Cronkite (11 page)

Cronkite’s lede for UP about the Wilhelmshaven raid was unlike that of any of the others. What made him proudest was that he trumped Bigart, the legendary
New York Herald Tribune
writer. Both Cronkite and Bigart felt lucky that February 27, for they were alive. The 303rd, their bomb group, suffered no losses. Exhausted from a long day’s raid over Germany, Cronkite, at the Molesworth base, read out loud to Bigart from his notebook. “Homer,” Cronkite said, “I think I’ve got my lede.” He then read to Bigart the following:

American Flying Fortresses have just come back from an assignment to hell—a hell of 26,000 feet above the earth, a hell of burning tracer bullets and bursting gunfire, of crippled Fortresses and burning German fighter planes, of parachuting men and others not so lucky. I have just returned with a Flying Fortress crew from Wilhelmshaven.

Bigart had a pronounced stutter. When he heard Cronkite’s histrionic text, he reportedly put his hand on Cronkite’s arm and moaned, “Y-y-y-y-you wouldn’t.” Decades later Cronkite, usually modest, boasted about his recounting of the Wilhelmshaven mission. “I swept the boards with my story on that,” he declared. “Particularly in the British press. Every British paper bannered my story.”

UP president Hugh Baillie encouraged his reporters to write the kind of copy that would attract lots of attention to the UP brand, as Cronkite’s Wilhelmshaven story did. In a cable sent to his European news manager, Baillie gave specific instructions for the type of writing he wanted to see from Cronkite and his peers: “Tell those guys out there to get the smell of warm blood into their copy. Tell them to quit writing like retired generals and military analysts, and to write about people killing each other.”

Salisbury, the UP London editor, wasn’t offended by the emotionalism of Cronkite’s account. Salisbury, in fact, later claimed to have suggested the “hell” metaphor, when Cronkite was at a loss for words after the raid. “Bigart, Cronkite and Hill were badly shaken by their experience,” Salisbury recalled. News that Bob Post was missing—and presumed dead—stunned them. Their nerves were raw with grief. Stricken with writer’s block, still shaken from the mission, Cronkite couldn’t get his story started properly. After typing a few lines, he’d rip the paper from his Smith-Corona, wad it into a ball, toss it away like a baseball, and start over. Salisbury recalled what happened next: “Finally, as his editor at U.P., I fed him a typical wire-service overline: ‘I flew through hell today.’ Walter eyed the words with some doubt, but finally modified the phrase and used it to lead his story.”

Cronkite’s dramatic Wilhelmshaven account may have been riddled with cliché images, but somehow it worked. Hundreds of newspapers used “Assignment from Hell” the first week and, remarkably, others were still running the Cronkite piece a month or more after the event. Nearly two decades later, the editor of the book
Masterpieces of War Reporting
, Louis Snyder, selected it over the other contenders as the best journalistic account of a World War II air mission.

The dispatch made Cronkite popular in America; it also brought him a new level of media accolades in Great Britain. The piece was neither beautifully written nor an incisive overview of a bombing mission, but for the first time, Cronkite allowed his readers to see inside him. “The impressions of a first bombing mission,” he admitted midway through the article, “are a hodgepodge of disconnected scenes like a poorly edited home movie—bombs falling past you from the formation above, a crippled bomber with smoke pouring from one motor limping along thousands of feet below, a tiny speck in the sky that grows closer and finally becomes an enemy fighter, a Focke-Wulf peeling off above you somewhere and plummeting down, shooting its way through the formation; your bombardier pushing a button as calmly as if he were turning on a hall light, to send our bombs on the way.”

Cronkite’s UP story came closer to what Murrow was doing on CBS Radio than most other wire service reporters would dare do. It was edgy in a contemporary way. In fact, Murrow’s unit immediately arranged with United Press to bring Cronkite in for a radio report. The night after the mission, Cronkite sat in a London studio, numb with fatigue, waiting for the airwaves to clear so that he could read the report he’d prepared. Time and again Cronkite started broadcasting, only to be told that the signal had faded. With blocked airwaves, he never was able to make that Wilhelmshaven broadcast for CBS Radio, but the exercise brought him to the attention of Murrow, who liked his relaxed reading style. Cronkite, it seemed, had a voice tailor-made for radio. Murrow usually hired journalists
despite
their voices. Because Murrow so often argued with Paul White over reporters who were ace writers and weak readers, there was a suspicion that he purposely favored bad voices. Nothing was further from the truth. He had developed his own vocal ability through long hours of grueling practice. He certainly valued the reporter who could deliver in both respects.

