Cronkite (82 page)

Although President Clinton remained popular with the American public during his second term in the White House, charges of perjury related to allegations of adultery brought forth impeachment proceedings in 1997. Cronkite watched in weary dejection as the PBS moderator Jim Lehrer heard the president denying he had “sexual relations” with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Hadn’t Clinton learned from Watergate that it’s the cover-up that will get you every time? A
New York Times
reporter on religion who asked about Cronkite’s beliefs was met with a firm “none of your business” from the broadcaster. That’s the path Clinton should have taken. Independent counsel Kenneth Starr spent the spring of 1997 investigating Clinton. Lewinsky began to cooperate fully with the Justice Department. The word
impeachment
was bandied about. Amid the turmoil of the investigation, the Clintons, both Bill and Hillary, retreated to the Vineyard that August to heal.

After Clinton was elected and it became public knowledge that he and his family vacationed in Edgartown, Cronkite sent a note to the White House inviting them to go sailing with him. He never heard back about a solid time. Then, with impeachment looming, Cronkite received a telephone call from the White House social secretary, asking if the “wonderful” invitation was still open. Picking himself off the floor, Cronkite said yes.

“When can we do it?” she asked him.

Cronkite, a stickler for such things, calculated the wind and weather and replied, “Friday looks good.” This conversation occurred on a Monday.

She said, “How about tomorrow?”

He said, “Sure.”

With the exception of having a great future story to dine out on, Cronkite regretted going along with the yachting scheme. Within hours a slew of security details, including two drivers who spent the night guarding the
Wyntje
, arrived in Edgartown. Cronkite warned President Clinton that the paparazzi, even on the Vineyard, would be out en masse because of the Lewinsky crisis. “Somebody might take a picture of it,” Cronkite told President Clinton, “but so what?” Clinton later joked that he never forgot that reassuring line: “At that time I could have done with a picture with Walter Cronkite.”

The paparazzi and voyeuristic spectators indeed watched the Clintons board the
Wyntje
in the drowsy sunshine and shove off for the Atlantic adventure. Cronkite, for the first time in years, applied a little mustache wax to keep his bushy eyebrows tame. The outing—which included seventeen-year-old Chelsea Clinton and fourteen-year-old Walter Cronkite IV (grandson)—was an excellent strategic move by the Clintons. What better way to jump-start a personal rehabilitation campaign than to hang out with the Most Trusted Man in America? Although they sailed for only ninety minutes, never going very far off the island’s coastline, the Clintons seemed to have a serene and healing time, plowing the great gray waters. After the
Wyntje
returned to Cronkite’s private dock in Edgartown, they all stayed aboard and talked confidentially for a good hour. No leaks about the discussion occurred. Cronkite, having played family counselor to the Clintons, declined to report a single word. Cronkite did tell Sandy Socolow that “nothing much” happened on the short cruise. “Bill and Hillary didn’t speak to each other the entire time,” Socolow recalled Cronkite telling him. “Not a word.”

An aftereffect of Cronkite taking the Clintons to safe harbor was an invitation to sleep at the White House. “On principle my dad never accepted that overnight offer from other presidents,” Chip Cronkite recalled. “But both Mom and Dad saw it as an historic opportunity for young Walter—who would get to sleep in the Grant anteroom during the visit—so they said yes.” Not only did the Cronkites sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom, but they gossiped for hours with Bill and Hillary as if they were at a co-ed slumber party. The president was extremely grateful that Cronkite had shown him such compassion during his darkest hour. “President Clinton was in awe of Cronkite,” the former White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers recalled. “You know how your childhood heroes die hard in your heart? That’s the way it was for Clinton with Cronkite.”

Cronkite’s main sustainable hero remained John Glenn. On January 17, 1998, NASA announced that the seventy-seven-year-old Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, would become the first senior citizen in space. Desperately, Cronkite lobbied NASA to appoint him as Glenn’s sidekick. After the
Challenger
shuttle had exploded in 1986, Cronkite had been reassured by NASA that he was still under consideration. But upon closer investigation, a NASA administrator nixed the possibility because of his 1997 heart surgery. Cronkite, carping that NASA was discriminating against octogenarians, telephoned Glenn in Columbus, Ohio, hoping to arm-twist the famed
Friendship 7
astronaut and U.S. senator to help him fulfill his lifelong dream. “I told him if they wanted to test an older guy in Space, I ought to go,” Cronkite recalled. “Or I could go with him, play canasta up there.”

