Cronkite (20 page)

At an afternoon meeting, Sig Mickelson told Cronkite he seemed overextended with substituting for Douglas Edwards on the
Evening News
and serving as impresario of
You Are There
. He was fired permanently from
The Morning Show
. His replacement was Jack Paar, a rising Ohio comic who set the mold for Johnny Carson, host of
The Tonight Show
from 1962 to 1992. While Cronkite spoke in a halting way, Paar had a quick-mind comic delivery that had the same stimulating effect as coffee. Many CBSers believed that Paar’s success meant the reversal of Cronkite’s upward trajectory at the Tiffany Network. Getting a lot of face time on a merry-go-round of CBS News shows was great, but for some reason Cronkite couldn’t carry a major broadcast on his shoulders. Perhaps he was destined to be a CBS utility player. Maybe he had reached his peak at the 1952 Chicago conventions.

At CBS News in late 1954, Mickelson—still trying to find the right time slot for Cronkite—had him host, off and on, such shows as
Eyewitness
and
The Twentieth Century
. He also considered having Cronkite moderate a new Sunday-at-noon show,
Face the Nation
, which premiered on November 7, 1954. Mickelson envisioned the show as probing U.S. government officials and world leaders. It was partially conceived as the CBS counterpart to NBC’s
Meet the Press
and, later, ABC’s
Issues and Answers
. Tellingly, however, even Mickelson thought that Cronkite wouldn’t be tough enough as an interviewer to carry the Sunday show. He was too nice. The gig went to Bill Shadel, the brave CBS Radio correspondent who had reported from D-day in June 1944 and accompanied Murrow to Buchenwald in April 1945. It was humiliating to Cronkite, who practically blew a gasket at the news, because Shadel had worked
for
him at WTOP in Washington, D.C., and now was deemed by CBS management as a more “serious broadcaster.”

There was a flaw in Cronkite’s character that resulted from being the child of an alcoholic father: he couldn’t handle shame. His chipper attitude camouflaged a deep hurt. Feigning relief at being scrubbed from
The Morning Show
, Cronkite told
The New York Herald Tribune
that dawn held zero appeal for him. “I don’t like the challenge of getting up that early,” he explained. “I am basically a creature of the night.” His stubborn ego wouldn’t admit he had bombed on
The Morning Show
and was blackballed from
Face the Nation
. Denial was easier. Cronkite truly believed that he had outperformed Jack Paar, his replacement, on
The Morning Show
. The unflappable Paar ended up hosting NBC’s
Tonight
from 1957 to 1962, a comic turn for which the quick-witted raconteur was well suited. One of Paar’s more famous quips pertained to his old
Morning Show
rival at CBS: “I’m not a religious man,” Paar said. “But I do believe in Walter Cronkite.”

When off-duty from CBS, Cronkite could often be found racing cars or tinkering with old radios like a
Popular Mechanics
devotee. One day in 1955, he was passing a car dealership in New Jersey and impulsively bought a flashy sports car for $1,700. That British model, a Triumph TR-3, was soon replaced by an Austin-Healey that Cronkite drove only for weekend pleasure around Westchester County. Then he and Betsy began to compete with the Austin-Healey at road rallies. Helmets in place, they worked together—pilot and navigator—to negotiate road courses precisely as event organizers dictated. They were hoping to win trophies. Soon the Cronkites were invited to join a team at the “Twelve Hours of Sebring” race in 1959. The tabloids loved showing Cronkite in racing clothes, looking like a hybrid of the Red Baron and auto racing pioneer Barney Oldfield, explaining how liberated he became when the speedometer hit one hundred miles per hour. All of life’s tension evaporated. But in 1961 Cronkite, while competing in an international rally, skidded off a road in the Big Smokies of Tennessee. The car flipped over an embankment, almost killing Cronkite (whose Austin-Healey landed in a lake one hundred feet away). “Cronkite,”
The Saturday Evening Post
reported, “emerged wet but unhurt.”

