Cronkite (9 page)

While UP was a major news outlet, it was hard for reporters to gain much adulation because of the formulaic writing rules. But breaking news was breaking news. A UP reporter with an exclusive, Cronkite knew, could quickly become the toast of the fourth estate. At least for a few days.

The fighting in Morocco began early on November 8, 1942. Operation Torch met only halfhearted resistance from the French troops being commanded by the puppet government of Marshal Philippe Pétain in Vichy, France. Back in the United States, the Associated Press transmitted only the U.S. government’s official announcement over the wire; it described the invasion plan in general terms. The United Press offered that too, but it also carried an eyewitness account of the landing, written by Chris Cunningham. The wonder was that he found a way to transmit it among the heavy bombardment—but then, the resourceful Cunningham was known to cultivate a chummy relationship with the telegraph detail in war zones.

The only news from the Northern Group, Cronkite’s beat during the assault, came from a Vichy French radio service, a pro-Nazi propaganda fog machine. While the UP editors were awaiting a report from Port Lyautey in Morocco, the U.S.S.
Texas
plastered the French arsenal with a cavalcade of bombs. Within two days, the battle was over, as the last Vichy resistance collapsed; the city of Casablanca, the Lyautey airfield, the Moroccan rail yards, and a number of useful ports were all in Allied hands.

Having survived the ordeal with only a ringing in his ears, Cronkite went ashore at Port Lyautey with a gunnery officer to inspect the damage. He was amazed at how off-target the U.S. Navy’s marksmanship had been. All the wrong buildings were in ruins. Unbeknownst to Cronkite, his dispatches on Operation Torch—all dutifully logged—had mysteriously not gotten through to New York. United Press hadn’t publicly released an original Cronkite article on the action at Lyautey, though he had filed thirteen. He had filed them from the radio bridge of the
Texas
, via a British communication relay channel in Gibraltar, but the channel was giving preference to BBC reporters, so none of his pieces got through to London or New York. Determined to dominate the North African coverage, UP headquarters in New York took advantage of an agreement among the news organizations to pool stories during the first week and used an article from Robert G. Nixon, the INS man, regarding a flight he took over the Moroccan coastline. Censor approval of anything more specific demanded a delay of more than a week anyway. Still, when UP finally received permission to run an article on the Northern Group’s assault, it was one written by Walter Logan. No Cronkite byline.

Algeria was a stalemate. But the Germans, in a counteraction, hurried reinforcements to neighboring Tunisia. Heavy combat would ensue there. Logan, Cunningham, and the other UP men moved on, too, heading to far more stubborn fighting to the east, in Tunisia. But no one in North Africa or New York knew where Cronkite had ended up. As it happened, he was back aboard the
Texas
, assuming it was sailing from Port Lyautey down to Casablanca.

Staring into the bracing, choppy pearl-gray waves as they broke, trying to keep his stomach straight, Cronkite realized he had made a tactical error. The African coast kept getting farther and farther away. He had accidentally “hitchhiked” an oceanic retreat trip back to the naval yards of Norfolk, Virginia, instead of to Casablanca. He obeyed the U.S. Navy directive for correspondents to remain with their ships, not realizing that this order was to be taken seriously
only
before and during action. Secretly, he did intend to break the rule and leave the ship when the
Texas
docked near Casablanca, a city so secure that a meeting between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill would be held there only two months later. Reporting from Casablanca after the Allied landings would have been a safe choice for Cronkite. But any UP article he wrote would have been more of a travelogue than an urgent war dispatch. In any case, the
Texas
sailed straight past Casablanca in heavy seas, turning westward into the spinning surf.

