Cronkite (14 page)

Cronkite, by contrast, was not given to the introspection of Sevareid or the joie de vivre of Collingwood. The ultimate anti-Proust, he was opposed to navel-gazing. By choice, he kept doing the job at hand for United Press in war-torn Brussels, refusing to retreat to the United States. He wasn’t looking for transcendent truths or existential epiphanies; his guiding lights were bylines and paychecks. Even as other reporters thought of themselves as intellectuals, Cronkite, the Longhorn dropout, prided himself on being a tradesman. He was trained to report, so he did. His primary concern was finding the best vantage point, just out of harm’s way, from which to write a story. After all, the United States was still fighting the Japanese. Rest and relaxation were premature. World War II wasn’t over by a long shot.

When the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima that August 6, to the surprise of everyone, Sevareid and Collingwood read the historic news in California newspapers. As Sevareid wrote, he was “in a kind of mental coma for days.” For Cronkite, learning about Hiroshima made him feel that America was invincible. Putting his military aviation know-how to work, he wrote about what the
Enola Gay
drop—of an atomic bomb containing sixty kilograms of uranium-235—meant from the limited perspective of war-weary refugees in Holland and Belgium.

The end of World War II came on August 15, after a second atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki six days earlier. Six years of miserable war had left 70 million dead. Civilian casualties had outpaced military deaths by a three-to-two margin. A new wave of investigative journalism was needed to take historical stock of the global war. Cronkite, now a veteran of foreign wars, was in the profession for the long haul; he wasn’t ready to return to the U.S. mainland, even though Betsy was waiting for him with arms open wide. History was being made in devastated Europe, where millions were without homes, not in Kansas City’s Chamber of Commerce meetings. No returning to the normalcy of hamburger cookouts, Clark Gable matinées, and the Andrews Sisters for Cronkite. Having been assured that he was on track for a managerial position at UP, he remained in Europe to await assignment to one of the war-torn capitals that would showcase his vital reportorial abilities and sharpen his geopolitical understanding.

Even though Cronkite was living in Brussels, his best UP stories came out of defeated Germany. He was able to score a number of key interviews with Nazi collaborators being rounded up for trial. After General Patton was mortally wounded in an automobile accident that December 1945, Cronkite attended his funeral in Luxembourg. Then, in late 1945, he was assigned to a UP team to cover the war crimes trials at Nuremberg, Germany. Every news organization sent first-string reporters to watch the Nazi war criminals being administered justice, including Drew Middleton for
The New York Times
, Marguerite Higgins for the
New York Herald-Tribune
, Louis Lochner for AP, and Howard K. Smith and William Shirer for CBS. Novelist John Dos Passos, author of the masterful
U.S.A. Trilogy
, was even there with notebook in hand for
Life
.
The
New Yorker
had sent Janet Flanner and Rebecca West.

The courtroom was an old German theater, and Cronkite, along with the correspondents from twenty-three countries, competed for the best tip-up maroon seats in the press gallery. The courtroom was flooded with bright lights for the newsreel cameras. Cronkite thought he was at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, not in a city that had been bombed to rubble.

C
HAPTER
N
INE

From the Nuremberg Trials to Russia

COVERING THE NUREMBERG TRIALS—MOVING TO MOSCOW—DATELINE KREMLIN—CLOSED SOVIET SOCIETY—DOWN WITH
PRAVDA
—FEELING OPPRESSED—THE 1948 POLITICAL CONVENTIONS—MURROW AND TV—ANCHORMAN WANTED—DREAMING OF TV AMERICA

F
iling UP stories from Nuremberg in late 1945 and early 1946 was a difficult task. All day long, Cronkite wore heavy headphones to listen to the English translation of the war crime trials. Wiring a daily story with staff research help, he explained the intricacies of the international military tribunal—mankind’s first attempt to establish legal standards of responsibility for wartime atrocities—to his readers. He also tried scooping the other news organizations from sunrise to sunset. This was a double burden. Exclusives weren’t easy to get. All the correspondents were cloistered together, hearing the same testimony. Differentiating copy was mostly a matter of detail and style.

