Cronkite (27 page)

Other “verbal journalists,” as
Newsweek
called them, did a great job covering Glenn’s three orbits. They have been insufficiently recognized. On CBS Radio, Dallas Townsend was exceptional. ABC’s Jules Bergman, who had spent 1960 on a science fellowship at Columbia University, had a fine sense of the astrophysics involved with the
Friendship 7
launch. NBC’s Peter Hackes and Roy Neal had done their NASA homework just as diligently as Cronkite. At CBS, Charles Von Fremd was solid on color commentary. But it was Cronkite whom
Newsweek
declared the “grand panjandrum” of “Glenn mania” for his prudent observations infused with glee. When the air force was running the space race, TV cameras were frowned upon. But the Glenn mission proved once and for all that George M. Low, the manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program in Houston, was right: the more TV cameras trained on the launchpad, the better. CBS cameras were even ensconced on the aircraft carriers U.S.S.
Randolph
and U.S.S.
Forrestal
, hoping to catch the initial glimpse of
Friendship 7
’s billowing parachutes. “I think we have a lot more knowledge than the newspaper reporters,” Cronkite said in defense of his ilk, “because we have to have it spontaneously—the newspaper guy has time to check it out.”

Other CBS technical touches differentiated the Tiffany Network from ABC and NBC. Don Hewitt, for instance, had developed the brazen idea of erecting a giant twenty-by-thirty-foot Eidophor television screen on top of the central mezzanine in New York City’s Grand Central Terminal so commuters could watch John Glenn on CBS. (This was the building from which most CBS News telecasts originated.) And the Hewitt scheme worked. There was Cronkite, Godzilla-sized, broadcasting from Cape Canaveral on the giant screen, with commuters enraptured by the Glenn mission, waiting until the very last second to board their trains to Westchester County, New York, or Fairfield County, Connecticut. Even John Wayne or Elizabeth Taylor on a drive-in movie screen wasn’t much more outsized than Cronkite at Grand Central. CBS News had created a communal aspect during the Glenn mission that was then unprecedented in broadcasting. As NBC News veteran James Kitchell said, the big-screen stunt was “a one-up” on his network.

To Helen Cronkite, it was ironic; her son, who had failed physics at the University of Texas, was explaining Glenn’s flight to millions of Americans live from the Cape. The college dropout was now teacher to the nation. During Glenn’s reentry into Earth’s atmosphere—those minutes when the NASA tracking stations lost contact with him—thousands of people watched the big screen in breathless anticipation. “The cheer that went up when I said that Glenn was safe and sound and back from space was deafening,” Cronkite recalled. “It was just what I was after.” Glenn had taken the country along on the happiest ride of the cold war, and CBS News milked the publicity for all it was worth. It ran a special titled
Man in Orbit
that covered Glenn speaking to a joint session of Congress live. The network even aired his New York City ticker tape parade, preempting soap operas. And
CBS News Extra
devoted three segments to the Glenn mission. Cronkite was an active participant in all of the hoopla. While on his way to the studio one afternoon, he was quoted telling a reporter, “Can you imagine how great it would be to say to an audience, ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, this is Walter Cronkite reporting for CBS direct from the surface of the Moon?’ ”

Call it a lingering U.S. Eighth Air Force complex, but Cronkite, the American booster, thought Shepard, Grissom, and Glenn were good for cold war America—and, it shouldn’t be overlooked, they were helping to advance his career at CBS. By throwing away the script at key junctures during the Glenn mission, letting his enthusiasm bubble, Cronkite outshone the competition by a country mile. The frenzied ticker tape parade thrown for Glenn in New York nine days after the mission proved that America, too, saw the astronauts as its new heroes, that “instead of looking down despondently, we could look up at the stars.”

Cecil Smith, writing in the
Los Angeles Times
about Cronkite as the voice of NASA, surmised that Glenn’s three orbits were “quite possibly the finest excuse for television’s existence that the little tube has ever offered.” Looking fit and feisty, Cronkite soared to TV newsman fame on the exhaust of John Glenn’s Redstone rocket. TV journalism as an art was almost virgin territory, for the simple reason that the medium was so new. Therefore Cronkite could claim to be a pioneer in his own right. “This is not just Cronkite the old reportorial warhorse fleeing the confinement of his New York headquarters,” Smith wrote. “It’s part of a major design to do more and more of the CBS newscasts from remote locations.”

CBS grew so determined to showcase Cronkite as the media star of the Glenn mission that it published a colorful souvenir book titled
Seven Days
. Cronkite was treated as the new Murrow, the voice of space, the resplendent broadcaster John Glenn’s mother wanted to meet. The trifecta of Shepard, Grissom, and Glenn had transformed Cronkite’s career in dramatic ways. “At NASA,” Glenn recalled, “we all took to calling Walter ‘Mr. Space.’ ”

What space exploration had going for it from a TV perspective wasn’t astronauts squabbling, but rather the high-stakes drama of liftoff and recovery. Cronkite was a master at narrating those nail-biting moments with the right mixture of reverence, exclamatory judgments, and long pauses. CBS helped him out by using artists’ animations and full-scale models. Cronkite, using his newfound gravitas, worked to persuade Low of NASA to allow astronauts to bring TV cameras into space. Seeing color photos of Earth from space was a breathtaking experience. All the networks benefited from Cronkite’s pestering impatience when NASA ultimately ordered astronaut Gordon Cooper to send back live pictures from space during his May 1963 Mercury mission. Cooper orbited Earth twenty-two times and logged more time in space than all the previous space ventures combined (thirty-four hours, nineteen minutes, and forty-nine seconds, traveling an astounding 546,167 miles).

By 1963 there was a plethora of Project Mercury enthusiasts in America, but Cronkite was the first among equals. He publicly embraced Kennedy’s moon pledge with the ardor of a convert. He often described space in grand historical and even biblical terms. Understanding that the American people were keen to beat the Soviet Union in space, Cronkite, the veteran sports broadcaster, cloaked his reporting in almost jingoistic, high-octane nationalistic, anti-communist rhetoric. He was more NASA collaborator than reporter. Yet there was something wholesome and country-fried and urbane—all at once—about his ability to broadcast space travel. Cronkite, the tech-geek, knew before most that satellites would soon revolutionize the communications industry in astounding ways. “Just as Noah once sent out a dove to explore an unknown and dangerous landscape, man is now sending mechanical birds to feel out the perilous highway from here to the Moon,” he said on
CBS Reports
with Glenn looking on. “What we are hearing now is the curious song of those birds. They’re artificial satellites wandering through Space.”

P
HOTOGRAPHS

Walter Cronkite braving a Missouri snowstorm, circa 1918. While his father was in France serving in the Army during World War I, Walter and his mother lived with his maternal grandparents in Kansas City.
(Whitehurst Photos)