Cronkite (22 page)

The space program and the U.S.-Soviet technological competition related to it were appealing for another reason, one more sinister and more serious. Cronkite needed to find a safe perch in the cold war. CBS was putting pressure, directly and indirectly, on its staff to take a stand against communism. In 1950, employees were forced to sign a loyalty oath disclosing any affiliation with communist or fascist organizations. CBS employees were investigated officially and unofficially in the early 1950s. That was true for people in a variety of industries, but broadcasting was under special scrutiny, for the simple reason that it wielded the astonishing power to reach millions of people and perhaps influence them. In those pre-1957 NASA days, the U.S. Air Force was running the space program, with all experiments kept top secret. Cronkite’s security clearance, even with the air force, wouldn’t allow him near a rocket launch. But by promoting the new U.S. military hardware on
The Twentieth Century
, Cronkite became a salesman for the Department of Defense, showing the American people what the Pentagon was doing for them in a futuristic infomercial-type way.

In various theaters—China, Korea, Hungary, the United Nations, and even the Olympic Games—the United States had transferred the ferocious passions of the Second World War to another us-versus-them mentality. For a long time, Cronkite was on the sidelines, missing out on the cold war intrigue as he chugged along with
You Are There
and
The Morning Show
. Avoiding controversial news topics might have been a brilliant career decision, but it wasn’t brave. Too settled a family man to be a foreign war correspondent, not ideological enough to stir paranoia on the home front, Cronkite had used
You Are There
as his coy way of challenging McCarthyism. But that wasn’t the same as owning an important news beat or making history. He now realized that his passion for rocket technology could easily be translated into episodes of
The Twentieth Century
. The early launches might have been at the outer edge of the cold war, but for Cronkite the space job was his opening to please
everybody
except the hard-left (sympathetic to communists) and hard-right (anti–federal government) factions.

Just as Cronkite did when he covered the U.S. air war in Europe against Germany, he established a rapport with officers and officials in the various agencies overseeing space and defense projects in the late 1950s. Emerging as CBS’s space race correspondent, he was, once again, practically a member of the team in terms of his tacit enthusiasm for the work of his new friends. Cronkite did not often evince his own opinions; that was not his style. Yet he could become part of the mainstream when he believed in the goal and the means of achieving it, providing coverage that was predictably supportive. Cronkite believed that the growth of technology was crucial to defense in the cold war, and he was all for it. The heavy truth about him in the late 1950s was that he had signed up to promote the U.S. Air Force, seeing space as a beat he could own.

NASA was founded on July 29, 1958, courtesy of the National Aeronautics and Space Act. Cronkite, from day one, was a huge cheerleader for NASA, always promoting America’s technological prowess. For CBS, he visited NASA research laboratories such as Langley Aeronautical, Ames Aeronautical, and Lewis Flight Propulsion. From the early Project Mercury launches through the groundbreaking Gemini missions to the subsequent Apollo moon walk of Neil Armstrong and the space shuttle program, Cronkite was an avid believer in what he called the “conquest of space.”

He got to enter the space race fun for CBS News in earnest on August 17, 1958, when the U.S. Army attempted to launch a scientific satellite from central Florida. However, the launch rocket exploded after being airborne for only seventy-seven seconds. CBS ran two reports of the rocket failure that afternoon—Cronkite broadcast the second one.

Throughout his career, Cronkite was far more outspoken off camera than he was on television. In the many lecture circuit speeches he delivered in the Midwest, he could be surprisingly opinionated about his desire to beat the Soviet Union in the cold war. For example, in the winter of 1959 he told an audience that in the critical new sciences associated with missile defense, the USSR was demonstrably superior. This Cronkite claim has been proved untrue. Meaning to deliver a wake-up call to the American public, Cronkite described the United States as a “second-rate nation” in its intercontinental missile (and space) capabilities. He intended the commentary as a form of prodding for increased U.S. efforts in those fields and to help pry loose more congressional appropriations for NASA research. It wasn’t a particularly controversial stance in 1959. But the on-camera Cronkite wouldn’t have been quite so blunt. There was too much risk involved.
Pravda
praised Cronkite as the man who called the United States a “second-rate nation.” Publicity like that, Cronkite understood, he could do without.