Life was good for the Cronkites. They owned a home at 519 East Eighty-fourth Street. They now had three children: Nancy, the eldest; Kathy; and a son, Walter Leland Cronkite III (known as Chip).Walter, in the CBS tradition, was seen about town dining at the trendiest lunch spots with Lowell Thomas and enjoying musical events at the Rainbow Room with variety show host Ed Sullivan.

Aside from his gruff, newspaper editor demeanor while at the CBS office, Cronkite was often described in profiles as a down-to-earth guy. The CBS affiliates found him a refreshing face, a voice from the heartland. But Cronkite felt underappreciated by Paley. He fantasized about becoming a local TV anchorman in the Midwest (where raising a family was cheaper). CBS’s best-run affiliate in the 1950s was WCCO (channel 4 on TV) in Minneapolis; its 50,000-watt clear channel on radio could be heard as far south as New Orleans. Frustrated over
The Morning Show
experience, Cronkite accepted an offer to become the anchorman of WCCO. When Mickelson learned of Cronkite’s rash decision to move to Minnesota, he put his foot down. “You’re our next Douglas Edwards,” he scolded Cronkite. “You’re staying put in New York.” Unbeknownst to Cronkite at the time, CBS News executives had plans for him to anchor the 1956 nominating conventions.

What Mickelson was trying to convey to Cronkite was that CBS News was in flux. Paley announced that for the first time, in 1956, CBS radio operations had lost money while television was becoming a real breadwinner. Everybody was on the hunt for TV talent. As Reuven Frank, then the president of the NBC news division, recalled, some producers wanted to give a chance to a rangy, handsome newsman from Los Angeles, Chet Huntley. He was appearing on an NBC show called
Outlook
—a half-hour Sunday news and features segment—but neither the program, nor Huntley was well known by TV watchers. Scratching around for an alternative, a few executives promoted David Brinkley, but he was considered to be relatively unknown and quirky. With the 1956 conventions drawing closer, Frank recalled the panic that was starting to set in as NBC executives debated the merits of each of the two leading candidates: “And then, one of the great compromisers said, ‘Let’s put
those
two together,’ meaning Huntley and Brinkley. It was like the light bulb going on over somebody’s head in the comics.”

Chet Huntley and David Brinkley arrived as a breath of fresh air for NBC News, something entirely new to American broadcasting in the mid-1950s. To CBS News diehards, Huntley and Brinkley were nothing more than Kukla, Fran, and Ollie fortified by Associated Press news flashes. Cronkite himself analyzed the NBC duo’s on-air chemistry from a first-person perspective. “They received the critical attention,” he explained. “I was the old hand.”

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

The Huntley and Brinkley Challenge

DULL TIMES AT THE 1956 CONVENTIONS—MURROW’S COMPLAINTS—BLAMING COLLEAGUES—THE HUNTLEY-BRINKLEY CHEMISTRY—AVOIDING MURROW—NO DO-OVERS—CRONKITE AS SIMPLETON—MUDD IN THE WINGS—PICKING THE WINNERS—EISENHOWER BEATS STEVENSON—HOMAGE TO LOWELL THOMAS—“ANSWER PLEASE!”—I’M NOT A STAR—COULD SPACE BE THE NEW POLITICAL CONVENTIONS?—SPACE RACING—THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY MAN—THE AMAZING BUD BENJAMIN—LOOKING TOWARD THE GALAXY—GRAPPLING WITH SPUTNIK—FLORIDA AND THE NASA BEAT—CLIMBING TO THE TOP RUNG

T
he rap against Walter Cronkite at the 1956 political conventions was that he was a reliable dullard on the airwaves. The man was only in his late thirties, but he was already viewed as a TV veteran. Few Americans knew that the producers were the real innovators of television, that all an anchorman did was take election feeds from guys such as Sig Mickelson and Don Hewitt. Because the 1956 presidential election was sedate—the incumbent, Dwight Eisenhower, against the same old Adlai Stevenson of 1952—there wasn’t much drama in the Chicago (Democratic) and the San Francisco (Republican) conventions. So the public demanded that CBS spice up the proceedings with fiber optics, new camera angles, upped voltage—anything cutting-edge to justify the preemption of popular prime-time shows such as
Lassie
,
The Red Skelton Show
, and
I Love Lucy
. Cronkite didn’t deliver any unexpected sparks that summer. Instead, critic Jack Gould of
The
New York Times
, who had once worked for CBS News as an “information adviser” (whatever that was), derided his live broadcasts at the conventions as painfully “dead pan,” adding insult by asking Cronkite to cheer up.

