Cronkite (15 page)

There were various reasons for Cronkite’s departure from Moscow after exactly two years. Betsy was expecting their first child and had left for the United States early in the summer of 1948, via West Berlin. She later bragged that she was part of the historic Berlin Airlift. Cronkite naturally wanted to go home to Kansas City to be near Betsy, to share in the joyous excitement of pregnancy. As he pointed out in
A Reporter’s Life
, as an expecting father, he was increasingly nervous about being arrested on one pretext or another by the Soviet authorities. He wanted to leave Russia as soon as possible.

Everything about living in the Soviet Union now felt overtly oppressive to Cronkite. Whatever veneer of excitement that had glossed over him in 1946 had been wholly stripped away by 1948. Under Stalin the Kremlin was ending its policy of “limited friendship to brotherly Western correspondents,” revoking even “marginal privileges.” He was impatient, too, with the church-mouse penury of UP, tired of its penny-ante ways while NBC and CBS were growing. UP was always steadily downsizing, whittling down its greatness, cutting corners only until the sawdust was left.

Cronkite liked to tell his own story about his relationship with UP circa 1948. Leonard Lyons, a gossip columnist for the
New York Post
, met him on his return to America and the result was an anecdote about the Cronkites’ life in Moscow. One day, they returned home to find that someone had painted a dollar sign on the door of their apartment. It was meant as an anticapitalist gesture. Betsy, known for her verbal zingers, made an off-the-cuff comment about how godawful poor journalists were. According to Lyons’s column, however, it was Walter who made the quotable remark. “If they had known I worked for the United Press instead of the Associated Press,” he said, “they would have put a cents sign on the door.” (Cronkite ever afterward insisted—not wanting to mock UP publicly—that the quote should have been “If they had known we were newspaper people, they would have put a cents sign on the door.”)

In New York, on a quick stopover on his way to see Betsy in Kansas City, Cronkite learned that he would not be receiving an expected pay raise—and that if he accepted UP’s offer of a posting in London, he would not receive any expense money. For Cronkite, one of the company’s highest-paid foreign correspondents, this was the equivalent of a pay cut, not a minor trespass on his integrity. His entire reportorial life had been consecrated to UP, his allegiance to the wire service sincere. But UP’s niggling for dollars caused him to break ranks. In truth, he might have already been tired of all that UP reminded him of: the grueling war coverage; the nomadic lifestyle of a foreign correspondent; the constant company of other heavy-drinking reporters, some of them friends, all of them competitors; the time zone distances from Kansas City.

By October 1948, Cronkite was feeling the urge to lead a normal life. Missing out on the GI Bill, which would have paid for him to finally get his college degree, he was light-years behind Murrow Boys in his industry such as Collingwood (class of ’39 at Cornell) or Sevareid (class of ’35 at Minnesota). Not having worked in America since the first year of the war, he didn’t know much about the country in the present postwar tense. He had not taken a serious vacation since he’d left Missouri for New York back in 1941; that was seven years on the front line in Europe and Russia. With a child on the way, Cronkite relished being back in the Midwest, in Kansas City, where the trolleys still ran on time and no one was a spy.

In 1948, although he didn’t know it yet, his life would soon change significantly. That year, for the first time, CBS televised the Democratic and Republican national conventions (both held in Philadelphia). There was a whiff of new technology about the TV coverage that was intoxicating to those with a nose for the future. Jack Gould, distinguished radio and television critic for
The
New York Times
, wrote an article that summer about the significant role TV was playing in the presidential election. While he admitted that a lot of the proceedings of the conventions were an “arduous grind” to watch, there was no escaping the hard, futuristic fact that TV’s influence on electing politicians was “going to be great indeed.” When Truman arrived in Philadelphia he was dressed to the nines, like a riverboat gambler at a wedding, wearing a white suit and dark tie that was “the best masculine garb for the video camera.”

What Gould saw missing from the 1948 TV convention coverage was a network master of ceremonies, a clever ringleader who could ad-lib when the marathon oratory got dull. Just as TV was going to place a premium on personality in politics, and being telegenic became almost a prerequisite for seeking national office, the networks needed to have a happy-go-lucky “anchorman”—a vague TV term not used regularly until 1952 and then specifically for Cronkite—to hold all the disparate parts together. In 1948 the seasoned CBS trio of Ed Murrow, Quincy Howe, and Douglas Edwards distinguished themselves from NBC by a long shot. The CBSers came off as good-natured, detached, and quick-witted. “In a town overrun with eager beavers,” Gould wrote in the
Times
, “the Messrs. Murrow, Howe and Edwards acted as relaxed and seasoned reporters.”

