Cronkite (72 page)

When Cronkite’s turn arrived, he asked Ford about taking the vice presidential spot on the GOP ticket, “If Reagan chose you, wouldn’t it be like a co-presidency?”

Ford, his wife Betty looking on, foolishly agreed. “I would not go to Washington,” Ford told Cronkite, “and be a figurehead vice-president.”

What a score for Cronkite. CBS News fanned the spark into a wildfire. Without time for Ford to swivel, the phrase
co-presidency
ricocheted all over America. Ford later said it best: “Cronkite had me in a pickle.” Reagan would never accept a co-presidency. The disclosure squelched the novel idea of a Reagan-Ford ticket once and for all.

Meanwhile, Sandy Socolow received a hysterical phone call from Hinda Glasser, Cronkite’s office manager. Barbara Walters was trying to bully her way into the CBS broadcast booth where Cronkite and Ford were still chatting. Socolow, arms crossed, acting like a bodyguard, rushed to Glasser’s aid and prevented Walters from entering. “Barbara and I had an argument,” Socolow recalled, “but I succeeded in excluding her. She didn’t reach Ford until the Cronkite interview was over and Ford had exited our offices.”

Cronkite, still the alpha newsmaker, now had an unexpected problem on his hands. Walters was high-heel-clicking mad and just outside the guarded booth. She was demanding a follow-up interview with Ford. “She had planted herself right outside the door,” Kennerly, still amazed at her gall decades later, chuckled. “She was howling mad that Cronkite got the scoop, that the old-boys’ club was in play.”

Ford was afraid to exit the CBS booth. “Is she still there?” the former president timidly asked Kennerly.

“Yes,” Kennerly said. “We’ve just got to walk past her.”

That was easier said than done. Once Ford emerged from the booth, Walters pounced on him.

“You’ve got to give me the interview!” Walters raged. “You’re making me look bad!”

“I’m busy here,” Ford told her, walking swiftly away, desperate for escape, “I’m running late for an appointment.”

Walters hadn’t played her last card. “You’ve got to do it for Alan’s sake,” she implored, referring to her then-boyfriend, Alan Greenspan, who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during Ford’s presidency. Kennerly looked at the Walters spectacle with contempt. She was begging, pleading, arm-twisting, cajoling, like a spoiled child throwing a temper tantrum. But Walters got the follow-up interview. It was at that moment that Cronkite knew that Barbara Walters—his chief rival—was a real force of nature, one whose career would have longevity. “At a luncheon that both Barbara and I attended the next day, Ford told the group that he had a sore shoulder,” Cronkite recalled, “suffered when Barbara twisted his arm to get him onto ABC.”

A UPI reporter asked Socolow about the Walters incident, news of which had spread. He told a G-rated version of events, swear words left out. A little while later, Socolow fielded an irate call from Walters. She charged Socolow with betrayal. “Done what?” a perplexed Socolow responded. For four or five minutes, Walters ripped him a new one. “She said she was sorry,” Socolow recalled. “That she had looked forward to someday, perhaps, working with me, and now I had made that impossible.”

The Democratic Convention was held in New York City from August 11 to 14. As Rather predicted to Cronkite, the entire night was indeed “an entertaining brawl with elements of farce.” President Carter easily defeated Ted Kennedy to win the party’s nomination. But the most noteworthy moment of the night occurred when a seemingly inebriated Kennedy wouldn’t shake Carter’s hand onstage at Madison Square Garden. That night was Cronkite’s last hurrah. When CBS threw Cronkite a surprise party at the Democratic National Convention, inviting reporters and producers from NBC and ABC to come, Cronkite was touched. “I am overwhelmed,” he said. “I really am . . . even though I know that the free drink and free booze is a hell of a lure.”