Just when Cronkite felt jilted by NASA, he got an unexpected telephone call from CNN Newsgroup chairman Tom Johnson. Always wanting to get Cronkite in the mix, Johnson had a wonderful offer. Would Cronkite co-anchor the Glenn mission live on CNN with John Holliman?

Oh boy, would he! Johnson had done a sweet thing. Throughout the summer of 1998, CNN correspondent Cronkite boned up on space. He regularly talked to Glenn by telephone, determined to “own” the story. When CBS heard that the eighty-one-year-old Cronkite had been poached by CNN for “Glenn’s Second Trip into Space,” it issued a short, funny comment as press release: “Gosh, we wish we’d thought of it.” (At CBS, “gosh” and “by golly” were still considered lingering Cronkitisms.) Cronkite, in an effort to allay CBS News’ concerns about him working for CNN, agreed to interview Glenn for an exclusive segment on
60 Minutes
.

When press wags suggested that the whole Glenn-Cronkite pairing was a giant publicity stunt, a way for NASA to milk more federal tax dollars, Cronkite bristled. “John Glenn going back into Space is serving the purpose of reminding a blas�� public that we’re still in Space,” he said. “The flights of the shuttle have become so routine that newspapers don’t cover them. Broadcasters don’t cover them, really, we’ve almost lost track of the fact that we’re making these flights on a very regular basis now. I think there’s a whole generation out there, the under-29ers, who are hardly aware that we’re in Space.”

A deal was struck with NASA that Cronkite would get preferential treatment for the Glenn liftoff at Cape Kennedy, Florida, and then would fly to Houston to work for CBS Radio News. By once again linking Glenn’s patriotism to Cronkite’s performance, NASA was hoping to garner a tidal wave of great publicity. But a setback occurred. In late October, a week before the Glenn trip, Mike Freedman of CBS Radio News received a call from NASA asking for Cronkite’s questions in advance. Although Freedman explained that this would violate CBS News policy, NASA insisted. Freedman telephoned Cronkite at the UN Plaza and outlined the NASA request. The phone went silent for what seemed like an eternity (but was likely about three or four seconds). In that instant the jovial Cronkite turned back into managing editor of the
CBS Evening News
and said in a stern, powerful voice, “Mike, if they want the questions in advance, fuck ’em. There will be no interview.”

Freedman was proud of Cronkite, who was ready to give up the big scoop interview with Glenn live on CBS Radio rather than compromise his integrity or that of the network. When Freedman told NASA what Cronkite had said, it smartly dropped the insulting request. All systems were go.

On October 29, 1998, Cronkite played wise old man on CNN as Glenn returned to orbit, lifting off on
Discovery
STS-95 to study the effects of space on senior citizens. Cronkite reminisced about Kennedy-Johnson NASA efforts, seemingly teaching anchorman Miles O’Brien on the air about the history of space. It felt wonderful to be back at Cape Kennedy. He reminded viewers that during
Apollo 11
he was on the air for twenty-seven of the thirty key hours it took the astronauts to complete their mission. To help O’Brien and Cronkite out were former astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Bernard Harris. A Florida reporter joked in the
Vero Beach Press Journal
that it was the “Cronkite School of Broadcasting and Space” on CNN. When Cronkite’s buddy from the Bohemian Grove, Jimmy Buffett, stopped by the CNN booth he was immediately placed in the hotseat. “Walter waved me to sit next to him,” Buffett recalled. “How cool was that? Co-anchoring a John Glenn mission with Walter Cronkite? It just doesn’t get any better.”

After broadcasting liftoff from Florida for CNN, Cronkite moved his show to Houston for CBS Radio. On November 4, his eighty-fourth birthday, Cronkite and Mike Freedman gathered for NASA’s fortieth-anniversary luncheon. During the event, after everyone sang “Happy Birthday,” Cronkite anchored what would be his final CBS News
Special Report
: a fifteen-minute conversation—from Earth to space—with John Glenn and the other astronauts on the mission.

Sounding for all the world like long-lost brothers thousands of miles apart, Cronkite and Glenn chatted about everything from weightlessness to the crew’s release of the Petite Amateur Naval Satellite (which tested innovative technologies for the capture and transmission of radio signals). Then, for the last time in his life, Cronkite, milking his broadcast farewell like numerous other impresarios had done before him, used his signature close: “And that’s the way it is, November 4, 1998. This is Walter Cronkite for CBS News in Houston.”

