixon administration had pressboys ascending en masse up the ladder of success.

By January 1972, the Nixon White House seemed less interested in destroying Cronkite than in having his swarm of disciples at CBS News cool their jets. It was an election year, and Nixon understandably wanted less antagonism with the fourth estate. If a scorched-earth war with CBS News, or any other journalism organization, became a central campaign issue, he might be doomed in November. Better the press should focus on the president’s surprise trip to the People’s Republic of China. But on February 13, President Nixon had an Oval Office meeting with Charles Colson, his valet Manolo Sanchez, and scheduler Stephen B. Bull about how to keep CBS News from further attacking the administration’s Southeast Asia policies. A recent
CBS Evening News
broadcast—echoing Cronkite’s testimony before the Senate Subcommittee—had questioned the ethics of the White House’s attempts to try to control the media.

Nixon
: Cronkite is one of the worst offenders.

Colson
: Oh that Cronkite interview, Mr. President . . . I sent you the transcript of that report before it got on the news. It will be somewhere in your reading material. It is the most incredible transcript I have ever read in my life. I mean, he describes the evil influence of this administration and he talks about how we’re intimidating advertisers and how we’re trying to get advertisers not to advertise with CBS.

Nixon
: I saw that. Jesus . . .

Colson
: Talk about saying “ghosts under the bed.”

Nixon
: Have we ever influenced CBS?

Colson
: No. But, see that’s just creating a complete red herring and that shows you how dishonest the man is. He is basically a dishonest person.

Cronkite knew that Nixon was a brilliant political strategist. He thought the president’s decision to visit China in the spring of 1972 was a stroke of genius. But Cronkite also feared that Nixon had something pathologically wrong with him. As the White House organized its China trip, the role of TV news was preeminent for Nixon, who didn’t want print reporters with a true understanding of Chinese politics accompanying him. What he needed was to have Cronkite, Chancellor, and Reasoner singing his praises on TV. At all costs, Nixon believed, reporters needed to refrain from discussing the sharp cold war differences between China and the United States. As Nixon was preparing to break bread with Mao Tse Tung, he didn’t need Robert Elegant of
Newsweek
, a China hand, writing magazine cover stories about how the Chairman was responsible for killing sixty or seventy million of his own people.

White House spokesman Ron Ziegler announced that eighty-seven newsmen would accompany President Nixon on his trip to China. Cronkite topped the list, which included twenty-one newspaper writers, six news agency reporters, three columnists, and six magazine correspondents. All journalists gossiped about was the protocol of the White House selection process. When Nixon saw Stanley Karnow of
The
Washington Post
on the Ziegler list, he penciled a line through his name, with the added notation “absolutely not.” Speculation mounted over Nixon’s rationale for choosing reporters. Why did William F. Buckley get a billet when his magazine,
National Review
, had criticized Nixon’s China overtures? Who had decided that Joseph Kraft of
The New York Times
, whose telephone had been tapped by the government, was the best liberal columnist to meet Zhou Enlai? The Nixon trip became the inverse of the Enemies List. Which journalists did Nixon (in the parlance of the times)
dig
?

The Nixon administration allowed CBS News to send its A-team reporters to China: Cronkite, Sevareid, Rather, and Bernard Kalb. To prepare for the winter trip, Cronkite shopped at Macy’s for a parka, thick socks, and thermal underwear. “I understand it gets bitter cold when the winds whistle down from the China steppes,” Cronkite said in early February, justifying his Macy’s shopping spree. “I’ve already bought myself an imitation fur hat with flaps to keep my ears warm.” In his memoir
White House Years
, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger offered a hilarious anecdote about sightseeing amid elegant birch trees by a beautiful still lake near Hangchow, a provincial capital in eastern China. “All was tranquility and repose,” Kissinger wrote. “Suddenly, into the picture swaggered Walter Cronkite. He was a little worse for the wear, dressed in heavy furs more appropriate for a polar expedition and weighted down by a spectacular assortment of photographic gear around his neck. Fond as I am of Walter, the scene lost some of its serenity.”