Gould’s words stung Cronkite tremendously. He was irritated now, as well as hungry for scapegoats. The problem at the 1956 conventions could not have been
him
. He was rock solid. Instead of letting Cronkite fly solo, Mickelson and Hewitt had saddled their anchorman with “outside” political commentators—Elmo Roper, the opinion polling pioneer; and Samuel Lubell, a writer good at picking political winners—both of whom proved lethally boring when the cameras rolled. Cronkite would have preferred giving Sevareid and Murrow more airtime than have those two hapless wonks compete in a snooze fest. An internal debate ensued at CBS News in the fall of 1956 to figure out what had gone wrong. “The low CBS morale,” Sevareid wrote Mickelson in a memorandum, “was caused by too much executive tension, general uncertainty, and nervousness.”

To Murrow, no fan of Cronkite, the problem with CBS News’ 1956 convention coverage was executive producer Mickelson’s overproduction and quasi-religious vulgarity in pleasing corporate sponsors. Murrow thought CBS’s coverage was an orgy of distraction, false news, and propaganda. Everything was too staged in Chicago and San Francisco. The stodgy Cronkite unscripted, he argued, was better than the owlish Roper tethered to a desk, rattling off political factoids learned at some number-crunching camp. And there were other Mickelson mistakes that irritated Murrow considerably. Overly worried about being pro-Stevenson, Mickelson prohibited the showing of
In Pursuit of Happiness
(a triumphant Democratic National Committee short documentary) to the blistering consternation of DNC chairman Paul Butler. Why censor the most thoughtful bit of the whole confetti-crazed convention? Murrow didn’t overly mind Cronkite’s emphasis on ad-libbing analysis, but he thought Robert Trout, who broadcast the conventions for CBS Radio News, was better at it. Murrow came up with an idea. Why not have Trout become the anchorman of special events instead of Cronkite?

What infuriated Cronkite even more than the CBS boycott of
In Pursuit of Happiness
or UNIVAC, he wrote Mickelson in October 1956, was the unnerving commotion in the control booth. His beef was that while broadcasting to millions of Americans, he heard CBS staff chortling off-camera. It was beyond disruptive. A suspicious Cronkite even intimated that perhaps the Murrowites in Chicago and San Francisco had sabotaged his performance on purpose. Absolute “Q-U-I-E-T” was what he told Mickelson he needed in the booth. All Mickelson could do was stare at him in disbelief.

Self-consciously pointing fingers at the Murrow clique was perhaps convenient for Cronkite, but it was bull. The
real
problem CBS faced at the 1956 conventions was the stellar on-air chemistry of David Brinkley and Chet Huntley at NBC News. They, as Gould said in the
Times
, naturally “clicked.” Paired for NBC’s coverage of the conventions, these competent newsmen provided accurate and economic commentary. The NBC duo—with Huntley as straight man and Brinkley the dry wit—offered a chemistry that was pioneering to television news (or even radio news before it). If something quirky happened in Chicago or San Francisco, Huntley and Brinkley laughed. Cronkite, by contrast,
reported
that something funny had happened. Maintaining a journalistic remove had its limits. The nation, in one of its cultural whims, was starting to believe that two NBC anchormen were more profitable than one self-effacing Cronkite. It was like the double-dipped ice-cream cone or buy-one-get-one-free cheeseburger rages. “While past attempts at using two anchormen had mixed results,” historian Michael A. Russo noted about the 1956 conventions, “Huntley and Brinkley brought to the task greater editorial skills, a closer coordination of ideas with visual illustrations, and a sense of humor which TV audiences liked.”