But there was keen courtroom drama for Cronkite to write about as twenty-one of the most heinous captured Nazis—some wearing dark sunglasses as protection from the bright lights—faced the bench for crimes against humanity. (Three Third Reich architects—Adolf Hitler, head of the SS Heinrich Himmler, and minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels—had committed suicide rather than be captured.) “Sitting there for the first time and seeing these twenty-one men who had caused such horror in the world I actually felt sick,” Cronkite later explained in a documentary for PBS’s
American Experience
series. “They had come into the dock as if this was not a fair proceeding, as if they knew they were going to hang already, why go through the whole thing.”

As chief UP correspondent for the trials, Cronkite was able to arrange for Betsy to come live with him in Nuremberg. Decent quarters were tough to come by, but the resourceful Cronkite managed to co-opt a private guesthouse about five hundred feet from Faber Castle, where most of the other journalists resided. The privacy allowed Betsy and him to enjoy themselves almost perversely as the trials went on. “We’d get drunk around the bar and debate the value of the trial and whether there should be
ex post facto
justice,” Cronkite recalled. “We discussed all the arguments.”

The fact-gathering assistance of his UP colleague Ann Stringer was key to Cronkite’s ability to break news from Nuremberg. A salty Texan whose journalist husband, Bill Stringer, had been killed covering D-day for Reuters, Ann had previously scooped the first meeting of Russian and American troops along the Elbe River. According to Cronkite, his wife was just as intent at Nuremberg to outreport the press boys. “The real skill,” he recalled of her, “was in getting tipped off to documents that were in the files before they were brought into trial and to get access to them. Ann Stringer worked the prosecution staff pretty well on these documents.” Everybody knew the Nazis being charged were guilty, that the Third Reich had violated the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 (which renounced all war), the Geneva Conventions (which created the Red Cross and dictated terms for the treatment of prisoners of war), and The Hague Conventions (which established common rules of military engagement). To break news in Nuremberg, you needed inside information about how the Nazi prisoners were being treated in the courtroom. “We got a lot of damn good front page stories,” Cronkite recalled, “revealing the depths of the depravity of Nazi Germany.”

All the correspondents filed the same boilerplate accounts of the trials. While most reporters focused on architect and armaments minister Albert Speer—the notorious “Nazi Who Said Sorry”—Cronkite was more fascinated that president of the Reichstag and commander of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring, the unrepentant war criminal, wanted to die waving the bloody swastika. Cronkite managed to scoop the competition by procuring “new information” given to Allied investigators: that Göring’s financial fortune had been built on bribes from relatives of concentration camp inmates. For nine days Cronkite watched Göring get cross-examined. “On trial for his life,” Cronkite recalled, “Göring displayed on the stand all the arrogance with which he had set out to rule the world.”

What disturbed Cronkite the most at Nuremberg, what gave him nightmares for the rest of his life, were the films showing the Dachau death camps. According to Nazi criminals at Nuremberg, the prison was for political dissenters, habitual criminals, and religious fanatics. Cronkite practically vomited after seeing the “showers” (gas vents) in which cyanide powder was used to kill Jews. “As soon as the defendants saw the pictures, the film of the concentration camps, they began to whiten,” Cronkite recalled. “As a matter of fact, several of them cried. They weren’t crying, I don’t think, for the Jewish people who were lost. They were crying because they knew that, when those pictures were seen in the world, they had no way to escape execution.”

Cronkite was deeply impressed by the professionalism of the American prosecutors at Nuremberg like Robert Jackson (U.S.) and Roman Andreyevich Rudenko (USSR). The amount of research they did in preparation for the trials was impressive by any standard. “There has been much criticism over the years that the trials were the imposition of ex post facto justice on a beaten enemy,” Cronkite told
Rolling Stone
in 1981. “But I’ve always felt they represented an effort to establish a judicial precedent for a system of world order before the outbreak of another war—after which, clearly it would be too late.”