With every hour finding him farther from North Africa, anxiety swept over him. Was he in professional trouble? Could a foreign war correspondent be charged with dereliction of duty? Had cowardice influenced his retreating actions? Was an excoriating memo being written at UP headquarters with his name on it? A sort of nausea now held sway over him on that stuck-at-sea journey. If it were possible, he would have sucked down an entire keg of beer to numb the shame. And it wasn’t just an existential crisis over what constituted being AWOL. Ever since press lord Edward Willis Scripps had founded UP in 1907, frugality was the reigning ethic in the bureau that had mastered skinflint journalism. How were Cronkite’s tightwad bosses in New York going to perceive his leaving North Africa prematurely? Would they compute his travel blunders as money lost?

At this critical moment, not wanting to be declared dead or AWOL, practically in a panic, Cronkite charmed a ride on a reconnaissance plane that took off from the deck of the
Texas
; it shortened the trip home to America by a few days. When Cronkite finally arrived at United Press headquarters in New York at the end of November, full of regret, he was met by his editors with hands-on-hips reprimands. He was on shaky ground. Where have you been for six weeks, Cronkite? With his marvelous memory as get-out-of-a-jam helper, he explained every big scene and small nuance of his North African adventure that had been lost when his UP articles on Operation Torch were not received. He also learned that his bosses had presumed he was dead. Cronkite’s editors, glad he had survived the North Africa ordeal, salvaged his reporting (and the six weeks that he’d devoted to it) by releasing his account of the assault on Lyautey—more than two weeks after the assault. The Cronkite article was unusually long, and composed of pieces from the stories he’d tried to file while overseas. The result was clumsy and disjointed. “It was enough to make a young wire-service reporter think about turning in his typewriter,” Cronkite recalled, “and go into radio.”

A major error of Cronkite’s, in hindsight, was falsely assuming the UP articles he’d written on the radio bridge of the
Texas
had gotten patched through to his editors simply because he had handed them off to a U.S. Navy censor. There was, he learned, much more hustle to transmitting war reporting than pushing a magic “send” button. Not only did reporters have to cover the action, but it was also their sacred responsibility to guarantee that their copy got published. The importance of following up was incalculable; it constituted the difference between a pay raise and an enduring dark blot on one’s name. Echoing his screwup when broadcasting his first football game for WKY in Oklahoma, the
Texas
experience taught Cronkite a cardinal journalism lesson: triple-check everything—especially your story transmission.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

The Writing Sixty-Ninth

BON VOYAGE—MEETING ANDY ROONEY—OF BOMBING RAIDS AND HOTEL ROOMS—EIGHTH AIR FORCE BEAT—A FLYING FORTRESS—GENERAL EAKER’S FLYBOYS—I SAW—GLORY OF THE BYLINE—RIGOROUS TRAINING—WILHELMSHAVEN RAID—DEATH OF BOB POST—ASSIGNMENT FROM HELL—HITLER SHOULD WORRY—CRONKITE THE PACIFIST—UNAFRAID OF BEING A COWARD

C
ronkite spent a few nights in New York making love with Betsy and taking walks around Central Park. They attended the lighting of the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center and chatted incessantly about the war. Then, in early December 1942, United Press assigned Cronkite to the London bureau. Clearly, his shortcomings in reporting Operation Torch and his premature, unintended departure from North Africa hadn’t derailed his career. Along with UP’s Douglas Werner, who’d been in the Washington bureau, Cronkite left New York aboard the Dutch passenger ship
Westerland
. Both he and Werner would be available to UP around the clock in England to report on the anticipated escalation in the air war against Germany. Betsy, grateful for the fling with her husband, returned to Kansas City. She had been hired by an advertising office of the Hallmark Corporation, editing the in-house magazine. She had seen Walter off on December 11, with gifts to be opened on the holiday aboard the
Westerland
, including vitamins, stollen (German cake), chewing gum, cuff links, and some Max Brand and Zane Grey westerns. They would not see each other again for two years. “Like a lot of other people that year, we had to be apart on Christmas,” she recalled. “There was a war going on, but all I could think of then was that Walter would be at sea on Christmas Day.”