At the end of the convention, Cronkite’s microphone was mounted like a trophy; its accompanying plaque thanked him for teaching “three generations of Americans the political process.” Charles Kuralt, who had become a great pal of the anchorman, presented the memento to Cronkite as everybody held up a shot of Maker’s Mark. A button in the back of the microphone played Cronkite’s first CBS convention report from 1952, when the word
anchorman
was created for him.

That November 4, Cronkite broadcast his last Election Night for CBS News. Reagan easily trumped Carter by 489 electoral votes to 49. Cronkite sensed that the timing of his retirement was good, that before long the TV news standards he had spent decades establishing would recede into the land of folly. Though one can never trust statistics, a report had come out that November announcing that 27 percent of U.S. homes were wired for pay-cable, uninterrupted first-run movies, and specials. Within a year it would reach 38 percent. No amount of Maker’s Mark or colleague assurance, mugs of beer at P.J. Clarke’s, or fine wine on
Wyntje
could protect CBS News from the encroachment of the cable revolution. There would no longer be must-watch Cronkite personalities to offer headline news service to the 70 percent of the U.S. public that got most of its news from television. Depending on how you looked at the situation, cable TV was either the grand payoff for Telstar or Nixon’s revenge. Cronkite saw it as both.

On January 16, 1981, just before leaving the White House, President Carter awarded Cronkite the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “For thousands of nights, the eyes of millions of Americans have been turned into the eyes and ears of Walter Cronkite,” Carter said at the Washington ceremony. “He has reported and commented on the events of the last two decades with the skill and insight which stands out in the news world, in a way which had made the news of the world stand out for all of us. There is probably not a single American who doesn’t know Walter Cronkite, and of those tens of millions who do know him, I don’t believe there are any who distrust him.”

PART VI

The Spokesperson

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-
O
NE

Retirement Blues

THE LONG GOOD-BYE—NO SHAME IN CRYING—UPI FOR SALE—RATHER IN THE HOT SEAT—RUSSIA, REAGAN, AND REGRET—THE UNIVERSE—GLOBETROTTING TO EXCESS—PALLING AROUND WITH CHARLES OSGOOD—CABLE TV ROCKETS—OF JOHN HENDRICKS AND THE DISCOVERY CHANNEL—BANQUET SPEECHES AND SAILING—RECONNECTING AS DAD—SADAT IS SHOT—DOWN WITH RATHER, UP WITH KURALT—BETRAYED BY CBS—PRINTER INK IN HIS VEINS—A PRISONER OF HIS CBS PAST—THE JOURNALISM-CELEBRITY COMPLEX—FULL OF DISILLUSIONMENT

C
ronkite’s last day anchoring the
CBS Evening News
was Friday, March 6, 1981. At the company’s request, he had stayed through the February sweeps. There was a sense that Cronkite’s leaving the broadcast was akin to his dying. A telegram from a Long Island woman reached Cronkite, begging him not to quit: “Keep it up, you’re getting better.” But Cronkite wasn’t taking a hiatus; he was going out on top. A national magazine, in full mourning mode, contacted Cronkite with an offer for him to write his own obituary. Amazed at the letter’s gall, Cronkite indeed mailed back a response: “Walter Cronkite, television and radio newsman, died today. He was smothered to death under a pile of ridiculous mail, which included a request to write his own obituary.”

Upon stepping down, Cronkite, the preeminent television newsman of the twentieth century, insisted that he not be treated as a retired figurehead. Having negotiated a $1 million annual salary with CBS, he remained a vital part of the network. He would be regularly logging stories for the
Evening News
as special correspondent. Most of his time would be devoted to a weekly news magazine on science, space, and the environment called
Walter Cronkite’s Universe
(with Bud Benjamin as producer). A progenitor to the Discovery Channel, the half-hour CBS pilot had first aired on June 27, 1979, to good prime-time ratings. In 1980,
Universe
ran four additional times, earning a Peabody Award. So it made sense that, in 1981, Cronkite would try, in thirteen summer episodes, to make
Universe
a hit show focusing on U.S. military affairs, NASA, oceanographic exploration, and ecology. But while still part of the company, he had left behind a leadership void at the
CBS Evening News
. “That little guffaw laugh of his wasn’t around anymore,” Connie Chung lamented. “No more of his warmhearted ‘Attaboys’ after doing a segment he liked in the hallway.”