In the late spring of 1946, UP allowed Cronkite to return to Missouri for a spell. With Betsy at his side, he was confronted by all their family and friends wanting to hear about the historic Nuremberg trials. Somehow Cronkite had acquired a tiny palm-size camera at Nuremberg and secretly photographed the trials of deputy führer Rudolf Hess, Göring, Reich Main Security Office director Ernst Kaltenbrunner, and others. It was against the rules, so he didn’t brag about his smuggling act to anybody in Europe. But he had souvenir postcard pictures of the greatest trial in world history. “I have a vivid memory of Walter coming to visit us in St. Joe,” his cousin Kay Barnes recalled. “His camera was amazing. It was just tiny. I couldn’t believe that Walter took pictures of the trials with something that small.”

Cronkite was no longer reporting the Nuremberg story at the time the verdicts were handed down that fall by the International Military Tribunal. In the summer of 1946, he was transferred to Moscow. He would now be stationed just blocks from the Kremlin. Having rejected Stalingrad when Murrow made the CBS offer in 1943, he took over UP’s crucial Moscow post three years later. There was also the good news that Betsy could remain with him in Russia. Cronkite’s primary job for UP in Moscow would be to interpret “Soviet Communists for the American public.” He and Betsy made hurried preparations, barely knowing what to pack for an extended stay in a Communist nation, where goods could be scarce. Cronkite later laughed that Betsy brought an abundance of golf balls—a game neither played at the time and one that the Soviets considered unabashedly bourgeois. “I was chief correspondent,” Cronkite later joked, “because I was the only correspondent of the United Press in Moscow at the time.”

Upon arriving in the Soviet capital, the Cronkites slept on the office sofa of Richard C. Hottelet, one of the original Murrow Boys, who’d been a POW of the Gestapo. Their imposition on Hottelet lasted for ten days. They had eighteen pieces of luggage with them but had lost the keys for the locks. Nothing was going well. Betsy Cronkite soon went to work for Voice of America to help make ends meet; she also smuggled out a lot of contraband food from the VOA offices at the U.S. embassy for her husband to eat at night. Betsy’s primary duty was to write what daughter Kathy would call “women’s journalism”—self-help stuff about how to be a military wife in the cold war (the popular phrase used to describe U.S.-Soviet postwar tensions).

Life was hard in Moscow, but Cronkite found it deeply educational. For the first time he read Tolstoy and Gogol. The Soviets had lost at least 26 million people during World War II and many families were still in mourning. Once the Cronkites procured a modest apartment, they discovered they didn’t even have a refrigerator; they left the milk bottles outside to stay cold. The electricity was hit or miss and the floorboards were rotting. At night, by stark contrast, the Cronkites were often invited to embassy functions where men dressed in white dinner jackets and caviar was served as an
amuse-bouche
. Moscow was to Betsy Cronkite “a last bastion of empire.” Even though the couple couldn’t afford a radio, they drank expensive French Merlot and Cabernet. Such aristocratic poverty was surreal. “They lived a dual existence, rich and poor,” Kathy Cronkite recalled. “The deprivations of Moscow wore them thin.”

The only Russian words Cronkite knew were “hello” (
privyet
) and “good-bye” (
do svidaniya
). The UP office was a short walk from the Kremlin and the American embassy. It consisted of a single room at the Hotel Metropol, a low-amenities art nouveau building that housed most of the English-language correspondents in Moscow. As Harrison Salisbury of
The
New York Times
recalled, “Life at the Metropol was a little like living in a prison run by the Mad Hatter. We had adjoining rooms, we ate together, travelled together, drank together, we suffered together and fought together, we knew who slept with whom and who didn’t and when the partners changed.”