After Cronkite logged his UP report on Wilhelmshaven, a dark cloud of depression descended on him. The stark reality sank in: Bob Post had not returned. For a while Cronkite fantasized that Post was okay, a prisoner of war, captured on the ground and being treated with decency in some Nazi POW camp. Other crews in Post’s formation reported seeing the stricken plane going down near Wilhelmshaven, a wing missing. Others claimed they saw men parachuting out of the B-24 as it spiraled downward toward disaster. As a reporter, Cronkite worked hard to find out
exactly
what had happened, only to come up with contradictory facts. Such was the fog of war. What made Post’s death even more difficult was that his wife had recently arrived in London, ready for two days of R&R with her husband.

Once Cronkite submitted his United Press story, he composed a prose elegy for Bob Post that was imbued with a Fitzgeraldian sense of lost innocence. He tried to sound upbeat about his press colleague, letting the world know what a great bloke he was, but his typewriter kept hitting gloomy keys. “This is the story of Bob Post of the
New York Times
—the story he cannot write today,” Cronkite wrote in a United Press tribute. “It’s the story of a big lumbering bespectacled Harvard graduate who looked about as much like an intrepid airman as Oliver Hardy, but whose heart beat the same do-or-die cadence as the pilots and crew of the American bomber which he accompanied to doom somewhere over Wilhelmshaven.”

Unfortunately Cronkite’s tribute to Post didn’t get play in American newspapers. The U.S. government was hungry for morale-boosting, we-bombed-the-bejesus-out-of-Germany stories. Nothing about Post’s death worked as a morale-building Uncle Sam recruitment poster for the Mighty Eighth. In August 1943,
The New York
Times
officially declared Post dead, based on information obtained by the International Red Cross. Rooney, in retrospect, believed the whole push to embed with the Eighth was contrived and idiotic. Looking back on photos of the Writing Sixty-Niners in heavy fur-lined jackets, pants, flying overalls, fur-lined caps, goggles, and oxygen masks made him shake his head in disbelief. “I was scared to death of those missions,” he admitted. “Going up like that was a foolish thing to do. Reporters like to be close to the action. But what did we accomplish, really? Nothing. On those bomb raids over Germany all we did was take up space.”

Most of Cronkite’s post-Wilhelmshaven dispatches of 1943 recited facts in an organized way aimed at creating “personal heroism stories.” His first question to an airman was always “Where do you hail from?” What surprised Cronkite was how easily he abandoned all the rules of objective journalism he had learned in Mr. Birney’s class at San Jacinto High School and from Vann Kennedy at INS. All Cronkite stories now had one aim: spit in the eyes of the Nazis. “The Yanks are here, all right, and Adolf Hitler has good reason to worry about it,” he crowed in a May 15 UP article on the Mighty Eighth buildup. “One can’t go near an American base without catching the spirit of ‘we’ve got the stuff now.’ ”

PR officers were interested in exactly that sort of morale-boosting piece—something to encourage the army airmen as well as the we-are-all-in-this-together civilians back home. Most correspondents supplied the puffery only as necessary, to remain on good terms with the PR officers. Cronkite eagerly wrote propaganda for the good of the Allied cause. He was a reporter for Democracy. “We were all on the same side,” Cronkite later said, “and most of us newsmen abandoned any thought of impartiality as we reported on the heroism of our boys and the bestiality of the hated Nazis.”

No matter what Cronkite now wrote—even patriotic pablum—it was eagerly printed in U.S. newspapers. In New York, Hugh Baillie was extremely happy with his suddenly star reporter. It was as if Cronkite had a gold-starred passport after the Wilhelmshaven raid. As 1943 closed, he had achieved a bit of journalistic glory. His November 19 dispatch (“Nazi Air Force Seen Beaten at Every Turn”) ran in
The New York World-Telegram
and was circulated among the flyboys. But, missing Betsy terribly, he grew despondent after receiving a memo from UP’s New York bureau manager, Earl Johnson: “We do not have the least idea how many years this war will last, but we would be less than smart if we did not prepare for a long war.”

The eventual successes of the Mighty Eighth, which Cronkite documented at a time when the air war was hanging in the balance, had expedited the time frame of the Operation Overlord (D-day) invasion plan of Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Third Reich was losing planes at an alarming rate. Hitler was forced to pull his Luftwaffe from northern France to defend the German homeland. When
Playboy
magazine asked Cronkite about his Mighty Eighth experiences in 1973, the then–
CBS Evening News
anchorman responded, “I’m embarrassed when I’m introduced for speeches and somebody takes a CBS handout and reads that part of it because it makes me sound like some sort of hero.” Compared to Bob Post or Andy Rooney, Cronkite felt like an “overweening coward of the year” who was “scared to death” all the time. His rule was “to avoid getting into combat.”