One of Cronkite’s heroes at CBS throughout the late 1950s remained the legendary radio broadcaster Lowell Thomas. Cronkite essentially studied under Thomas in the 1950s, learning how to be a reassuring voice instead of a sharp knife jab of hard truths. When he heard Thomas salute the nation every weekday with “Good evening, everybody,” he knew that was the guy he wanted to be. There was a folksy, reassuring, sometimes bland aspect to Thomas’s delivery of the news. But the listener trusted him. Maybe Thomas wasn’t a crusader like Edward R. Murrow—he called himself a “news communicator.” And that’s what Cronkite strove to be.

Cronkite had first gotten hooked on Thomas while at San Jacinto High School in the 1930s. He modeled his public persona after his boyhood idol. It was an easy fit. What Cronkite wanted to emulate was sounding as confident, knowledgeable, and breezy as Thomas, an obviously serious man of good humor. Distinguished in an ordinary way, Thomas exuded the romantic aura of Hemingway minus the bloodlust. With a mop of curly brown hair, penetrating blue eyes, and a thin mustache, he was a dashing figure. Thomas didn’t just
think
he was larger than life; he
was
. Somehow he persuaded leading figures from T. E. Lawrence to Mahatma Gandhi to Field Marshal Montgomery to grant him exclusive interviews. “His almost forty-six years of reporting the news nightly set a record for longevity,” Cronkite later boasted about his evergreen idol. “His total audience was once estimated at 125 million people.”

All this set Cronkite’s wheels in motion. While everybody else at CBS News was trying to be the new Murrow, he would aim to be the new Thomas. Everything Cronkite did in the 1950s was aimed at someday grabbing the intrepid Thomas’s crown. Cronkite used to read whatever Thomas wrote—and there were more than fifty books. His favorites were
With Lawrence of Arabia
(1924) and
Hungry Waters
(1937). On summer weekends the Cronkite family would vacation at Thomas’s home in Pawling, New York, sitting on the porch to discuss world events as the children went swimming. “Everybody he met, as far as I know, he made a friend of,” Cronkite said. “And he had a million of them around the world. . . . All walks of life. . . . If you spoke to Lowell Thomas, he spoke back, grabbed your hand and you were one of his followers from that point on.”

By the late 1950s, Cronkite’s career trajectory at CBS had hit a plateau. Pulling down a good salary, he had stayed out of trouble during the Red Scare, never getting attacked for working with blacklisted writers on
You Are There
and pioneering with
The Twentieth Century
. His radio show “Answer, Please!”—which involved responding to mail queries on the air—was extremely popular. The specific questions were easy to answer. But sometimes CBS radio listeners wanted Cronkite to display psychic powers.

“Will we ever have war again?” one letter read.

“Will we ever get ahead of Russia?” read another.

Cronkite eased out by answering, “If I knew, I’d be working for the Pentagon instead of CBS Radio.”

Never before had America produced such a fast flood of media personalities as in the golden age of television. A lot of on-air reporters like Cronkite were now being asked for autographs, as if they knew the answers to war and peace. An appearance on CBS’s
Face the Nation
or
The Twentieth Century
guaranteed an immediate rise in popularity, with average citizens simply wanting to shake the hand of a personality beamed into that little five-by-eight Philco or RCA box in their living rooms. When he entered a Manhatttan restaurant, it was like Moses parting the Red Sea. Before long, Cronkite befriended the intellectual pundits Benjamin booked on
The Twentieth Century
—Robert Shaplen and Sidney Hertzberg among them. Ad-libbing with such experts, Cronkite believed, was the essence of smart television. But for all the fame Cronkite accrued from being a CBS News broadcaster, the instant recognition by the man on the street, the job seemed superficial, at times even farcical. As Cronkite told a columnist friend in Iowa, “It’s difficult for a celebrity to be a working newsman.”