Murrow, it turns out, didn’t like the notion of being an anchorman for CBS TV. His past experiences at national conventions had left him cold; such events tended to degrade reporters’ professionalism, turning them into cheerleaders and spectators, clapping like silly sycophants at prewritten political speeches. Being obedient and rote was not the Murrow way. So there was a job opening at CBS. Although it wasn’t posted until four years later, for the 1952 conventions, CBS executives had an ad in mind: “Anchorman Wanted.”

Meanwhile, all across the United States, television affiliates for NBC and CBS were prospering. TV was incrementally becoming the communications medium of the future, and Cronkite wasn’t yet in the game, his sepulchral voice yet to be truly discovered.

PART III

Cold War Broadcaster

C
HAPTER
T
EN

Infancy of TV News

BABY BOOM FATHER—TRUMAN’S MISSOURI—GOING TO WASHINGTON, D.C., VIA KMBC—THE TV PIONEER—DOUGLAS EDWARDS—KOREAN WAR BEGGING—GROWING FAMILY—TV NEWS AT WTOP—WORKING WITH SHADEL—ONE-TAKE WALTER—TRUMAN GIVES CRONKITE A WHITE HOUSE TOUR—GETTING THE 1952 CONVENTION GIG—FACE TIME RULES

D
utiful and determined to be a hands-on father, Walter Cronkite was in Kansas City on November 8, 1948, when Betsy gave birth to their first child, Nancy, at St. Luke’s Hospital. He took a brief home leave from the United Press. While Walter was in Russia working, a pregnant Betsy had returned to Kansas City to live with Arthur and Eva Maxwell, her parents, at 3220 Agnes Avenue. “I raced half way around the world from Moscow to be present for the event,” Cronkite was fond of saying, “only to find my presence was not required.”

The Cronkites were participating in what became known as the Baby Boom, a phenomenon in the postwar years between 1946 and 1960 marked by a large increase in American births. Still a roving reporter, all he got to do was kiss newborn Nancy (the first of the Cronkites’ three children) before heading out on the road again for UP. “That’s the way it was in those days,” Nancy said. “The wife took care of the kids while the husband traveled for business.” What Cronkite realized upon his return to Missouri was that the United States—where baby items such as diapers, baby food, and infant clothes were easy to come by—was ideal for raising a family. Before Cronkite left for New York (and then back to Moscow), he had lunch at the Kansas City Club with Karl Koerper, vice president and general manager of KMBC, the CBS affiliate in Kansas City. Looking for career headway and anxious to move back to America, Cronkite suggested to Koerper that KMBC needed an able Washington-based correspondent. The pitch was that Cronkite would move to the District of Columbia on behalf of KMBC. The
Kansas City Journal-Post
was defunct and Cronkite theorized he could pick up the slack with radio broadcasts from Washington aimed at a Midwest—particularly Missouri and Kansas—audience. “It was a very fine, responsible radio station,” Cronkite recalled of KMBC, “the sixth station Bill Paley had put together of the original CBS network.”

Koerper, hoping to scoop up a talent like Cronkite, had KMBC hire Cronkite. Eventually ten radio stations across the Midwest would air Cronkite’s syndicated radio reports. In a glass-half-empty sense, Cronkite’s KMBC job was a demotion; he was reaching only a regional audience, not a national one. It was a step up, though, in the entrepreneurial aspect of running his own broadcasting operation, with clients but no bosses. In addition, the KMBC syndicate offered twice the salary he’d been receiving at UP in Moscow. What new father wouldn’t like that? While his bosses at UP were unhappy about his departure, they understood what double the salary meant to a family man. Truth be told, any news organization—even
The New York Times
—would have been lucky to employ Cronkite. What one columnist at the New York
Daily News
wrote about Cronkite in 1965 was already his reputation in journalism in 1948: “Solid as a mountain,” and “As reliable as the sunrise.”

In the 1930s, Cronkite had bounced back and forth many times between his first love, newspapers, and the new medium of broadcast radio. With his move to Washington in December 1948, though, his newspaper-reporting days were finished. Electronic broadcasting was still young and had yet to tap its full potential. The same was true of Cronkite, the newest voice in radio news at KMBC. “When Walter got into radio everybody was trying to sound like Ed Murrow,” veteran CBS correspondent Bob Schieffer recalled. “I mean even Charles Kuralt tried to sound like Murrow. Not Walter. He had his own, very distinctive way of talking. I don’t know where it came from. He came from Kansas City and grew up in Texas and lived a lot overseas. What ended up happening was that by the 1960s everybody at CBS Radio started sounding like Cronkite, not Murrow. He had taken over the cadence of the network.”