For Cronkite, the transfer to London presented a dramatic shift in his professional prospects. The United Press management was aware that the company did not have enough reporters to cover every hotspot in Europe, but it was determined to “compete toe-to-toe on the big stories of the day,” as a company executive put it, “with a view to keeping a dominant position on the front pages.” UP president Hugh Baillie was convinced, as were many others, that one of the biggest stories would be the Allied invasion of France from Britain. More than others, perhaps, Baillie believed it could occur in 1943, so UP made sure the London bureau was not short of good reporters.

Cronkite’s journey across the Atlantic was fraught with danger. German
Unterseebooten
(U-boats) attacked the convoy, sinking a couple of sluggish freighters. The
Westerland
emerged unscathed, the only high note of a voyage “abominable from every other standpoint.” After the convoy anchored in Glasgow, Scotland, on December 30, 1942, Cronkite made his way immediately to London by train, where he worked alongside Ed Beattie of UP, who handled many of the major articles and whom Cronkite later called his “hero.”

Joe Alex Morris and other UP executives gave Cronkite the kind of break a budding journalism career needs, an opportunity to prove his mettle in the Fleet Street milieu. Cronkite didn’t squander a minute of it. In his first weeks in London, he met Andy Rooney, an Army-enlisted man reporting for
The Stars and Stripes
, whose office was located in the Times of London Building, near UP’s bureau. Reporters from scads of news outfits, including United Press, congregated after work at the same nearby pub on Fleet Street, swapping information over tavern ale about everything from B-17 bomber raids to where to find the bombshells around Piccadilly Circus—the high-heeled prostitutes, not the ordnance. Once the pub closed, Cronkite started the habit of relocating to a private club, where cheap gin could be purchased by the bottle. “I thought Walter was one of the big guys,” Rooney recalled. “I was four years younger, just a little guy at
Stars and Stripes
. We’d often get called about an upcoming bombing raid, so we’d go visit the bases together to get the scoop.” The feisty, funny Rooney deemed Cronkite “a tough, competitive scrambler . . . in the old
Front Page
tradition of newspaper reporting.”

Cronkite found lodging at the Park Lane Hotel, in a room he deemed a “cell,” just across a park from Buckingham Palace. The American Bar at the hotel became his salon. On New Year’s Eve he had “absolutely no desire for liquor,” he wrote in a letter to Betsy. Nevertheless, he went on to describe the four cocktails he drank at a private club, as he began to get acclimated to wartime London. And by journalistic standards, four drinks was nothing. Sometimes it seemed that finishing a bottle of gin at Jack’s Club or the Wellington Inn won respect from one’s fellow newsmen. “Joe Morris and Ed Beattie were organizing a sort of party, but when they got around to inviting me they themselves were pretty well organized,” Cronkite wrote. “I didn’t feel like that kind of hilarity.”

Worn out, plagued with a sinus infection, and homesick for Betsy, Cronkite was in a funk his first week in London. Feeling dehydrated and exhausted from the transatlantic trip, already almost broke (a continual concern throughout the 1940s), Cronkite felt uprooted. Everything in London was so uncertain. UP not only hadn’t given him marching orders, it hadn’t so much as offered him a map. “What hours I’m going to be working and what I’m going to be doing I won’t know till Monday,” he wrote Betsy. “I’m hoping it will be big enough to keep me out of the office most of the time. I have no desire to sit on the desk writing cables.”

Between 1943 and 1945, Cronkite wrote Betsy dozens of letters. Without direct telephone service, it was how the couple communicated. Whenever Betsy received a missive from her husband, she’d read it aloud back in Kansas City to her new Hallmark friends, circulate it around the family circle, and then read it again at bedtime. (While she saved all incoming correspondence from Europe, few copies of her own letters to Walter survived the war.) Five main themes emerged from Cronkite’s correspondence: the British weather was gloomy; he missed Kansas City; alcohol was a friend; holidays were a big deal; and the UP had put him on a woefully chintzy expense account. “I’m going through my meager funds like they were pennies in an amusement arcade,” he wrote. “And unless Doug Werner and I get an apartment in a hurry I shall soon be sleeping in a Hyde Park air raid shelter.”

