Cronkite (33 page)

PART IV

Anchorman

C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN

Anchorman of Camelot

FREQUENT FLYING—KENNEDY MAGIC—THE AMERICA’S CUP GOES NEWPORT—CAPTAIN CRONKITE—WHO SPEAKS FOR BIRMINGHAM?—JOCKEY FOR ANCHOR—BOTCHING THE CLOSE—WHIPPING NBC—THE EDWARDS ERA ENDS—ENTER RICHARD SALANT—CRONKITE TAKES THE HELM—DON HEWITT TAKES CHARGE—APRIL 16, 1962—TELSTAR REVOLUTION—BILL SMALL ARRIVES IN D.C.—VOICE OF THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS—MARTIN LUTHER KING’S DREAM—THE THIRTY-MINUTE EXPERIMENT—INTERVIEWING JFK IN HYANNIS PORT—BIGFOOTING ROBERT PIERPOINT—THAT’S THE WAY IT IS

T
o Cronkite, daring was the vital element of
being
. Once, when he left New York for Cape Canaveral to film a space-themed episode of
The Twentieth Century
, he ended up instead on remote Ascension Island, located off the coast of Africa in the equatorial waters of the South Atlantic Ocean. When Cronkite got situated on the island, he called home and spoke to Betsy.

“Say,” he said, “don’t you realize where I am?”

“No,” she said. “Where are you?”

“I’m in Ascension,” he answered, pleased to show off his intrepid daring.

“Wonderful,” the space-minded Betsy replied. “How many times have you been around?”

Cronkite wanted to be the go-to guy who orbited all things JFK. Working with CBS producer Les Midgley on
Eyewitness
, he understood that any Kennedy-tinged story generated excellent ratings for the network.
*
In the early 1960s, every verbal aside, press conference, camera zoom shot, and line of give-and-take dialogue that President Kennedy uttered was gobbled up by millions of curious TV viewers. Cronkite hoped his Friday show, which aired from 10:30 to 11:30 p.m. EST, could showcase the Kennedy family. Not only was Robert F. Kennedy the U.S. attorney general, but Edward M. Kennedy had been chosen to fill his brother’s vacated seat in the U.S. Senate. “Walter wanted to ride on the Kennedys’ coattails,” Andy Rooney recalled. “Every time Kennedy was on
Eyewitness
, the ratings went through the roof. If he did something on Alabama tenant farmers or Charles DeGaulle, nobody seemed to care.”

David Halberstam, in
The Powers That Be
, rightly called Kennedy the “first television president.” Kennedy’s charismatic breakthrough in the 1960 presidential debates had made him an electronic superstar, one Cronkite planned to capitalize on. All White House galas, foreign trips, holiday parties, and yacht outings were shot by CBS News cameramen. Ever since NBC News broadcast the JFK inaugural parade in color, CBS News had grown determined to dominate the ongoing Kennedy story. Cronkite knew that if he wanted to eventually replace Douglas Edwards, whose position was tenuous as long as CBS News was second to NBC News, as anchorman, he would have to win the Kennedy scoop sweepstakes.

During the Kennedy years, not all U.S. viewers lived in a city with three network television stations. If you lived in Aroostook County in Maine or Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana (or thousands of rural areas like them), you didn’t
choose
CBS over NBC, for there was no choice available. You took what your rabbit-eared antenna could pull in, which, in the case of those two areas, was CBS. Advertisers wanted to sell hair products and first cars to the all important eighteen- to twenty-five-year-old demographic. But as TV reception improved, consumers could choose a network brand in the same way they chose a car model or soda. Young people, polls showed, liked Kennedy far better than stiff GOP types like Richard Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller. The CBS snag was that Cronkite, a network broadcaster since 1950, wasn’t considered “Kennedy cool” in 1962; he was still Eisenhower plaid, seemingly believing that what was good for General Motors was good for America.

As Cronkite became a serious contender for the anchorman job of the proposed
CBS Evening News
in 1962—in competition with four or five others to replace Douglas Edwards—he retired from his longtime hobby, auto racing. CBS management didn’t like having Cronkite, who had gotten in a car wreck in Tennessee, unable to even carry a life insurance policy. You couldn’t build a TV franchise around a corpse. Paley might have tolerated Cronkite’s speed racing hobby if it brought him White House access, but the blue-blooded Kennedys preferred yachting around Martha’s Vineyard and Rhode Island Sound to the smell of diesel at the Daytona 500. With his physician telling him speed racing was bad for his heart, and possessing far too much energy for golf, the universally accepted pastime for upper-class white men, Cronkite needed to excel at a different sport. Maybe, he thought, his passion for sailing—first developed in Carmel, New York—could grow into the more challenging sport of yachting from Maine to Cape Cod to Newport on the Atlantic Ocean à la President Kennedy. His friends the William F. Buckleys and James Micheners and Bill Harbachs had already taken to mother ocean . . . why not the Cronkites?