A columnist for the Kansas City
Atchison Daily Globe
, Jim Carson, ballyhooed Cronkite’s new KMBC assignment as a regional boon. “Cronkite is in Washington to establish headquarters,” Carson wrote on January 9, 1949, “and will begin his reporting about the first of February. Plans call for Cronkite to provide a daily news spot for each of the stations from our Nation’s capital. . . . Localized news, as it affects Missourians and Kansans, will be scheduled on a quarter-hour program each week.” The scuttlebutt in Kansas City, encouraged by Cronkite, was that his being a Missouri boy would open up access to President Truman himself. But in truth, the White House was new turf to Cronkite, a mystery mansion akin to mammoth caves. He had no “in” with Truman.

The Cronkites rented a little Georgian-style house across from Rock Creek Park and struggled a little to make ends meet, even though his new salary of over $15,000 a year lifted them into the upper middle class. It was more money than fellow Writing Sixty-Niners Andy Rooney or William Wade were making. He represented five states for KMBC: Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Furthermore, following a newsman’s primary instinct, he’d gotten to where the sizzling news of 1949 was: official Washington. Truman had defeated New Yorker Thomas Dewey in the 1948 election and was promising a Fair Deal to the American people. This meant the role of the U.S. government was going to grow. Because Cronkite was broadcasting for the Midwest, the Department of Agriculture was a mandatory part of his beat. Murrow was a semi-regular guest at the White House (joining Truman to dine with the likes of Charles de Gaulle and Winston Churchill). Cronkite, by contrast, was hanging out with wheat surplus traders and stockyard operators from Des Moines and Fargo.

One of the stories Cronkite covered in Washington for KMBC was the rise of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican, and his determined hunt for Communists employed by the federal government. Speaking out against McCarthy was a dangerous idea for a radio or television reporter. The senator was at the forefront of a popular movement that portrayed communism as a threat as despicable as Nazism and even more insidious. To denigrate McCarthy was to appear, in many people’s eyes, disloyal to American democracy. More pointedly, McCarthy indignantly investigated those who were at odds with him and freely substituted innuendo—even rank falsehoods—for hard facts. Very few broadcasters had either the bedrock courage or unassailable reputation—let alone job security—to withstand implication by McCarthy. But Cronkite did. In May 1950, he was asked to speak to the Rotary Club in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a city whose WMT radio carried his District of Columbia reports. He might have chosen a safe topic, but instead he bluntly branded McCarthy a fearmonger—earning the respect of the White House. According to the Cedar Rapids
Gazette
, Cronkite said that McCarthy “has contradicted himself and proved little in his investigation of alleged Communists.” No recording of Cronkite’s Rotary Club speech exists today, but he insisted he didn’t cower before his audience that day. “I couldn’t believe that anybody was going to take McCarthy seriously,” Cronkite recalled. “I thought he represented a kind of fringe fanaticism and personal ambition that wouldn’t be followed by anyone of import.”

In Washington, Cronkite had access to the CBS office at the National Press Club. His able assistant Eileen Shanahan, who went on to become a reporter for
The New York Times
, was tasked with mining daily White House and USDA news releases for valuable radio nuggets that would interest a Great Plains audience. Although Cronkite was good at ad-libbing, he had trouble finishing his reports on time. Working for the UP had been far different from his new job at the Midwest radio syndicate. Timing was now key to his position. It was also essential for him to cultivate Washington insider sources. Using connections first developed at
The Daily Texan
, Cronkite was able to fall in with the Texas delegation on Capitol Hill. “Walter being Walter, he got to know [Speaker of the House] Sam Rayburn pretty well,” Andy Rooney recalled. “When I saw him in Georgetown one afternoon, he one-upped me by drinking bourbon with Rayburn.”

While Cronkite was adjusting to the demands of radio, Ed Murrow was facing the challenges of television. He wasn’t happy about being a bifurcated CBS reporter. “I wish television,” he said in 1949, “would go to hell.” Perhaps TV was Satan’s tool, Cronkite felt like telling Murrow, but the medium wasn’t going to be granted an exit visa anytime soon. Radio news had taken twenty years and a world war to learn to take full advantage of its inherent strength. At its best, in the hands of someone like Murrow, radio news had become a public art, a partnership between reporter and the listener. Television, on the other hand, was far from an art form in the late 1940s. Its newscasts looked like filmed radio, resulting in little more than spoken wire reports emitted to the viewer. “The people who say TV will destroy radio are as wrong as those who, twenty-five years ago, said that radio would kill the newspapers,” Murrow told Ben Gross of the New York
Daily News
. “I sincerely believe that radio news will become more and more important.”

