Cronkite (25 page)

Before Election Night, November 8, 1960, CBS News took out ads promoting both Cronkite and Murrow as lead anchors. But pecking order matters, and Cronkite’s name came first. He was the marquee player. CBS purchased full-page ads in
The Washington Post
and
The New York Times
showing Cronkite (not Murrow) surrounded by a sea of telephones, looking like he was the ringmaster of a Jerry Lewis–like telethon, the anchorman easily engaging citizens willing to dial a few numbers. Whom to watch on Election Night was obviously a matter of personal appeal and Cronkite was marketed as the Everyman. What were Huntley-Brinkley? The Everytwo? CBS News issued press releases boasting about the extraordinary job their boy Walter had done during that year’s Olympic Games and the final Kennedy-Nixon debate. The seemingly avuncular Cronkite, the Midwesterner with a centrist disposition, was becoming the franchise.

C
HAPTER
F
IFTEEN

New Space Frontier on CBS

JITTERS AT THE JFK INAUGURATION—CBS MAKES SPACE A PRIORITY—CRONKITE, WUSSLER, AND THE ART OF SPECIAL EFFECTS—WITH EISENHOWER AT GETTYSBURG—BACK AT THE BOOKIE JOINT—BEATING THE COSMONAUTS—GUTS AND GRIT OF ALAN SHEPARD—GO, GUS GRISSOM—INTERVIEWING WALTER LIPPMANN—APRIL 16, 1962—OF NOAH’S DOVES AND ARTIFICIAL SATELLITES—GODSPEED, JOHN GLENN—NO-FRILLS WALTER

O
n the morning of Friday, January 20, 1961, Washington, D.C., glittery as a glacier, was an exhilarating place to be. John F. Kennedy was poised to become the thirty-fifth president of the United States. For the first time, a Catholic would occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Although the city was dusted with snow, a freezing winter wind whipping around Capitol Hill and Georgetown alike, the CBS special-event crews kept warm with gloves, scarves, and hot chocolate in the bitter cold. They were part of a pool of cameras that would follow President-elect Kennedy from his Georgetown residence to the White House, where he was supposed to arrive at about 11:30 a.m. and give President Eisenhower a ride to Capitol Hill. Chief Justice Earl Warren was slated to administer the oath of office to Kennedy at noon. While Cronkite didn’t consider himself a New Frontiersman (a Henry Wallace phrase circa 1948, applied to die-hard Kennedy supporters in 1961), he thought the Massachusetts senator’s rise to power from Brookline to PT-109 to
Profiles in Courage
to beating Richard Nixon was an irresistible story.

What worried Cronkite about the Kennedy inauguration was the potential for technical glitches that could turn CBS’ live broadcast into a TV white-noise static fest. Many of CBS News’ top technicians were stuck in New York because of inclement weather. It had taken Betsy hours in a CBS car to get from National Airport to the Hay-Adams Hotel across from the White House. CBS News producers had laid cables down Pennsylvania Avenue in preparation for the inaugural parade; these had short-circuited because of heavy water damage. “Our guys,” Cronkite recalled, “were pulling cables all night.”

Cronkite himself was doing last-minute homework just before the start of CBS’s broadcast that Friday morning. Joining him for the broadcast were Howard K. Smith, Edward R. Murrow, Paul Niven, and George Herman—a marvelous cast of correspondents. But all the CBSers were grumpy because they’d been outplayed by NBC News, which garnered all the buzz for plans to televise the inaugural parade in color (a historic first). Meanwhile, CBS management in New York was nervous about cables, wires, and soundboards. During that same worrisome prebroadcast lull, the news division’s Sig Mickelson pulled aside his special-events general assistant, Bobby Wussler. “Young man,” Mickelson said to the twenty-two-year-old Wussler, “I’ve been watching you and I have a big job for you. What do you know about the space program?”

“Not much, sir,” Wussler responded.

It was an odd question for Mickelson to ask Wussler when the CBS workforce was fretting over perfecting the impending Kennedy inauguration coverage. There were more newsy questions that needed to be answered. Did Sorensen write the inaugural speech? How many columns are on the podium? Are we
sure
JFK will be the youngest president in U.S. history? Not many minutes were left before the beginning of the telecast, but Sig was thinking about NASA.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1936, Robert Wussler vividly remembered his family’s first TV, a Crosley 9-420M, purchased when he turned twelve years old. He attended Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, majoring in communication arts. Graduating in 1957, he was determined to land a job at one of the Big Three networks, so he walked into CBS headquarters in New York and was hired as a mailroom clerk. His coworkers soon learned that Wussler was a visionary who thought the CBS News specials could be produced as high-octane drama with the help of electronic gizmos. Mickelson met him, appreciated his talent, and promoted him to the position of CBS News production assistant after only five weeks on the job. Wussler started helping Douglas Edwards with the
CBS Evening News
show, while Don Hewitt simultaneously took him under his wing. What Wussler had a better grasp of than the old CBS Radio News hands was the potential boon of using graphic art to make newscasting a more entertaining endeavor.

