Cronkite (13 page)

Although Christmas 1944 was a turning point for the Allies, there was still great suffering and death during the first two weeks of January. After the Battle of the Bulge ended on January 25, 1945, Cronkite returned to London and spent much of the next few months there. As a war correspondent, Cronkite’s unintentional problem in 1944 and 1945 was that he was always just on the outskirts of the action area. But he was the UP authority on the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Belgium. That counted for a lot. The filings from London, as Allied forces pushed into Germany, kept him busy at the United Press bureau, but he was occasionally sent back to the Low Countries to report from the field. Like most U.S. reporters, he didn’t care much for Montgomery, perhaps as a result of attending too many of his briefings. “He really didn’t deserve the credit he got,” Cronkite insisted. “In Europe he sat on the Rhine intolerably long.” While stuck in Luxembourg, Cronkite befriended General Bradley. The only problem was that the gripping news was coming out of Bastogne, not the Cravat Hotel.

What Cronkite did gain from the Second World War was the ability to say he’d been a war correspondent. Murrow, Collingwood, Sevareid, Liebling, and, yes, Cronkite had become famous names. Unlike Murrow and his CBS Boys, Cronkite hadn’t pioneered the use of recordings from a C-47 flying over Holland or captured the gunfire ratchet of house-to-house combat in Aachen, Germany. However, he had gone on a combat bombing mission over Germany and been through D-day, Operation Market Garden, and the Battle of the Bulge (largely from the remove of Luxembourg). That was a damn impressive résumé.

During the Second World War (and the early cold war years that followed) the Charles Street Club in London was a favorite hangout for international newsmen. Everybody raved about how well the martinis were shaken and served. Don Hewitt, destined to become one of the most successful producers in television history, was hanging out there one afternoon, minding his own olives, when the United Press bureau chief walked up to the crowded bar. Suddenly everybody was whispering in awe. “Before you knew it, you could hear people saying, ‘You know who that is? That’s Walter Cronkite,’ ” Hewitt recalled in his memoir,
Tell Me a Story
. “Today, fifty years later, people still say, ‘You know who that is? That’s Walter Cronkite.’ ”

To his credit, Cronkite didn’t try to milk his World War II experiences for personal glorification. In fact, he liked to tell the story of the day in September 1944 when he and Bill Downs, after participating in the Market Garden glider landings in the Netherlands, were riding in a Jeep down Highway 69 (dubbed “Hell’s Highway”) and sharing a wild kind of momentary euphoria when they ran into serious crossfire. Ack-ack gunfire echoed all around them. A mortar exploded within yards of their Jeep, sending the two correspondents scrambling for cover in a nearby drainage ditch. Cronkite and Downs kept their heads down, helmets firmly fastened, just as General Patton insisted, but the outcome was uncertain, to say the least. The flak seemed endless. They were terrified that death was upon them. “Downs, lying behind me, began tugging at my pants leg,” Cronkite recalled. “I figured he had some scheme for getting us out of there, and I twisted my neck around to look back at him. He was yelling to me: ‘Hey, just remember, Cronkite. These are the good old days.’ ”

On May 5, 1945, at the hamlet of Wageningen, near Arnhem and Nijmegen, German generals signed the protocols of capitulation surrendering Denmark and the Netherlands. V-E (“Victory in Europe”) Day had almost arrived, and rumors of an armistice were announced on the UP wire. Cronkite borrowed a U.S. Army command car to ride from Brussels to Amsterdam to witness the liberation celebration at Dam Square. The landscape he traversed was geographically low lying, with vast swaths of land below sea level. Since Nazi Germany had invaded the Netherlands five years earlier, in May 1940, the Dutch people had lived in terror daily. Their response to their liberators was ecstatic. “They pelted us with tulips until our car was fender deep in them,” Cronkite recalled. “Tulips are heavy flowers. In bundles they are dangerous. The only blood I spilled in the war was that day—hit by a bunch of tulips tied together with a piece of wire.”