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN

Torch Is Passed

BEYOND UBIQUITOUS—VOICE OF THE OLYMPICS—HIGH Q FACTOR—TOO MANY IMAGE MAKERS—THE EDUCATION OF DAN RATHER—WHY NOT GO CRONKITE?—LOCKING OUT MURROW—THE STEADY DR. FRANK STANTON—KENNEDY COVETS POWER—THE CHIPPER NIXON—PRESIDENTIAL COUNTDOWN—STANDING UP TO KENNEDY—WHO WON THE DEBATES?—KENNEDY WINS THE CLIFFHANGER—CRONKITE HOLDS HIS OWN

T
he CBS “eye device” logo was first unveiled on television in the early 1950s. Designed by graphic artist William Golden after he studied Pennsylvania Dutch hexes and Shaker drawings, the eye device quickly became an iconic part of the television landscape, serving as backdrop for entertainers such as Jack Benny, Lucille Ball, and Rod Serling. The “eyemark”—as Walter Cronkite called the black-and-white logo—was ubiquitous by 1960, known the world over, even serving as cufflinks for the old Unipresser’s monogrammed WCL dress shirts. Logos hadn’t mattered on radio, but for TV logos were visual brands that could make or break a network. “Walter was the ultimate company man,” Andy Rooney recalled. “I regularly teased him that he should get the CBS Eye tattooed on his ass . . . he didn’t find it funny.”

If a television viewer turned the dial to CBS in 1960, there was a good chance that in addition to the eye device logo, Cronkite would be on the Tube. For
The Twentieth Century
series, Cronkite spent days in the Atlantic on aircraft carriers, destroyers, and submarines and then followed President Eisenhower around Ankara, Kabul, Tehran, and Delhi. CBS chartered a plane so Cronkite, producer Bud Benjamin, and seventeen technicians could bring what
The
New York Times
called “unprecedented” TV coverage of a presidential foreign trip. Anytime there was breaking news, the public, it seemed, wanted to know what Cronkite thought. Whenever a foreign assignment came up, Cronkite, perhaps without much conscious involvement, reflexively said “Send me.” “Between anchoring and narrating various TV series and doing a Sunday news broadcast,”
The
Washington Post
said about Cronkite’s commitments, “he trots the globe in pursuit of current history.”

Throughout the Eisenhower era, most newspapers offered only spotty coverage of the Winter Games; this changed in 1959, when CBS News purchased exclusive rights from the Olympic Committee for $50,000 to cover the eleven-day spectacle. When the marvelous CBS sports commentator Jim McKay suffered a nervous breakdown in early January 1960, Cronkite replaced him at the Olympic Winter Games, which were held in Squaw Valley, located along the California-Nevada border. Cronkite, filling in for McKay, quickly became the TV master of the global sports spectacular.

Downhill skiing, ice hockey, bobsledding—Cronkite boned up on sports in preparation for his Squaw Valley broadcasts. Doing homework was one of his strong points. It fascinated him that for the first time—he was obsessive about firsts—speed skating, figure skating, and ice hockey would be held on artificial ice at an Olympics. And he studied up on the competitors from thirty-three nations, memorizing factoids from more than six hundred capsule biographies of athletes. Somehow Cronkite made the CBS viewer feel that he was a former gold medalist himself, enjoying the abundant snowfall while explaining the Nordic combined competition. He talked knowledgeably about downhill plunges, challenging pistes, frostbite, and snowcat climbs. Wearing blocklike boots, a fur-hooded parka, and mittens that made it awkward to hold his hot-chocolate mug, Cronkite looked like a rejected model auditioning for an L. L. Bean catalog. But nobody held it against him. Playing the man of all seasons, he metamorphosed into a hybrid athlete, reporter, spectator, cheerleader, humorist, worrywart, and good-time Charlie. While he served as anchorman for the Winter Games, his on-air color men included former Olympic stars Dick Button and Art Devlin and sports reporters Chris Schenkel and Bud Palmer.

The CBS ad campaign promoting the multisport Winter Games was bold. A Madison Avenue firm had designed an edgy-looking display ad with a downhill skier floating in midair holding an Olympic torch with a giant CBS eye logo over his head. A quick look through the TV guide section of
The
Washington Post
showed that Cronkite’s name appeared right after the 7:30 p.m. time slot announcement. This was significant. CBS sports in 1960 was under the umbrella of CBS News. Sig Mickelson was building Cronkite up as the star broadcaster of special events, news, and sports.

Squaw Valley, the smallest locale in the world ever to host the Olympic Games, a one-stoplight hamlet high in the Sierra Nevadas, was an ideal stage set for Cronkite. The village environment worked in CBS’s favor because camera crews didn’t have to roam all over Placer County looking for remote shots; all the competitions were within a few miles of one another. Not only did Cronkite get wonderful reviews for his Olympic broadcasts, the first held in North America in twenty-eight years, but also the prime-time ratings were robust. Cronkite was accorded some historical credit for making the Winter Games a popular four-year TV ritual in America. And he was the quarterback of a newfangled technology developed in Squaw Valley that forever changed sports broadcasting: In the men’s slalom event, Olympic officials, unsure if an athlete had bypassed a gate, asked CBS to review its tape. That simple request gave CBS the pioneering idea of instant replays—a mainstay feature for nearly all subsequent televised sporting events.