Glenn’s mission was merely a theatrical sideshow to the Clinton impeachment imbroglio. On the afternoon of February 19, 1999, when the impeachment came to its end, Cronkite was working with Freedman on a series called “Postscripts to the 20th Century” for CBS Radio News (short radio clips to help inaugurate the twenty-first century, also known as “Millennium” spots). Freedman suddenly got an inspired idea. Why not have Cronkite break the historical news of the Clinton verdict for the noon CBS Radio broadcast that would go out to all four hundred affiliates? “I asked Walter, and he looked a little surprised,” Freedman recalled. “Then his eyes twinkled and he said, ‘Sure.’ ”

And so it happened. The dah-dah-dah Teletype opening for the CBS hourly news alert hit the airwaves, and Cronkite spoke into the microphone from a booth at the CBS Network Radio Studio on Fifty-seventh Street. He opened the radio newscast crisply. “The impeachment case,” he said, pausing a half second for operatic effect, “is about to finally come to the end.” He went on to elaborate how the Senate Republicans didn’t have a two-thirds majority to force Clinton to resign. Then Cronkite handed off the breaking news to the CBS News congressional correspondent Bob Fuss in Washington, D.C. “I had people from our affiliate stations around the country calling after that newscast like never before,” Freedman recalled. “They were beyond thrilled. One guy in Wisconsin called and said ‘UNBELIEVABLE! I drove off the road when I heard his voice.’ ”

Throughout the summer of 1999 at the Vineyard, Cronkite plotted with friends over how to stop real estate mogul Donald Trump from building an 861-foot residential tower on New York’s East Side. It devoured all of his energies. Cronkite considered Trump-style unfettered development an abomination. Why did Trump need to build the world’s tallest residential tower, which would “completely overshadow the United Nations and its beautiful gardens”? The Cronkite-versus-Trump squabble got heated in the tabloids. Trump claimed that Cronkite was a “totally preposterous” man who simply didn’t want his rich-guy view marred. When a mediation meeting was held over the issue, Cronkite, walking into Trump’s office with his NIMBY posse, was bowled over. Trump leapt out from behind his desk, came around with his arms outstretched and said, “Walter, it is soooooooo good to see you again!” Such breezy familiarity irked Cronkite because he had never met Trump before. (The contentious issue was soon resolved in Trump’s favor: construction started on Trump World Tower on First Avenue.)

In October 1999, Cronkite spent a week at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena filming a Chip Cronkite–produced documentary titled
Beyond the Moon
, about the robotic devices of the future that would one day hopefully take astronauts to Mars. He flew back to New York from Pasadena in time to accept the World Federalist Association’s Norman Cousins Global Governance Award on October 19 at the United Nations. Cronkite used the occasion to promote Earth Day, one world government, the United Nations, and the new George Soros book,
The Crisis of Global Capitalism
. This wasn’t the accepted speech of a liberal. Cronkite had come fully out of the closet as a global-governance leftist, a political view more accepted in Copenhagen than Peoria. According to Cronkite, the notion of “unlimited national sovereignty” meant “international anarchy.” It all got back to the picture that Bill Anders had snapped back in 1968 during
Apollo 8
: there was only
one
Planet Earth, and it had no borders.

At the UN, Cronkite uncorked his Interfaith Alliance–sponsored assault on the Christian Coalition and the religious right of the Republican Party. It was biting rhetoric aimed at Holy Roller crackpottery. The line between activism and journalism has always been imprecise, but Cronkite went off the Five Ws reservation at the UN with a shot of
Network
“I’m mad as hell” outrage reminiscent of his Roseland introduction of Barbara Jordan. “Their leader, Pat Robertson, has written that we should have a world government but only when the Messiah arrives,” Cronkite scoffed. “Any attempt to achieve world order before that time must be the work of the devil. This small but well-organized group has intimidated the Republican Party and the Clinton Administration. It has attacked each of our presidents since [Franklin D. Roosevelt] for supporting the United Nations. Robertson explains that these presidents were and are the unwitting agents of Lucifer. The only way we who believe in the vision of a democratic world federal government can effectively overcome this reactionary movement is to organize a strong educational counter-offensive stretching from the most publicly visible people in all fields to the humblest individuals in every community.”