Wearing his government-issue correspondent’s uniform, cuffs hemmed so high you could see his socks, Cronkite joined in the Amsterdam revelry on May 7, V-E Day in Holland (determined to stay sober, he limited his libations there). “I got a lot of garlands and heard a lot of welcoming speeches,” he later explained to
Time
magazine. “The Canadians were not amused.” (It was the Canadian Army and the Royal Canadian Air Force that had liberated the country.) This was the greatest day in Cronkite’s life, except for the day he married Betsy. An irrepressible joyousness, a downright rapture, swept over him at the realization that the Yanks had won, that Hitler was dead, that the people of the Netherlands had been liberated. Walter Cronkite, he gloated to himself, had been part of the historic liberation of Dutch soil. He was proud to be among the brave Dutch people, to whom he felt a bloodline connection. Wild yelps of jubilation echoed up and down the canals along Dam Square. Honking car horns created an almost single rumbling symphonic effect. Traffic was at a standstill. “The sound of Allied aircraft was the one sound of war the Dutch welcomed,” Cronkite recalled. “The Royal Air-Force came at night and the Americans during the day.”

On May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered to the rest of Europe. History was happening fast. Urgent UP stories needed to be filed from The Hague, Utrecht, Maastricht, Bruges, Antwerp, Luxembourg City, and Brussels. While Amsterdam was rip-roaringly festive, Cronkite headed south to The Hague, the capital of the Netherlands, to reclaim what had been the UP bureau before the Nazi occupation. To his utter amazement, he discovered that three former Dutch UP staffers had already reestablished the office and were waiting for a correspondent to appear. Cronkite had been able to save about a quarter of his income and now used his money to help his UP staff get proper food and clothing. “Through their tears of joy they couldn’t wait to tell me that they had a teleprinter available, that we could put the U.P. back in business,” he recalled. “With incredible courage, they had disassembled one of our teletypes before the Germans entered Amsterdam. Each of them had taken a third of the parts to hide in their homes. If they had been caught, they would have faced certain execution.”

Cronkite realized that the Dutch celebrations belied the simple, ineradicable truth of Europe in May 1945. Death and loss were looming everywhere. Reports came over the UP wire that were shocking. When Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz in Poland, ghastly new confirmation of the Holocaust was produced. A race for eyewitness accounts and photographs was on. The UP wanted copy about the dire fever of the immediate postwar situation: concentration camps, stolen art, dangerous dikes, flooded lands, widespread disease, and the devastation caused by the Soviet army. The list was long. “There were a number of great stories from the Netherlands,” Cronkite recalled, “but I didn’t get to print any of them because of the German surrender.”

While Cronkite was celebrating V-E week in The Hague, Murrow broadcast in a somber mood for CBS Radio from among the throngs massed in Trafalgar Square in London, unwilling to sound a trumpet. He had seen too much carnage to be unreservedly happy. He had been to the newly liberated Buchenwald camp in Germany that April. When Murrow took to the CBS Radio airwaves, he prayed for the Jewish people who had been victims of the most horrendous atrocities known to humanity. Compared with Murrow in London, covering top-level meetings going on in Whitehall and Westminster, Cronkite’s UP articles about the rebuilding of Dutch canal towns seemed bush league.

The United Press was still having Cronkite write uplifting boilerplate pieces about the victorious U.S. Army in Europe, morale-boosting copy aimed at producing Allied propaganda heroes because of the continued fighting in the Pacific. In fact, an argument could be made that Cronkite was flacking for the army under the guise of UP reporting. If his V-E journalism for UP was edited into an omnibus it could be labeled as nonfiction propaganda. “You can’t write horror stories every day,” Cronkite said in defense of hired-gun writers, “because nobody would read it, for one thing. It’s repetitious.”

As Cronkite intuited, once the euphoria of V-E Day passed, life in Europe was only a little less disturbing than it had been during the war, and the future no less uncertain. Throughout the Netherlands, war refugees roamed highways on foot, pushing wooden carts loaded with all they had. Displaced Dutch families were looking for relatives, retribution, or just a safe place to start life over. The Nazis had starved and beaten the Dutch, but had never defeated them. Vast tracts of blighted cities across the continent lay in rubble. More than 80 percent of Nuremberg, the Nazis’ showcase city in Germany, had been bombed out. There were shortages of nearly every commodity. For a reporter, the situation on the ground was overwhelming because the devilment of war could be churned up on every block. Throughout defeated Germany, everything looked wrecked as though by earthquake or eruption. Although not quite a pacifist with a capital
P
, Cronkite thought the Second World War taught that the age-old ways of militarism couldn’t continue in the second half of the twentieth century. No matter the circumstance in 1945, he declined to carry a pistol as he traveled dicey European neighborhoods where crime and chaos still reigned. He was strictly an observer of the destruction, not a participant.