Moreover, Huntley (based in New York) and Brinkley (in Washington, D.C.) could themselves be humorous when the moment cried out for lighthearted informality. Huntley had a Westerner’s laconic sense of irony. And Brinkley was the undisputed master of the droll aside. It wasn’t that Chet and David were clowning around or trying to score cheeky points. They just allowed themselves the flexibility to make succinct journalistic observations in a relaxed give-and-take style. With their unique toss-back-and-forth approach, Huntley and Brinkley were not merely broadcasters; they could momentarily become part of the audience as well, commenting to each other as the audience surely did at home with fellow family members in the living room staring at the Tube.

Unlike Cronkite, the press wizards didn’t think the 1956 conventions required much on-the-run reporting. With a couple of shoo-ins in the incumbent Republican president (Eisenhower) and the second-time Democratic nominee (Stevenson), there was precious little breaking news to cover. Only Stevenson’s vice presidential choice—would it be Estes Kefauver of Tennessee or John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts?—held dramatic possibility. “It was a situation made to order for Huntley and Brinkley,” Mickelson explained. “Brinkley’s sardonic wit enlivened the proceedings and created an attitude of mild amusement among viewers. CBS continued to view the proceedings as a serious news story long after there was no news remaining.”

As a ploy to beef up CBS News’ ratings at the 1956 Democratic Convention in Chicago, Cronkite—along with Douglas Edwards, Charles Collingwood, Eric Sevareid, and Robert Trout—went on the network’s beloved game show
What’s My Line?
It wasn’t unusual in the 1950s for broadcasters to do commercials and host game shows: journalists such as Mike Wallace, Douglas Edwards, and John Cameron Swayze did it all the time. But
What’s My Line?
was weird. The show’s premise was that four celebrities guessed the occupation of a mystery person. Cronkite sat in the guest chair alongside host John Daly, while the other four CBS correspondents stood behind him like suited-up crows on a wire about to cackle. When Cronkite answered questions from the blindfolded columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, he altered his voice to sound like the Mickey Mouse of
Karnival Kid
. He spoke spasmodically, in blurt-outs with long pauses between words. Eventually, after a lot of canned laughs, Cronkite and his CBS convention team were outed. (Cronkite’s
What’s My Line?
appearance has become a must-watch YouTube clip; the kitsch factor remained quite high into the twenty-first century.)

What’s My Line?
didn’t help. The CBS news division with Cronkite at the helm came out of the summer with a chink in its armor. Huntley and Brinkley were the new undisputed TV darlings. They owned the buzz. The newsmagazines
Time
and
Newsweek
pronounced the NBC reporters truly worthy of the intelligent viewer’s time. Jack Gould poured on the praise in an August 1956 Chicago analysis. “Mr. Brinkley’s extraordinary accomplishment has been not to talk too much,” Gould wrote, not even mentioning Cronkite in his
New York
Times
piece. “He has a knack for the succinct phrase that sums up the situation. . . . It is Mr. Brinkley’s humor, however, that is attracting audiences. It is on the dry side and rooted in a sense of relaxed detachment from all the political and electronic turmoil around him.”

A few critics rallied to Cronkite’s defense by saying, “We like the straight-news simplicity of Cronkite.” It was intended as a compliment for the Unipresser, but amid the general delight over Huntley and Brinkley, it was faint praise. Cronkite continued to broadcast with directness, but in the aftermath of the national conventions, “straight-news simplicity” was under siege. Entertainment was seeping into the TV news ship through the portholes of Huntley and Brinkley. Throughout the rest of Eisenhower’s presidency, it would remain so, and from two directions: inside CBS (by correspondents blending a point of view into their factual reports) and outside (by NBC, which made no-nonsense straight news passé). When Mickelson asked Cronkite to critique his broadcasts of the 1956 conventions to get the kinks out for 1960, Cronkite refused. Throughout his career he followed an ironclad rule—a superstition, really—that helped him survive in the business: he never watched himself. “Walter thought that there were no do-overs,” NBC News anchorman Brian Williams recalled. “Watching your own flubs set the ego back too many notches.”