Even as late as 1949, the potential of television news had yet to be seriously explored. “In the beginning,” said Sig Mickelson, the first director of CBS Television news, “the Murrows, Collingwoods, Sevareids wouldn’t deign to be caught in television. Television was for
Howdy Doody
and
Romper Room
. Radio was for adults.” In the early years of television, in fact, producers didn’t even know where to look for the potential. The priority, indeed, was the perfection of the on-air reading. Murrow, along with the producer Fred Friendly, had been doing a radio segment,
Hear It Now
, that was carried on 173 stations and won Peabody Awards. They were masters at script reading.

Douglas Edwards of CBS, the original face of TV news, ran his eyes over any script on the desk before him and then looked up into the camera to talk. He was smooth, but the bobbing of his head was regarded as a terrible distraction during his dinner-hour segment,
Douglas Edwards with the News
. In the truest sense of the word, Edwards was a journalism pioneer. Born in Ada, Oklahoma, in 1917, Edwards began his radio career as a teenager, working as a “junior” announcer at a 100-watt station, before cutting his teeth professionally at WKYZ in Detriot during the Great Depression. He didn’t have much in the way of star power, but he pushed on during a time when television news faced a bias vis-à-vis radio broadcasting. There were two main reasons for this: “First it was
television
,” Mike Conway explained in
The Origins of Television News in America
; “second it was
news
on television.”

Edwards’s fifteen-minute show on CBS was the only nightly news broadcast in early 1949. Later that year, NBC started its own competing TV news program, with John Cameron Swayze as host. Swayze, whom Cronkite had befriended when both were newspapermen in Kansas City, memorized the scripts for NBC’s nightly
Camel News Caravan
. In fact, Swayze had made his first TV appearance in 1933 by reading the newspaper out loud at an experimental facility in Kansas City. It was transmitted live from the building’s top floor and beamed into the lobby, where it could be watched on prototype sets. Arriving at NBC’s studios on East 106th Street in Manhattan at about three in the afternoon, the forty-three-year-old Swayze would sift through reports from United Press or NBC radio correspondents. After writing the script for his fifteen-minute show, he would read it out loud three or four times, and with that, commit it to memory. Swayze could ad-lib a bit, but his talent was delivering his program with straight-ahead verve.

When Swayze immediately captured the larger part of the available audience, CBS executives strongly encouraged Edwards to memorize his scripts. He couldn’t, and he didn’t think it was a good idea anyway. Although Edwards had started as a velvet-voiced announcer, he had struggled to establish credentials as a newsman and he didn’t want to devote too much of his time to learning words by rote.

The producer of
Douglas Edwards with the News
was a twenty-six-year-old maverick named Don Hewitt. Energetic, unafraid, and insistent, Hewitt, a native New Yorker, wasn’t comfortable until he had his way. A former photo editor for Acme Newspictures, he had joined CBS in 1949, and worked on
Douglas Edwards with the News
since its conception. If Hewitt had a pet peeve, it was Edwards’s on-air stiffness. Hell, he used to carp, Woodrow Wilson had been looser than Edwards. Long before the term
telegenic
was in vogue, Hewitt intuited that it was the key to a successful TV broadcasting career. Determined to loosen his guy up, Hewitt looked for a way to get Edwards to stop looking down at his script, even suggesting that he learn Braille. Based in New York, Hewitt and his CBS team experimented with cue cards and then settled on writing the script in large letters on a scroll, which turned just above the camera.

While Edwards and Hewitt were trying to jump-start CBS television in New York, Cronkite was in Washington, wondering whether he had dead-ended on KMBC radio. He missed the United Press. Few of the Midwest affiliate stations were properly using his reports from Washington. “Most of the news directors back at the local stations,” Cronkite recalled, “didn’t know how to query me for information.”

When the Korean War erupted in the summer of 1950, Cronkite itched to cover the action. It saddened him to read UP stories from Asia by colleagues while he was stuck reciting wheat and soybean prices over the radio for a localized Midwest syndicate. With Betsy’s okay, he wired Wells Church, the CBS news manager in New York, to volunteer his reportorial services in the Korean conflict. To Cronkite’s surprise, he got a call from Edward R. Murrow instead of Church. “Ed said that not many guys get a second chance, but would you like to join CBS and go to Korea?” Cronkite recalled. “I said, you’re darn right yes.” Murrow green-lighted the hiring of Cronkite. He buried whatever residual animosity existed as a hangover from the Savile Club incident, when Cronkite had accepted, then reneged on, a CBS News job offer.