Rewarded for the Squaw Valley success, Cronkite was assigned to anchor the Summer Olympics of 1960 (held in Rome from August 25 to September 11). Because there was no satellite transmission, CBS couldn’t broadcast live. Instead, sitting in the broadcast center in New York, Cronkite served as the connective tissue for the Rome games, announcing that Cassius Clay had won the gold medal for light-heavyweight boxing and former polio patient Wilma Rudolph had won three gold medals in track and field.

What Cronkite did brilliantly was parlay his Squaw Valley–Rome work, which received glowing reviews in a dozen newspapers, into a larger win, setting himself up as the anchorman to tune into for the 1960 political conventions. Asked that June what his concept of an anchorman was, Cronkite said, “We think of him as the on-air editor and coordinator of an event which by its nature is in several parts. For the Olympic Games in Rome this summer I will stay in New York as the anchorman, tying together the segments. For the Olympics, it’s almost a host job. For the conventions, it’s an on-air editing job, keeping a running story going.”

As he continued anchoring the overall coverage of special events throughout 1960, it became clear that Murrow and Edwards were being replaced by Cronkite. He was the new Lowell Thomas, the master juggler of egos, the number-two guy from Safe Corner, U.S.A., who always seemed right in the number-one person’s broadcast chair even when dealing with astrophysics or pole vaulting. He had come to personify the CBS eye even more than Murrow, and was anointed by the TV viewers as America’s most likable and professional eyewitness to the twentieth century. More than anything else, he wanted to be seen as a Horatio Alger type, a scrappy wire service reporter who had made it by dint of hard work and long hours—and who had done it on his own terms. “Of the great men of television,” Theodore White, author of
The Making of the President, 1960
, observed, “only Walter Cronkite had not been moved forward by an assist from Murrow somewhere along the line.”

Cronkite’s hunch was that the 1960 presidential election would be a historic cliffhanger. Everyone would be tuning in. Advertisers, he intuited, liked being part of history; they salivated at being in sync with the zeitgeist. Everyone had known in 1952 and 1956 that Eisenhower was going to win. But in early 1960, the next president was anyone’s guess. And no longer did the election season begin with the gavels of the summer conventions; the springtime primary and caucus systems were now important stepping-stones for presidential aspirants. Cronkite, as reportorial beneficiary, had a yearlong opening to break political news and get CBS News in the front-page mix.

There was a steep downside to the intertwining of campaign politics with television. As primaries and caucuses swelled in number, so too did the cost of running for the White House (for example, TV ads had to be purchased in dozens of local markets). The age of television caused presidential candidates to fund-raise nonstop so their campaigns could become Rockefeller rich. In 1948, President Truman needed to pass around a fedora to afford to move his “Whistle Stop” train out of an Oklahoma depot. By 2012, in the age of Obama, candidates for president would need to raise an astonishing $1 billion for a campaign to survive. But even by 1960, it seemed that raising money had become what politicians did more than legislating.

A few serious-minded journalists, following Murrow’s lead, also worried that having electric wagons loaded with cameras, microphones, and other paraphernalia on political convention floors actually
discouraged
participatory democracy. But their protests soon got muted. Whenever the red light went on, the politician being filmed spoke in phony-baloney, overly cautious sound bites. A whole new breed of TV image makers was introduced to the conventions—media consultants, makeup artists, and public relations experts. TV cameras had made political conventions more superficial affairs. It was Cronkite’s determination in 1960 that CBS—no matter what—would whip NBC in the ratings with historic special-events coverage of the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles (from July 11 to July 15) and the GOP one in Chicago (from July 25 to July 28).