By early fall of 1956, with the political convention floors barely swept, John Cameron Swayze was fired as anchor of the evening news at NBC. To no one’s surprise, Huntley and Brinkley replaced him, the former broadcasting from New York and the latter from Washington in a unique bi-city format that showcased their obvious chemistry.
The Camel News Caravan
was renamed
The Huntley-Brinkley Report
. While NBC News had yet to assemble a roster of ace correspondents to match those of CBS, Robert Kintner, president of NBC News, increased his division’s budgets and recruited new talent, including the likes of Edwin Newman, Sander Vanocur, and John Chancellor. And the production quality of
The Huntley-Brinkley Report
was even more impressive than it had been at the 1956 conventions. NBC’s ratings didn’t skyrocket, but suddenly it was something that well-informed people
had
to see and fashionable people
wanted
to see. The suppertime evening news broadcast was on its way to becoming an American ritual. Where CBS News continued to excel was in documentaries and special reports (the Murrow tradition). Most important of all—in financial terms—CBS was also making tremendous inroads into NBC’s traditional stronghold: entertainment programming. Its killer lineup of situation comedies, led by
I Love Lucy
, gave the company banner years during the 1950s. Inevitably, NBC retaliated. It signed its own big stars, including comedian Bob Hope.

That fall, Cronkite went into fighting overdrive,with a CBS News prime-time special called
Pick the Winner
, which ran right up to Election Night. Dr. Frank Stanton spared no expense in buying CBS News ads in
The New York Times
and
The Washington Post
to promote Cronkite’s prime-time interviews (and sometimes debates) with a cast that included Governor Averell Harriman (D-N.Y.) and U.S. senators William Knowland (R-Calif.), Hubert Humphrey (D-Minn.), and Karl E. Mundt (R-S.D.). The
Pick the Winner
series ran for eight weeks on Wednesday nights. It paid off. On Election Night, November 5, as Eisenhower beat Stevenson by a whopping 457 to 73 electoral votes, CBS whipped the competition with a 25.3 rating, compared with NBC (13.8) and ABC (13.1).

Cronkite’s fine Election Night performances guaranteed he’d remain CBS News’ first-string anchor for live-events coverage. He nevertheless felt like second fiddle. With the political season over, he looked for a special-events angle that could grab him some precious prime-time real estate. He needed a hit show like Murrow had in
Person to Person
(which aired from 1953 to 1961 and consisted largely of the legend interviewing public figures in casual settings). “In the fall of 1957,” Cronkite complained, “my presence on CBS was confined mostly to reruns of a waning series called
You Are There
and one newscast a week, the
Sunday News Special
.”

He inventoried his options, making an honest appraisal of the threat Huntley and Brinkley posed. He thought about loosening up more on air. He might easily have tried to meet Brinkley head-on, giving his news copy piquant turns of phrase and his on-air banter the humor of
Poor Richard’s Almanac
. Yes, Cronkite had ideas about changing news broadcasting, but they didn’t run toward aping someone else’s style. His fascination with broadcast journalism wasn’t with the delivery so much as the selection and organization of the news. By 1958, CBS News had restructured into two major operating divisions: the CBS TV network (with 243 affiliates) and the CBS TV stations (with five CBS-owned stations). The business of the medium was in boom mode. All Cronkite wanted, in the end, was to help shareholders win a fair share of the pie.

It wasn’t just Huntley and Brinkley whom Cronkite had to keep his eyes on in 1957. The up-and-coming Roger Mudd was already creating a lot of noise at CBS headquarters. Although Mudd’s primary job in Washington was doing the 6:00 a.m. radio newscast and the local news inserts on the TV morning show
Potomac Panorama
, his star kept rising. Before long, Mudd—a native Washingtonian who had begun his career as a reporter for
The Richmond News Leader
—was hosting a 6:00 p.m. newscast on WTOP that he wrote himself (including a weekly commentary piece). By May 1962, Mudd had joined the CBS News Washington bureau as a congressional correspondent. Whenever Cronkite had a lackluster performance on some special—which wasn’t often—rumors circulated among CBS employees that newbie Mudd (the network’s future) would take over the plow.