In preparation for China, Cronkite had his physician inject him with gamma globulin to boost his immune system and inoculate him against cholera, diphtheria, polio, and influenza. He telephoned the CBS cameramen who were going—Skip Brown, Izzy Bleckman, and Jime Kartes—to make sure they also got shots. Cronkite boarded the red-eye to China from Honolulu with the rest of the lucky reporters. A paranoid Nixon was worried that one of the news-gathering jackasses would queer the trip; it didn’t happen. As President Nixon stepped off Air Force One on that cold morning in Beijing to shake hands with the Chinese prime minister, Zhou Enlai, Cronkite swelled with pride. History was being made. But China clearly wasn’t paradise. In the coming days, he would assess China’s industrialization to be on par with Stalin’s Russia in the late 1940s.

An obliging Cronkite wanted to play by the rules established by the Nixon administration in China. It was a matter of living up to his word. “It was very much like landing on the moon,” he recalled. “Westerners hadn’t been there for years. We were a source of wonderment for the Chinese.” Dan Rather, in contrast, ready to break with stricture, was eager to interview the everyday people of Beijing. He was being too much the renegade for Cronkite’s taste. Some CBSers trace the beginning of Cronkite’s disapproval of his then forty-one-year-old protégé to Rather’s aggressive grandstanding in Beijing and Shanghai. China, Cronkite believed, wasn’t the place to tick off the Nixon crowd. Nevertheless, Rather did the best stories of any TV journalist in China, stories in a class of their own.

Cronkite’s job in China as anchorman was to set the scenes of Nixon’s historic trip. The White House froze out all reporters—Cronkite included—from the more serious diplomatic meetings. Much of Cronkite’s time was spent with Stanhope Gould, ensuring his broadcast script was constantly fresh and accurate. CBS’s makeshift base of operations was the Minzu Hotel, near Tiananmen Square, and after morning meetings, the CBS correspondents fanned out to report from the square, the Forbidden City, or the Great Wall. Bernard Kalb’s expertise on China was extraordinary, and Cronkite made great use of it. Whenever Cronkite had a free moment, he spent time with his literary friends James Michener and William F. Buckley. Weighed down with cameras, enjoying each other’s company, they goofed around like tourists looking for a giant panda. A competition occurred to tell the worst Barbara Walters stories known to mankind.

The February weather was bitter, snow sometimes swirling about, and Cronkite caught a cold. Guzzling codeine-infused cough syrup, he regularly hit up Bleckman for batteries to keep his socks heated. After wandering along the Great Wall, taking notes in a daybook, Cronkite joked that the greatness of the 2,300-year-old ruin was self-evident: few structures could sustain such a barrage of shutter-happy, historically ignorant Western photographers. Although Cronkite had boned up on Communist China in advance of the trip, he was nevertheless surprised to see what a deity Mao Tse Tung had become, his face plastered on billboards around every bend. “Cronkite spent a lot of free time with Sevareid,” CBS cameraman Izzy Bleckman recalled. “That was unusual, but they went together to see the Forbidden City.”

CBS News coverage of the trip was solid. But Cronkite knew that Nixon had turned the entire China trip into a staged guided tour cum cocktail hour for the press. By keeping such ironclad control of the schedule, the White House got what it wanted: TV reporters doing soft-news segments on how to use chopsticks, the beauty of Mao jackets, and why bicycling was healthy exercise. Ironically, it had been Cronkite’s night in San Francisco, before he flew to Hawaii, that grabbed tabloid attention. Away from Betsy’s watchful eye, he had cut loose like a sailor on leave. The rumor mill claimed that he had gone out with a floozy he’d found at a Geary Street strip club. Columnist Herb Caen of the
San Francisco Chronicle
saw Cronkite’s partying and wrote a comical dispatch on February 17, 1972. The news raised eyebrows at Black Rock. Cronkite’s wild evening out with Manning chasing skirts wasn’t great for the serious-news brand. Not only did he and Manning hang out at the Condor, an infamous topless bar, but Cronkite was also later spotted dining with a go-go dancer clad in a miniskirt and barely there crop-top. “I’m a very quiet fellow in New York,” Cronkite said in response to the Caen report. “But something gets into me every time I come to San Francisco. It must be the water.”