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

Dean of the Air War

SHADOW OF MURROW—SAVILE CLUB INCIDENT—FAVORITE WAR STORY—ORCHESTRATED HELL—THE AMAZING 303RD—A TOUCH OF FAME—HAVE I BEEN SIDELINED?—D-DAY AT LAST—FLYING IN A B-17—PEA SOUP FOG—WAS THAT OMAHA BEACH?—REFLECTIONS WITH EISENHOWER—THE BIRTH OF TV JOURNALISM

A
fter the Wilhelmshaven mission, as Cronkite reported the burgeoning air war for UP, CBS News occasionally asked him to deliver radio reports about flyboys. It was mainly the morale-boosting stuff—reports of Eighth Air Force baseball games and seeing Clark Gable in the flesh. United Press was more than willing to lend Cronkite out, on the theory that the CBS broadcasts broadened his, and UP’s, audience share. Cronkite even played the role of a fictionalized Walter Cronkite on three episodes of the action-adventure radio show
Soldiers of the Press
. Instead of G-men as heroes, World War II reporters were given the Superman treatment. The show was UP’s way to do PR, offer wartime propaganda, and let Americans know that wire service reporters were risking their lives for democracy. “It expressed the jargon and explained the processes of covering combat in a time when communication technology made live battlefield reporting impossible,” Cronkite later told NPR. “Dramatizations like these were a kind of reporting, sort of journalism once removed.”

With his firm, clear, and penetrative voice, Cronkite sounded distinguished on radio. He had a genius for accentuating syllables in a compelling way. In the fall of 1943, Murrow, a gifted talent scout, asked Cronkite to lunch at the Savile Club in London, a rarefied gentlemen’s institution that had counted Kipling and Darwin as members. For Cronkite, getting to dine with Murrow was the high point of his time in London. He found the chain-smoking broadcaster extremely erudite, exhibiting his broad range of knowledge brilliantly in conversation. He was a natural newsman, larger and looser than Cronkite had expected. After some good-natured casual chat, Murrow offered Cronkite employment at CBS. According to Murrow, Cronkite’s first posting would be a prominent one—Stalingrad—and his base pay would be $125 per week, more than twice the $57.50 he received from United Press. It was a heady offer.

The former UP night-shift deskman from Kansas City—Walter Cronkite of St. Joseph along the Missouri River—was being courted by Edward R. Murrow at the prestigious Savile Club in London. Imagine that! The spirit of Horatio Alger was still alive and well in America. Murrow had assembled the stellar group of war correspondents for CBS that came to be known as the Murrow Boys. This collection of acolytes was a genuine phenomenon from 1939 on. Focused and brimming with confidence, the Murrow Boys moved stealthily and quickly in pursuit of a story. Although the typical journalist of the era was more slovenly and sardonic, the Murrow Boys were dapper and knew how to make a great martini. This group—which included Cecil Brown, Winston Burdett, Charles Collingwood, William Downs, Thomas Grandin, Richard Hottelet, Larry LeSueur, Eric Sevareid, Howard K. Smith, and (the lone woman) Mary Marvin Breckenridge—constituted the cream of the crop of wartime radio journalism. Cronkite didn’t waste much time accepting Murrow’s generous offer to become CBS Radio’s eyes, ears, and voice in Stalingrad. Cronkite and Murrow shook hands on the new job. “I guess he was looking for cannon fodder more than broadcaster,” Cronkite later joked about getting the Stalingrad beat. “But I accepted.”

Cronkite immediately zipped over to the UP office and told his boss, Harrison Salisbury, about the exciting CBS Radio offer, adding, with a degree of breast-beating, that he intended to seize the life-changing opportunity to work with Murrow. When Salisbury heard the details of CBS’s lucrative (by journalism’s meager standards) offer, he suddenly remembered a telegram that (so he claimed) had been sitting on his desk for three days. The message was from UP president Hugh Baillie; it increased Cronkite’s salary by 25 percent. Cronkite was flattered. Describing Baillie’s feelings toward Cronkite as paternal, Salisbury handled his reporter with finesse, saying he
knew
Cronkite wasn’t the sort of low-rent cad to abandon his Unipresser “family” for CBS in the middle of World War II. Wasn’t he a team player? “Well, he drove a stake right in my heart,” Cronkite recalled, “because I loved the U.P., I really did.” Nonetheless, Cronkite left Salisbury’s office reiterating that he had already agreed to CBS’s handsome offer.