Once Cronkite got acclimated to London, he was given a top-notch assignment, one he had coveted since 1941: covering the Allied air war against Germany. He hoped to go on bombing missions aboard a four-engine B-17 Flying Fortress or a B-24 Liberator. The U.S. Army Air Force had been pressured for a year by the British government to undertake strategic bombing of German industrial sites. Great Britain’s own Royal Air Force (RAF) fleet of planes had been effectively bombing Germany on night raids. On January 28, 1942, the Eighth Air Force was officially activated at the National Guard Armory on Bull Street in Savannah, Georgia. A few months later, the Eighth was prepared to raid Germany as part of the air war preparation for the Allied invasion of the continent.

By August 1942 the U.S. Eighth Force Bomber Command—part of the Eighth Air Force—had been organized to carry out the daytime bombing missions over Germany, using British airfields at Alconbury and Molesworth, both in Cambridgeshire, as bases. But the Mighty Eighth, as the Eight Air Force came to be known after World War II, began slowly with sorties over France and Holland. By the end of 1942 it still hadn’t flown any missions over Germany, which frustrated Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The British fear was that American delays in fully executing the air offensive were allowing the German economy to freely supply Hitler’s war machine.

The key figure in Cronkite’s London life was General Ira C. Eaker, who had grown up on a farm near Eden, Texas, and was now head of the Eighth Air Force’s bomber wing. Like Cronkite’s father, Eaker had enlisted as an infantry private right after the United States declared war on Germany in 1917. He rose to the rank of captain during the Great War. Eaker was involved with notable feats of early aviation that Cronkite heard about while working for Braniff (including Eaker’s being the first pilot to fly coast to coast “blind,” solely on instruments). Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Eaker, now a general, arrived in England to take over the Mighty Eighth’s Air Force from General Carl Spaatz.

General Eaker quickly earned the respect of the British people by establishing effective Eighth Air Force Bomber and Fighter Groups at air bases across East Anglia. At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, Eaker was successful in convincing President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill of the practicality of precision daylight bombing of vital targets deep inside Nazi Germany. With the Royal Air Force night attacks, American daylight missions under Eaker’s command would provide “round-the-clock” bombing that would destroy German industrial and military targets as well as German morale. In a nutshell, Cronkite’s job was to cover the Mighty Eighth’s successes while glossing over its failures.

On March 4, 1943, the Mighty Eighth sent 238 B-17s on a bombing run over Berlin. The non-pressurized, unheated aircraft were developed in the 1930s (around the time Model “A” Fords were being manufactured). The gutsy raid did only minor damage in the end, but Cronkite’s morale grew considerably. The ultimate objective of the Mighty Eighth, he understood, was to leave the Third Reich in ruins. The Mighty Eighth pilots were flying into the hornets’ nest of the world’s heaviest and most vicious concentration of antiaircraft guns. If not shot down in battle, these U.S. flyboys arrived back at Alconbury and Molesworth triumphant heroes (i.e., the new Billy Mitchells).

The RAF Berlin raid was also noteworthy to Cronkite because an embedded reporter had been allowed to fly on one of the warplanes. James MacDonald, a forty-seven-year-old Scotsman and World War I veteran, wrote on the front page of
The New York Times
about accompanying a Lancaster crew on its flight over the German capital. It was riveting stuff. “Royal Air Force bombers transformed a large area of Berlin into a particularly hot corner of hell last night,” MacDonald wrote. “I know, because as a passenger aboard one of the planes making up the large force that battered the German capital I saw a great number of 4,000-pound high-explosive bombs and thousands of incendiaries blasting buildings right and left and starting widespread fires reminiscent of some of the big German raids we have gone through in London.”