The forty-nine-year-old Rather was an aggressive newsman, to be sure: he even experimented with heroin for a story on drug addiction. No television correspondent had covered civil rights or went after Nixon with more doggedness. During Nixon’s first trip to China in 1972, he pushed against White House rules and tried to interact with the common people of Beijing. The very year that Cronkite became CBS News anchor, Rather was a cub reporter at KHOU-TV in Houston, gaining superlative notice for his coverage of Hurricane Carla from Galveston Island. “We were impressed by his calm and physical courage during that hurricane,” Cronkite said. “He was ass-deep in water moccasins.”

But Rather also had his critics. Many felt he had been undignified in drawing President Nixon into a verbal clash at a Houston press conference in 1974. From that point on, Rather had trouble shedding the image of being a loose cannon. His deviating from protocol during Nixon’s trip to China had rubbed Cronkite—a play-by-the-rules establishmentarian—the wrong way back in 1972; he considered it gauche. For all of Rather’s intensity when he interviewed politicians, his questions tended to bleed into long digressions. Rather’s style was quite different from Cronkite’s down-home neighbor-next-door persona. Rather was folksy, but in a quirky way (“This is shakier than cafeteria Jell-O,” “If a frog had side pockets he’d carry a hand gun,” etc.) that Cronkite thought hokey and tedious. He sometimes came across as simultaneously loopy and wooden, edgy and insecure. One word often used to describe him was “enigmatic.” Nobody at CBS ever mastered the riddling essence of his character. “I’m a different person than Walter Cronkite,” he tried to explain, fearing unmet expectations, “and as time goes along, it will naturally be a different broadcast.” Rather, for all of his great reportorial skills, was paranoid that Cronkite, after going on his global junket for
Universe
, would plot a return to the anchor chair.

What surprised Bob Schieffer of CBS News was how the Rather crowd purged the broadcast center on West Fifty-seventh Street of all remnants of the Cronkite regime. Cronkite’s old beige set backdrop was repainted blue-gray, because Rather thought it enhanced his complexion. He even had the “Cronkite Newsroom” plaque taken off the wall. “I would have had the ‘Cronkite Newsroom’ sign plated in gold,” a disgusted Schieffer scoffed. “I came to work that Saturday morning, March 7, after Cronkite quit. I was slated to do the
Evening News
that weekend night. And to my utter surprise Walter’s anchor chair was gone from the set. ‘Where’s the chair?’ I asked. I was told it had been moved to storage. ‘Go get the damn chair,’ I told a stagehand. This being CBS, it took them all day to find it. But I broadcast the news from Walter’s chair.”

Just how insecure Rather (whose salary was $6 million over a period of three years) was became apparent during his first appearance as anchorman on Monday, March 9, 1981. A direct order had been handed down from CBS executives that the set change from Cronkite to Rather was to be minimal, but Rather wanted to jazz things up a little bit. Among other things, a new desk and backdrop were frantically erected in the studio over the weekend to give things a Ratheresque aura. The new guard at CBS News wanted to make Rather’s debut memorable. Cognizant that he had big shoes to fill, Rather himself indicated his broadcast needed a new tone and tenor.