The same evening, the telephone rang in Cronkite’s shabby London hotel room. His roommate, Jim McGlincy, a fellow UP reporter, fielded the call. It was Baillie—their boss—on the other end of the line. Somehow Baillie had placed a call from New York to this London flophouse, which was by itself a difficult feat in wartime. Once he and Cronkite established that they could hear each other clearly, Baillie, through a backbeat of static, went to work. “He gave me a sales pitch like you never heard in your life before,” Cronkite recalled. “And he said, ‘I’m going to raise you $20 a week just to show my good faith. You’re going to be president of the United Press before you’re 30.’ ” Cronkite was overwhelmed. Yet even when Walter was overwhelmed, he tended to his interests where money was concerned. “I said,” Cronkite recounted, “ ‘Does that include the $17.50 that Salisbury just told me already?’ There was kind of a long pause, and he said, ‘No, no, no, this is on top of all that,’ which meant I was going up to $95 a week, a huge amount for United Press.” Flattered and happy to stay in London with the boys of the Mighty Eighth, Cronkite reversed his Murrow decision and told Baillie that he would indeed remain a proud Unipresser.

Had Cronkite’s decision been based only on money, he’d have jumped to CBS without a backward glance, but other root factors were also at play. In the first place, he had yet to be truly convinced that broadcast radio was a moneymaking vocation. Although Murrow was all the rage, his own experience announcing Oklahoma football games had left him cold. On a more personal level, he was less than eager to become one of the Murrow Boys like Sevareid and Smith, trying to ride the Great One’s coattails to fame. As sterling a career opportunity as the CBS gig might have been, it would have entailed abandoning print journalism and the Eighth Air Force, whose flyboys were like family to him. And, it should be added, he
definitely
preferred living in wartime London than wartime Stalingrad.

Cronkite scheduled an appointment to see Murrow immediately. They met again at the Savile Club. Cronkite knew the legend deserved to hear of his reconsideration man-to-man. Unlike on previous occasions, Cronkite now noticed how deeply penetrating the CBS broadcaster’s eyes were as he stared at him. Sheepishly Cronkite reported that he would be staying at United Press after all. Murrow was incensed at the about-face. From Murrow’s perspective, Cronkite was reneging not just on a CBS job offer but on a Savile Club handshake, a matter of honor: an agreement between gentlemen. Murrow was wounded by Cronkite’s reversal but was too diplomatic to chide Cronkite for his decision to stay at UP. They shook hands as they parted. “I don’t think it cost him any prestige,” Cronkite guessed, “because it all happened within twenty-four hours.”

Murrow was eight years older than Cronkite—not a great gap, but one that saw Murrow in a secure career as of 1943, when he was thirty-four. The underling Cronkite, at twenty-seven, was still—as Andy Rooney of
Stars and Stripes
had put it—“scrambling.” Later in life Murrow, as was his wont, claimed he didn’t recall the Savile Club incident. But according to Cronkite, Murrow intimated that Cronkite had parlayed the CBS offer into a higher salary from Baillie. That was, Murrow believed, low-road behavior. Cronkite didn’t quite see it that way. Although he and Murrow would work professionally together at CBS, their personalities never meshed; permanent friction existed between them. “Murrow couldn’t believe it,” Stanley Cloud and Lynn Olson explained in
The Murrow Boys
. “How could Cronkite prefer the formulaic writing and anonymous existence of a U.P. reporter to life as a CBS correspondent?”

As
The
Wall Street Journal
aptly put it, “a certain chill” pervaded Cronkite’s relationship with the Murrow Boys “for the rest of his career.” After turning down the CBS offer, Cronkite was too busy covering the Eighth Air Force beat to worry about his Q factor with Murrow, who had won the Peabody Award for his broadcasts from a besieged London. After nearly a year covering the air war for United Press, Cronkite continued to draw publicity of his own. His byline, as part of a deliberate campaign by UP to tout its own correspondents, had earned a certain cachet. Cronkite was made available for radio interviews and was the subject of discussion throughout the United States in newsrooms. In November 1943,
Look
magazine featured an article by Cronkite reliving the flight over Wilhelmshaven as “My Favorite War Story.” And Murrow never blacklisted Cronkite from reporting on CBS Radio. “Despite my turning down Ed’s offer, CBS kept inviting me to do pieces on the air,” Cronkite recalled. “They kind of used me as an air war correspondent. . . . And, later, sometime in 1945, I was on CBS’s weekly roundup of war news. I did a piece for them. So I had a connection with CBS through that whole period.”