Cronkite initially suffered from a bad case of “Ain’t Life Grand” intoxication in Moscow, a common malady for foreign correspondents living behind the Iron Curtain. He turned native, eating blini for breakfast and drinking vodka at night. With Betsy at his side he visited sights such as Lenin’s mausoleum, the Bolshoi Theatre, and St. Basil’s Cathedral, feeling the riptide of Russian history on every street corner. With UP picking up the tab, the Cronkites spent a long weekend in Leningrad and took a memorable cruise down the Volga. Right out of the gate, Cronkite wrote a colorful piece, full of lighthearted affection, about the differences between Russia and the United States. Datelined Moscow, the article ran in American newspapers on October 24, 1946: “Sprawled in a snowbank this morning I heard for the first time a guffawing belly-laugh by a Russian,” Cronkite began. “A heels-over-breakfast tumble, like a funny paper character who steps on a banana peel, is just as uproarious in Moscow as it is in New York or Mooselookmeguntic, Maine.”

If Cronkite’s initial UP articles from Moscow read like goofy travelogues or cornpone jokes, they at least catered to growing American curiosity about Soviet society, which had been painted as bleak and colorless throughout the Stalin era, particularly during the unyielding defense of the homeland during World War II. Cronkite’s articles showed that Muscovites were regular people who laughed, cheered, and flirted just like Americans. They were also the kind of pieces the Soviet press censors wanted foreign correspondents to write. The Soviet Union was a deeply totalitarian, closed society. To be a Western journalist in the USSR during the years right after the war was an exercise in frustration. Conflicting attitudes between the foreign correspondents and their Soviet hosts were coalescing, with a totalitarian government shielding its society from view. Cronkite responded to the handcuffed world of Moscow journalism by writing frequently on the subject of Soviet censorship—articles that he amazingly managed to file through the New York bureau.

Even as he failed to produce a single breaking news story during two years in Moscow, he became an operative in the snowballing American-Soviet cold war. At the time Walter and Betsy arrived, the USSR and the United States were still allies—wary ones to be sure, but joined in the afterglow of victory. Cronkite’s early articles reflected the friendly curiosity of Americans regarding Soviets. By 1947, with the Truman Doctrine (which stated that the United States would provide aid to Greece and Turkey to counter the encroaching Soviet influence) and the Marshall Plan (which offered American economic support to rebuild the economies of Europe during the postwar years) in place, the Kremlin treated reporters such as Cronkite as if they were OSS or newfangled CIA spies. One of Cronkite’s UP articles that drifted entirely away from hard news described his reportorial work in Moscow to the newspaper public in America, allowing them to understand the process by which news was gathered in the closed-door Soviet Union: “The foreign correspondent in Moscow is a blood cousin of a digest magazine editor,” Cronkite explained. “Ninety-five percent of the news he files from Moscow is gleaned from newspapers, magazines, or other periodicals.”

Soviet newspapers such as
Pravda
, the house organ of the Communist Party, obviously would not be trustworthy sources of facts, but Cronkite did archly quote a Soviet TASS news commentator asserting that President Harry Truman “wants to be the ruler of the universe and use England as his lackey.” Cleverly, he decided to cover
Pravda
—the censors couldn’t find a problem with that. There was much to catch the eye of the American reader as both amusing and frightening: “After the smashing of the German source of international reaction and criminal aggression, another such source was formed, no less dangerous. It is in the United States, its headquarters are on Wall Street. Its heads are Truman and [Secretary of State George] Marshall, its agents all over the world are American generals and diplomats, its hunting dogs are American capitalist papers.”

Cronkite cited that quotation in a UP article on the average Soviet’s conviction that the United States was planning an imminent attack on Russia. He, and the brand of journalism that he was allowed by both sides to practice, now focused on the widening cold war gulf between the two nations. In a small way, he contributed to the anti-Soviet attitude developing in America by quoting the most outrageous demagoguery of Russian leaders. By the time he approached the end of his Moscow hitch in September 1948, the world’s democracies no longer wanted to hear about the delightful way those melancholy Muscovites laughed when the winter weather played a trick.