Two minutes before airtime, Rather threw a fit over Cronkite’s chair, which Schieffer had used for his weekend broadcasts. It was still behind the desk. He refused to sit in it. “I was in the fishbowl and got an emergency call from the film editing office that there was a problem with some footage of a segment,” Socolow recalled. “I rushed out down the hall to take care of the problem. Then suddenly, over the loudspeaker, I heard director Richard Mutschler shout, ‘Socolow, he’s standing up! He’s standing up!’ ”

The cameramen didn’t know what to do. “It was a near-catastrophe that will not be soon forgotten all these years later,” CBS writer Sandor Polster recalled, “by those who had worked so hard to make sure that his debut would be perfect.” In a blog post titled “The Empty Throne” (posted on March 7, 2011), longtime
CBS Evening News
veteran Polster—one of the three news writers Rather inherited from Cronkite—detailed Rather’s strange intransigence just before airtime that Monday. The drama began when stage manager Jimmy Wall barked, “Two minutes. Two minutes to air.” Suddenly, Rather got up from Cronkite’s old chair and pronounced, “I don’t want to sit here,” thereupon moving himself to a low table. Socolow lost his temper and cursed at Rather’s selfish bad timing. “What an asshole thing to do,” Socolow recalled. “It was so disrespectful to the crew; it makes me sick to my stomach.”

The clock was ticking. Thirty seconds . . . ten . . . five . . . showtime. The newsroom floor hands, longtime professionals, scrambled to fix lights, re-angle the cameras, and make all sorts of instant lighting adjustments. “I still can see Dan Rather perched on that typewriter table,” Polster recalled thirty years later, “looking a bit constipated, as if he were bracing for a hasty retreat.” Schieffer put it more succinctly: “Quite frankly, Dan looked like he was going to the crapper.”

Cronkite, working at home, was devastated by the way Rather treated his legacy on his first
CBS Evening News
broadcast. Why was he embarrassed to sit in his chair? It seemed to Cronkite rude and immature, like cooties in grade school. “It was goddamn crazy,” Socolow recalled. “Dan’s explanation to Cronkite and me was that he thought standing would be better than sitting. By the first commercial break he knew better and sat down.”

To Connie Chung, who nicknamed Rather the “Stealth Bomber”—for his sneak character attacks—Rather had purposefully tried to humiliate Cronkite out of jealousy. Morley Safer, Cronkite’s old drinking buddy at CBS News, a mainstay on
60 Minutes
, saw “Chairgate” as indicative of Rather’s creepy personality. “Rather was determined to wipe out every vestige of Cronkite,” Safer recalled. “It’s that simple. That was the root of it. Rather was nasty toward Walter. The chair stunt was one of many slights. Dan’s a liar and an unbelievably paranoid guy. He did his best to get rid of all the Cronkite people. Rather and Nixon, you might say, were strangely very much alike.” When Jeff Fager was named executive producer of the
CBS Evening News with Dan Rather
in 1996, Rather was at first livid. “He told me he wasn’t happy I got the job,” Fager recalled. “This surprised me. I asked, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Because you’re friends with Morley Safer who talks to Sandy Socolow who talks to Cronkite who talks to everybody.’ ”

Ratings dipped by 9 percent at
CBS Evening News
after Cronkite’s departure, the largest number of defectors going to ABC’s
World News Tonight
. Cronkite was not psychologically prepared for retirement. Just weeks after resigning as CBS News anchorman, he flew to the Soviet Union with producer Andrew Lack (who later went on to become NBC News president, Sony BMG chairman, and then head of Bloomberg LP multimedia operations) to report on the state of that nation. Cronkite’s assigned point man in Moscow was Gordon F. Joseloff, who had been a UPI reporter there until CBS hired him in 1975 to write for the
Evening News
. Joseloff and Cronkite became fast friends. It was a UPI alumni thing. It always gave Joseloff a thrill to hear his own copy read on air at CBS by his boyhood idol. It was at the Cronkites’ annual Christmas party in 1978 that Joseloff was asked to run CBS News’ Moscow bureau. Salant thought that since Joseloff had once worked the Russian beat for UPI, he’d be ideal for the job. “Don’t worry,” Cronkite had told him. “We’ll teach you what you need to know.”