By 1960, presidential aspirants had learned how to use TV in their favor. (Vice President Richard Nixon had pioneered this eight years earlier, during his famous “Checkers” speech.) John F. Kennedy advanced the unsettling art of TV manipulation during his campaign for the presidency when he spoke to the Protestant Ministerial Council in Houston about his Catholicism; the event was televised only locally, in east Texas. Even so, the Kennedy campaign had cleverly procured a copy of the Houston tape and ran highlights as commercials all over America before the candidate arrived to speak. The Big Three networks themselves pushed the idea of presidential debates, which forever changed U.S. election politics. But before there could be televised debates in 1960, the two candidates first had to be chosen, still the job of the political conventions. And Cronkite needed to have his CBS team beat NBC in the convention ratings to prove his staying power as a special-events wizard.

There wasn’t much inherent drama in Chicago in 1960 for Cronkite to capitalize on to earn another Teddy White callout. Vice President Nixon was guaranteed to win the GOP nomination, and it was fairly obvious that the blueblood Henry Cabot Lodge, the former Massachusetts senator and ambassador to the United Nations, would be Nixon’s VP choice. Cronkite at least scored a major interview with Lodge; that was
something
. But the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, by contrast, was thick with subplots and subterfuge. JFK didn’t like Senator Lyndon Johnson, but many pundits believed the wheeler-dealer Texan had to be on the ticket as VP if Nixon was to be beaten. There was also the real possibility that Kennedy would choose Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri or Adlai Stevenson of Illinois over Johnson.

Every major CBS News affiliate in the nation sent a reporter to the convention to get baptized in the new era of TV journalism. Dan Rather, a twenty-nine-year-old Texan, arrived at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena in July, excited just to be covering his first national political convention for the CBS station KHOU in Houston. It wasn’t until 1954 that Rather had even seen a TV. “I remember the scene,” he recalled. “We were on a shopping trip, ambling through the appliance section of a department store, and we were bowled over by a stunning sight. People were watching a ball game on a tiny screen.” Now, as news director for KHOU-TV, Rather found himself covering Lyndon Johnson, the Senate majority leader who was challenging John F. Kennedy for the Democratic nomination as delegates gathered in downtown Los Angeles.

With the nomination still undecided, the convention promised the kind of drama that live television news thrived on.
The Huntley-Brinkley Report
had surpassed the ratings of CBS’s
Evening News
show (hosted by Douglas Edwards) in 1958, and remained in front, with momentum at its back. It was not so much that
Huntley-Brinkley
had finally found its audience as that it had found its coast-to-coast affiliates, setting NBC up for a ratings showdown with CBS at the 1960 conventions. A lot of vengeful energy was circulating around William Paley’s office on Madison Avenue; he hated being number two in anything. “This was supposed to be comeback time for CBS in convention coverage,” Rather recalled. “Cronkite, having got a good start in ’52, had been creamed in ’56. Huntley-Brinkley were white hot.”

The Democratic National Convention began on Monday, July 11. Team Cronkite was assigned a balsam-lined, air-conditioned little studio at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena from which to broadcast. Sig Mickelson, the director of CBS News, immediately perceived that his crew was off its A-game, that it “didn’t have the inner drive and enthusiasm” needed for riveting convention coverage. Viewers perceived the blandness, too. The overnight ratings gave the first day’s honors to NBC. Cronkite groaned to colleagues like a soldier, anxious and peeved, feeling ambushed. A frustrated Mickelson attributed CBS’s lackluster performance to a bloated corps of floor reporters, most of whom didn’t know enough about the political world to recognize the backroom strategies suddenly at play. It was far too late to change the correspondents, yet something dramatic had to be done to ratchet the numbers upward toward the sterling White Sox–Dodgers ratings. Two days into the convention, and still lagging behind NBC, CBS was floundering. A radical change was implemented by Mickelson in record time.

Don Hewitt, the moxie-driven director of CBS News coverage, was fixated on the winning combination of co-anchors next door in the NBC booth at the Los Angeles arena. On Wednesday morning, as he recalled, “I panicked and went to Sig Mickelson and told him we had to team Cronkite with
someone
.” Hewitt, unafraid to whip up a firestorm, was so desperate to return CBS to its familiar place on top of the ratings, he decided to resort to the network’s magic bullet from the Second World War as Cronkite’s co-anchor. “Hewitt, whose judgment was normally impeccable, approached me before the opening of the Wednesday session,” wrote Mickelson, “and suggested that we try Murrow in the ‘anchor studio’ to work with Cronkite.” For all their traditional antagonisms and obvious stylistic differences, Hewitt was convinced that Cronkite-Murrow was the winning ticket. It made sense.