Wussler’s big break came with the Winter Olympics of 1960, when he orchestrated pioneering TV graphics and production techniques. Cronkite called him the Plotter because he always sat in a corner devising ideas for special effects in a giant looseleaf journal. Cronkite, like Hewitt, fell under the spell of Wussler’s technical talent in Squaw Valley, where the U.S. team won three gold medals. Thanks to the big ratings garnered by prime-time broadcasts, CBS Sports became a separate division within the CBS television network in 1961, and Wussler deserved a hunk of the credit for the new status it enjoyed. Besides graphics, on-location logistics were also a Wussler specialty. He ran the CBS News special-events unit almost like a SWAT team hungry for complicated assignments in far-off places.

“Men are going to fly in space—this year, throughout the Sixties,” Mickelson told Wussler the morning of the inauguration. “We’ll probably visit some other planets. And you’re going to be in charge of our coverage. As a matter of fact, there’s a monkey going up from Cape Canaveral in ten days, and you’re going to go down there and find out all about this.”

Wussler, like a good lieutenant, nodded his acquiescence. Then he went about overseeing CBS’s broadcast of the Kennedy inaugural, trying to stay warm in the twenty-two-degree weather that felt like subzero because of the wind chill. Visions of space ships and rockets were swirling in his mind. Mickelson had jarred his sensibilities. Soon after the inauguration, Wussler started his research, devouring the science fiction books of Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and H. G. Wells for ideas. During the first half of 1961, CBS News was investigating numerous issues, such as Cuban prime minister Fidel Castro, U-2 spy flights over the Soviet Union, and missile technology. But when it came to space, carte blanche was given to Cronkite-Wussler by the president of CBS News himself.

Mickelson had been slightly off with his facts when he tapped Wussler. The United States was about to launch a
chimpanzee
(named “Ham”), not a monkey. The implication that space coverage was something new for CBS was also a bit off. As Mickelson knew full well, CBS had been deep in the world of rocketry since 1958. Cronkite himself had claimed that during the Second World War, he saw a German V-2 rocket launched by the Third Reich soaring over Holland; he had even written a UP column about it that ran in
The New York Times
. Nevertheless, Mickelson was prescient. Space
was
going to be the huge news story of 1961. Assigning Wussler to work the NASA beat with Cronkite was a masterstroke. The Cronkite-Wussler creative collaboration proved unbeatable. Besides being a great juggler, booker, technician, imagist, producer, and arranger, Wussler had youthful energy, that rare quality that the poet William Blake had called the hallmark of genius.

The Murrow Boys became part of history during World War II, and the Cronkiters were going to do the same covering Project Mercury, the first concerted American effort to send humans to space. “It was a little bit like being along for Columbus or Magellan,” Wussler recalled in a 2003 oral history interview. “It
was
a New Frontier. It
was
the Sixties. I had grown up as a Depression baby, a World War II kid, and in the slow days of the Eisenhower Fifties. And Kennedy—it
was
Camelot, as corny as it may sound. It was Camelot. And Camelot, and the Kennedy mystique, and the Space program, and the Magnificent Seven guys, the first astronaut class, all sort of came out of the same short period.”

It’s difficult to understand Cronkite’s rise during the 1960s without understanding Wussler. Cronkite’s engaging strengths were his original voice, work ethic, ability to edit scripts, nomadic nature, competitiveness, and eccentric curiosity that not even the most ambitious hotshot could match. Attracted to the dramatic news stories of the day, he nevertheless had a limited sense of the visual production of TV news. Wussler, on the other hand, always looked for new camera angles, fresh graphics, and ways to improve the sound quality of a CBS special, be it Vietnamese jungle gunfire or a Saturn V rocket engine revving for liftoff. He was an ideal partner for Cronkite. It was Wussler, a cyberkinetics junkie, who invented, for better or worse, the split screen of talking heads.

What CBS News had discovered by 1961, through a combination of luck and talent scouting, was the right special-events team. Don Hewitt, the third key member of the troika, had been with the news division since 1948 and had worked on special events with Cronkite since Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in June 1953. Together Cronkite and Hewitt, world-trampers at heart, had spent more time in adjoining hotel rooms than any other duo in television. To Cronkite, CBS live events coverage was an “intoxicating endeavor”; the boundaries of TV news burst wide open in such unlikely places as Squaw Valley and Cocoa Beach and Hyannis Port.