So Joseloff was thrilled to host a dinner for Cronkite on March 30 at his spacious Sadovo-Samotechnaya apartment, just a stone’s throw from CBS operations. “Walter wasn’t big on diplomacy,” Joseloff recalled. “He got down and dirty, wanting to know
everything
going on in Moscow.” Midcourse, somebody from Reuters banged on the apartment door to give Joseloff and Cronkite the grim news: President Reagan had been shot outside the Washington Hilton by a deranged John Hinckley. Videotape of the attempted assassination had just been shown on ABC. “I’ll never forget Walter’s reaction as he heard those words,” Joseloff recalled. “He sat bolt upright, his face got red, he got to his feet, and he asked me to lead him to the Reuters office. A throng had already gathered around the incoming news wire. Walter pushed his way in. A couple of correspondents did double takes as they turned around to see that the older man breathing down their necks was none other than Walter Cronkite.”

Here was the leaping jaguar that Bill Felling of CBS News had talked about. Reagan had been shot and Cronkite was ready for on-air action. NBC News pool footage was already being streamed to the Soviet Union. CBS in New York told Joseloff to get Cronkite, now all laser-focused on the Reagan tragedy, ready for a live interview, something more than a sound bite, even though it was almost midnight in Moscow. At first, all the Soviet satellite transmissions were tied up; state television was being uncooperative with CBS. But when they learned that it was
the
Walter Cronkite wanting a channel to New York, studio technicians were rushed to a state-run studio for an emergency broadcast.

Back in New York, Rather had been on the air for hours doing a fine job of explaining the circumstances of Reagan’s near-assassination. When Secretary of State Alexander Haig stated incorrectly that he was constitutionally third in line of succession to the presidency, Rather correctly took issue, calling the remark “patronizing.” A Soviet security vehicle came softly to the curb to pick Cronkite up and rush him to the camera. After a harrowing ride to a station located on Moscow’s outskirts, Cronkite managed to get airtime. “America once again had Walter to watch at a time of national trauma,” Gordon Joseloff recalled,

Not that Cronkite saw it that way. The Reagan assassination attempt put him in a deep funk. He didn’t like being sidelined. He felt marginalized almost into a state of nonbeing at CBS. A bitterness swelled inside of him. One CBS holdover from Cronkite to Rather was Linda Mason. From her catbird perspective, Cronkite wasn’t merely disgruntled by Rather’s trying to differentiate himself from the former anchor on the air or by being exiled in Russia for the attempted assassination story—though those were factors. Cronkite, she believed, was envious that Rather had gotten paid a $2 million annual salary to replace him. Why hadn’t Black Rock been as generous to him? Meanwhile, the Ratherites simply weren’t impressed with the work Cronkite did from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in 1981. That fall, Cronkite went to Hungary for CBS News to cover the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Soviet invasion of 1956. Cronkite produced an ungainly ten-minute piece he wanted Rather to air on the
Evening News
; it wasn’t very compelling. CBS News ran only an extremely boiled-down, bottom-of-the-broadcast filler version of it.

Wanting to make spot news, Cronkite and Benjamin traveled to Poland to cover the Solidarity movement (which emerged in 1980 as the first non-Communist trade union in a Warsaw Pact nation). They hoped to earn an exclusive U.S. broadcast interview with Lech Walesa, the movement’s leader. Walesa, a humble shipyard electrician, fighting for workers’ rights and organizing for democracy, was amassing the power to topple the Communist regime. It felt unsettling to Cronkite to be working as a far-flung cold war reporter in Poland for the pampered Rather, who was ensconced in his old New York studio. Could a five-star general of nearly two decades really become a corporal again? After a harrowing flight into Warsaw, having force-landed on a grass strip, Cronkite indeed scored an exclusive interview with the Polish freedom fighter. “Walesa and his whole retinue reminded me of Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 campaign, with the young people surrounding him,” Cronkite recalled. “He was constantly taking advice from them, conferring with them, deciding one thing one minute and then something the next. . . . And they all adored him. It was a damn good interview; I’m very proud of it.”