United Press was paying Cronkite what it considered an enormous salary and it wanted to turn him into a household name. Celebrity reporters were good for business. In January 1944 the wire service released a story about Cronkite, anointing him in the headline as the “Dean of the Air-War Writers” for his heroic interviews with bombardiers, flight engineers, and radar technicians based at Molesworth. In terms of the American air assault from British bases, it was true: he had helped UP come in first with scoops on the broadening extent of bombing during 1943. By the end of that year, the Eighth Air Force comprised two hundred thousand military personnel. It was capable of sending more than two thousand Flying Fortresses (B-17s) and Liberators (B-24s) into the air on a single day. But the death of Bob Post meant that journalists were now rarely allowed to go along on a bombing run. Murrow campaigned heavily to do so and was repeatedly turned down, until December 1943, when he was taken on a bombing mission to Berlin with the RAF. His vivid account was a major news story, easily eclipsing anything by UP’s “Dean of the Air-War Writers.” Murrow, to Cronkite’s amazement, called the Berlin bombing “a kind of orchestrated hell.” Cronkite childishly thought Murrow had stolen his Wilhelmshaven “hell” metaphor.

No reporter spent more time hanging around the Molesworth Boys and drinking at the Cross Keys tavern than Cronkite. When the men of the 303rd Bomber Group came back from missions, Cronkite, their chronicler, would dutifully record their harrowing recollections. Most of his prose sketches never made it into UP articles, but the flyboys liked thinking that if they were killed in action, then at least Cronkite would be able to let America know how brave they had been. In February 1944, Cronkite boarded
Shoo Shoo Baby
—named after a song by the Andrews Sisters and famously plastered with a towering image of Bugs Bunny—and fastened his flak jacket. By now, he had learned how to write about the plane’s two waist-gun emplacements and top-turret gunner’s perch like a pro. He considered himself a veteran war correspondent.

On this bombing mission, he sat between bombardier F. E. Umphress Jr. and navigator Kenneth Olsen. But he later joked that he had turned his life over to Captain Bob Sheets, known as one of the best U.S. pilots in England, a man who hated Nazis more than the clap. Cronkite knew from interviewing Sheets after previous missions that he wasn’t afraid of Focke-Wulf 190s or Messerschmitt 109s. The gutsy Sheets actually liked going after the Luftwaffe. He thought dueling with the Nazi pilots over the North Sea was exhilarating for a singular reason: he always won.

Still, even with a ballsy pilot like Sheets, the risk that February was very real. The B-17 Cronkite had flown on in an earlier mission, for example, a plane called
S-for-Sugar
, had been shot down while dropping five-hundred-pound demolition bombs on an aircraft assembly plant in Oschersleben, Germany. All of the men on board perished. So Cronkite’s gallows humor before the mission was actually a camouflage for fear. Years later, when writing about the 303rd in his memoir,
A Reporter’s Life
, Cronkite signed a photograph to his old B-17 pilot that read: “For Captain Bob Sheets—with a lifetime of gratitude for getting us back.”

By late March 1944, Cronkite, while not privy to classified information, knew that the Allied invasion of France was approaching. Betting on the exact day, place, and time of the invasion had become a parlor game for Molesworth beat journalists. The waiting game kept Cronkite on high alert. But as Cronkite’s fourth wedding anniversary approached—March 30, 1944—he also grew lovesick for Betsy. “I just sent you a cable . . . saying the only thing I seem to be able to think,” Cronkite wrote his wife. “That the first two years seemed to go so quickly, and the last two have dragged so horribly. Two whole years out of our lives. It makes this war with Hitler a pretty personal matter.”

A glitch occurred that almost prevented Cronkite from covering D-day. For some reason, Cronkite wasn’t selected to be the UP reporter covering the Normandy invasion. The decision made that May was that Jim McGlincy would be one of the five hundred correspondents chosen for the invasion across the Channel. The snub stung. He was mystified as to why he was being benched. In a letter to Betsy he conveyed how “broken hearted” he was at not being chosen. But he did, in the end, play a minor role in the D-day landings.

At 1:30 a.m. on June 6, 1944, he was shaken awake in his London hotel room by a friend, Major Hal Leyshon, the PR man from the Eighth Air Force, madly pounding on his door. A breathless Leyshon told Cronkite, “We’ve gotten a new mission with the Eighth Air Force. And it’s going to be a highly dangerous operation, very dangerous, something we’ve never done before.” Leyshon told Cronkite he would have the
first
and
best
story of the cross-Channel assault. “There’s a pretty big story breaking,” Leyshon concluded. “I think you better come with us.” Cronkite quickly changed clothes and grabbed his bag. Once they were in Leyshon’s sedan, driving through the dark, Cronkite received a full explanation. “The invasion is about to start,” Leyshon said. “We’re sending a B-17 bomber group over the coast at low altitude as a spearhead.”