MacDonald’s
Times
dispatch was spot-on regarding the impact of the air raid on the German capital, where Hitler resided. Emergency sirens echoed down Berlin’s streets and back alleys. The Fuhrer was reported to be shocked by a bombardment that deep into the Third Reich. On the heels of the successful British strike, the Eighth Air Force prepared a follow-up bombardment. The joint Allied Command decided that the RAF would bomb Nazi-held territory at night, while the Eighth Air Force would make more dangerous daytime raids. With the air war about to accelerate, other news organizations were scrambling to catch up after
The New York Times
’s Berlin bombing raid scoop. For his part, Cronkite was pushing hard to be in the forefront of coverage of the air war for UP. “It was a question of befriending the right guys in the Eighth,” Rooney recalled. “Walter was a charmer at that.”

Just weeks after Cronkite arrived in London, the Eighth Air Force was set to join the RAF in the attack on the German homeland. And having weathered almost a year of impatient criticism, the Eighth Air Force had no intention of keeping its new initiative quiet. It embraced UP and other wire services with vigor, arranging access to the otherwise strictly guarded air bases, making crews available for interviews, and suggesting potential stories. Cronkite astutely befriended the public relations officers, whose trade was ideas—both giving them and helping to realize them. Around Molesworth air base, Cronkite became known for collecting all the spine-chilling, unnerving stories of the Mighty Eighth crews as they returned from their missions. He was the group’s Ernie Pyle.

A master of small talk, Cronkite would often just shoot the breeze about BBC’s popular radio program
It’s That Man Again
or the latest pinup girl in
Yank
. A popular sport for the Mighty Eighth airmen was a contest to paint the sexiest gals possible on the sides of the B-17s and B-24s. Cronkite, who loved raunchy jokes, used to write the filthiest slogans imaginable to paint on the fuselage—they were too dirty to ever be used. To develop sources and earn trust, he would treat officers from the Eighth to dinner at Grosvenor House, whose restaurant reminded him of the Muehlebach Hotel grill room in Kansas City. He learned about how the bomber crews had been grappling with high-altitude flights, where they had to contend with the lack of oxygen and extreme cold. But he didn’t just talk shop at these meals. It was important to befriend officers if he hoped to be invited on bomb runs. The U.S. Army Pictorial Service got quite a few shots of Cronkite and buddies clowning around like hooligans with soldiers from Poland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Canada, and Norway. Cronkite called their booze-fueled confabs a “babble of tongues.”

The Mighty Eighth pilots credited Cronkite for bringing Dixieland jazz into their lives. Walter could
swing
. Along with Herb Caen, the legendary
San Francisco Chronicle
reporter, Cronkite formed a band called the Latrios (because they practiced mainly in the latrines, where the acoustics were excellent). Cronkite could “play” bass fiddle with his voice. Caen was hot on the mouth trombone. Collie Small of
The Saturday Evening Post
had mastered “playing” the trumpet through his clasped hands. The musical trio memorized the Mills Brothers catalog, perfecting renditions of “Sweet Georgia Brown” and the “Bugle Call Rag.”

One evening, the Latrios decided to perform around Piccadilly, starting with their version of “King Porter Stomp.” Midsong, a large chamber pot full of water was dumped on their heads from above, followed by a loud . . .
Shut up
! The three correspondents raced into the building and up a stairwell to confront their attacker. A dozen or so GIs appeared to be sleeping with the lights out. Caen, in “Blood n’ Guts” Patton-mode, barked, “Who threw the chamber pot?” A silence filled the room. “I’m counting to three,” an angry Caen shouted, but no one confessed. The Latrios headed back down the stairs, deciding to let the matter rest. All they heard as they beat their retreat was a huge collective laugh from all of the GIs, at their expense. The Latrios disbanded not long after getting drenched.