Driven like a one-man Sousa band, Hewitt was innovative, almost maniacally so, and he had definite ideas about space coverage. For example, the modern viewer, he insisted, needed Disney-like visual models to comprehend the solar system. CBS installed in its studio a micro-planetarium, with all the planets and the Moon built to scale. Cecil B. De Mille had nothing on CBS News when it came to pageantry and re-creations. Just as Walt Disney had advanced animation with Mickey Mouse, the Hewitt-Wussler-Cronkite team developed a whole new generation of visual effects based on high-tech simulations. CBS News special events—like NASA itself—established a distinct personality: competitive, modern, and unstoppable for the space race against the Soviet Union.

As Cronkite was poised for important on-location assignments, Ed Murrow was in a strangely sequestered position at CBS News. The corporate chiefs were tired of his controversial let’s-punish-the-bad-guys public service programs. And Murrow was tired of everything else about the TV age. Paley couldn’t strong-arm Murrow into resigning without incurring a tidal wave of resentment from the nation, but he could stand by as the news division shifted Murrow to a smaller and yet smaller role at CBS. An intuitive Murrow sensed his diminution, and in early 1961 he let go of his hold on CBS, accepting an offer from President Kennedy to run the U.S. Information Agency. It was a matter of widespread CBS corridor gossip at the time that Dr. Frank Stanton, working behind the scenes at Paley’s behest, had convinced the Kennedy gang to offer Murrow the USIA job as a “sneaky way” to get him to leave the company. The short-lived second act for Murrow at CBS was over.

Before Murrow’s departure, Cronkite had been involved with a slew of CBS documentaries. Building on this unheralded aspect of his résumé, he now tried to inherit Murrow’s mantle. When the Nazi mass murderer Adolf Eichmann went on trial in Israel in April 1961, Cronkite and producer Sandy Socolow were determined to cover the proceedings for the
Eyewitness
program, which Cronkite hosted every Friday evening at 10:30 p.m. starting in 1959. Full of Nuremberg déjà vu, Cronkite thought the Eichmann trial was going to be
huge
news. Stanton agreed. Not only did he dispatch Cronkite and Socolow to Israel, but he also sent a second CBS News crew to Argentina to re-create the Mossad’s capture of the Nazi lieutenant colonel.

When the trial started on Wednesday, April 11, 1961, the Cronkite-Socolow plan was to shoot the opening day and quickly fly back to New York City for a Friday night
Eyewitness
broadcast, mostly pre-produced with a strategic hole to be filled by last-minute footage of the trial. At a refueling stop in Rome, Cronkite read a headline in
Il Messaggero
about Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin being the first human to orbit the Earth. An anxious Cronkite called Sig Mickelson in New York and was told to put the kibosh on the Eichmann broadcast. Instead, CBS wanted Cronkite and Socolow to get on the Gagarin story ASAP, to tap old UP Soviet contacts for scoops. Instead of the Eichmann story, there would be a “prime-time examination” of where NASA (the United States) stood in the space race vis-à-vis the Soviets now that Gagarin had shattered the power dynamic.

Gagarin was almost as big a news story as the Soviet
Sputnik
launch in October 1957. It didn’t take Price Waterhouse to calculate that the Russians had the first satellite, the first dog in space, and now the first man in space. Not wanting to miss out on the cosmonaut juggernaut, Cronkite flew back to New York, determined to get the biggest slice of the Soviet space pie that CBS News was carving up for its reporters. With a dose of luck, Cronkite and Marvin Kalb interviewed Gagarin only two days after the Russian cosmonaut made history. “American prestige was jolted,” Cronkite recalled years later on NPR, “as the world heard the quickened pulse of
Vostok 1
orbiting the Earth.”

On the strength of Cronkite’s work hosting
The Twentieth Century
, Stanton personally assigned him to cover the
Freedom 7
mission of Alan B. Shepard that May. “There was great pressure in the United States to get a man into space,” Cronkite recalled. Amid fierce competition among air force pilots, Shepard had been selected by NASA as one of the original group of seven Mercury astronauts. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy class of ’44, Shepard had, as a cold war test pilot, logged more than 8,000 hours flying time (3,700 in jet aircraft). Cronkite, who befriended Shepard, deemed him the greatest “rocket jock” of all time. Although NASA was selling Shepard as the all-American boy, Cronkite knew better. Shepard, who cursed like a banshee and drank with lust, had to attend NASA “charm school” to learn, for example, how to say “darn” instead of “damn.” The acquiescent Cronkite went along with the NASA charade of Shepard as wholesome American hero. Reporters in Florida covering the
Freedom 7
launch noticed that Cronkite had a behind-closed-doors alignment with NASA, as if he knew their secret handshake. There was some speculation that Cronkite worked for the CIA. “We were quite aware that the image that NASA was trying to project was not quite honest,” Cronkite later admitted. “But at the same time, there was a recognition that the nation needed new heroes.”