On May 20, Cronkite wrote home from Utrecht about the abominable, inhumane conditions he encountered among the starved Dutch people. Tulips were being cooked into stews and soups. Eggs and milk were rare commodities. Medicine was not readily available. Adults looked like children because they were so gaunt from habitual malnourishment. Once-prosperous streets now looked like vales of poverty. “There is absolutely no food in this part of Holland,” a distraught Cronkite wrote. “It is impossible to tell you how bad things are. I have seen several persons faint in the streets from hunger. A prominent newspaper publisher whom I invited to meet me downtown said he could come but he couldn’t bring his wife. ‘Her feet are swollen too badly,’ he said, ‘no food, you know.’ The people are walking skeletons. Their eyes bulge from shrinking sockets and their skins are bleached of natural color. I find it sickening to sit across a desk and talk business with many of them.” For his part, Cronkite survived on the army rations he received as a member of the press that late spring of 1945. His government-issue uniform was always a ticket to special treatment.

For the rest of his life, Cronkite kept in contact with Dutch friends he made around V-E Day when he was setting up UP bureaus. When nobody else at UP (or later CBS) thought news from the Netherlands interesting enough for an American audience, Cronkite anchored pieces on how the Dutch dug massive drainage projects, built monumental dikes, and even found the wreckage of Allied and German planes from the war so bodies could be sent home. Whenever the opportunity came, Cronkite bragged that he was a Dutchman. The fact that President Franklin D. Roosevelt—of Dutch ancestry himself—was credited with winning the Second World War only made Cronkite prouder of his heritage. “It would serve America well to listen to Dutch thought and opinion regarding their continent,” Cronkite believed. “Our friends in the Netherlands are in a unique position to help us interpret European moods and directions.”

Cronkite’s pace didn’t slacken with the defeat of the Axis powers, but his role changed for a time. He helped UP rebuild its presence in Europe, and with the widespread destruction, there was plenty to write about. Besides scooping Associated Press, his UP directive was to rebuild the technological side of his company’s business in the Low Countries. United Press leased telegraph wires between European cities, but then had to find the equipment to send and receive messages. A veritable scavenger hunt was staged by Cronkite (even in Germany) to procure hard-to-find communications equipment.

Recognizing that Cronkite was an excellent manager of The Hague bureau, UP asked him to establish one in Brussels; the AP had just set up shop in Amsterdam. Working with Sam Hales, a UP salesman, Cronkite was able to procure a couple of Teletype machines from the Siemens electric plant in Germany. Spreading Belgian francs around like seed, Cronkite was able to buy wire on the Brussels black market to establish a transmission link with Paris. Not only did he reestablish United Press bureaus in Belgium, Luxembourg, and Holland after the war, he also opened one in Germany. In New York, the UP bosses recognized Cronkite’s managerial competence—an unusual quality for a roaming reporter. It was the beginning of Cronkite’s lifelong reputation for being a “company man” at heart. His understanding of the money-making aspects of news delivery would serve him well in the coming decades.

Because Cronkite had such interesting Eighth Air Force bomb run stories, he could have returned to the United States to write a history of General Eaker’s celebrated flyboys, marketing himself as the “Dean of the Air War.” His UP clippings from London between 1942 and 1945 would have been good bait for a publishing contract. A few of his foreign correspondent colleagues indeed went that route. A book deal for Harper and Row or Random House would have meant more money for Cronkite than the meager pay and migraine headaches associated with opening UP bureaus without much capital outlay. Or he could have returned to America to look for a radio job, as United Press’s David Brinkley did, starting as a news writer at the NBC affiliate in Washington, D.C., and moving into radio announcing by war’s end.

As the consummate print reporter, Cronkite didn’t think NBC Radio was a step up from being a UP bureau chief in the Low Countries. Jokingly, he boasted that he was part of the informal “Murrow-Ain’t-God Club,” which promoted print reporting over radio news. As of 1945 he had an uphill battle in making that case. Murrow remained in London after V-E Day, preparing to return to New York for good, and working to protect the jobs of his “Boys.” A few, exhausted by all that they’d done and seen during the war, entered other fields by their own choice. Charles Collingwood of CBS, for instance, married the actress Louise Allbritton and moved to the Hollywood Hills for a while. Eric Sevareid, locking himself in a secluded cottage on the Monterey Peninsula, remained with CBS, but after seven years as a correspondent, he was spent and struggling just to recognize his old self. “I had a curious feeling of age,” Sevareid wrote, “as though I had lived through a lifetime, not merely through my youth.”