Cronkite and Midgley understood that the Kennedys had turned Cape Cod into a lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous playground. Their challenge was finding a way for
Eyewitness
to capitalize on what became known as Camelot.

Born in Salt Lake City, Midgley was first hired by CBS News in the mid-1950s. A gangly Ichabod Crane–like character, Midgley, a Mormon, was a close friend of tycoon Howard Hughes—no one understood why. He championed the idea of the Kennedys becoming part of a proto-reality show. His thinking went as follows: President Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier had been married in ultra-exclusive Newport, Rhode Island, and held their reception at Newport’s Hammersmith Farm. In the fall of 1962, the America’s Cup race was to be held off Newport. The challenger was
Gretel
, a twelve-meter sloop owned by Sir Frank Packer, an Australian media mogul. Its skipper was Jock Sturrock. The New York Yacht Club would defend the Cup with the
Weatherly
, captained by Bus Mosbacher. The America’s Cup defenders in those days were all wooden twelve-meter sloops, about sixty feet long, built at the Minneford Boat Yard in City Island, New York.

Midgley decided that CBS, riding the wave of Cronkite’s Squaw Valley and Rome Olympics coverage in 1960, could cover the America’s Cup for
Eyewitness
by spicing it up with Kennedy magic. Together Cronkite and Midgley developed a concept for the Friday show that combined the America’s Cup drama with the public’s fascination with the Kennedy family, one that would look at picturesque Newport and its famous “400” families—including the Vanderbilts and the Astors—and their mansions. Because Midgley knew that Lew Wood—a former U.S. marine from Indiana who started broadcasting for WDZ radio (the third-oldest station in America) in Decatur, Illinois, after graduating from Purdue University—
loved
sailing, he got the assignment to work with Cronkite for the
Eyewitness
episode to air in September.

Wood, with ace cameraman Walter Dombrow in tow, traveled to Newport numerous times to do advance work on the race. If
Eyewitness
could turn the America’s Cup into a sporting event as popular as the Kentucky Derby or Indianapolis 500 every year, CBS News would have an advertising cash cow on its hands. Dombrow and Wood chartered a Bertram Moppie powerboat and filmed B-roll shots of sleek yachts and sunsets. Back in 1962, there was no bridge between Jonestown and Newport, so it was necessary to take the ferry across. Having given up auto racing, Cronkite began to seriously eye sailing as a new recreational activity for him to master. “Once Cronkite came to Newport with his director Vinny Walters, he fell madly in love with the whole yachting life,” Wood recalled. “I met them at the Newport side of the ferry, got them settled in our rooming house, and provided press passes for them for the next day to get on the Press Boat to watch the race.”

Wood later boasted that he “turned Cronkite onto the yachting world”; that perception was true enough. Born with a profound appreciation of the sea, Cronkite told Wood that once he was financially sound, with $100,000 in his savings account, he was going to gallivant around Cape Cod like a Kennedy. Eventually, he would own one of the most handsome ketches on the Atlantic seaboard. For the time being, however, all he could afford was a twenty-two-foot Electra sloop to sail on Long Island Sound he named
Chipper
. He had purchased it at a New York Boat Show. Cronkite claimed that if he became CBS News anchorman—replacing Edwards—the pay raise would allow him to upgrade his modest vessel to a twenty-eight-foot Triton, then a mauve double-ender. And who knew? Maybe one day he could commission his own magnificent yacht, built to his personal specifications, and name it
Wyntje
(WIN-tee), in honor of a lovely Dutch ancestor and “all the women who’ve made Cronkite men happy in the New World—in whatever capacity.”

CBS News producer-director Don Hewitt was hungry to have a post-Edwards anchorman with grit, one bloodthirsty for combat against the dreaded NBC News; the analogy he liked emanated from the rope-line tug-of-war where you put your biggest and baddest dude at the far end to anchor the defense. The soft-spoken Edwards didn’t fit the billing. Having started out in radio broadcasting at age fifteen in Alabama, he rose to work side by side with Murrow in London from 1943 to 1945 and became the host of
Douglas Edwards with the News
. But in early 1962, his CBS superiors were ready with the hook. The big question at CBS News was not just who would replace Edwards at the city desk, but also Murrow on the freedom march.

A queue of talented broadcasters formed while Edwards logged his last weeks as anchor. Cronkite assumed that Howard K. Smith would get the nod. When President Kennedy summoned Murrow to run USIA, Smith was dispatched to Birmingham, Alabama, to work on a searing
CBS Reports
exposé about Jim Crow bigotry. While Cronkite had latched on to NASA, Smith was all about Montgomery, Birmingham, Little Rock, and the Freedom Rides. On May 18, 1961, Smith had seen Birmingham sheriff “Bull” Connor’s police force pummel civil rights workers with clubs. An incensed Smith lashed out at the segregationist bullies responsible for the bloody melee. In late 1961, he replaced Murrow as host of the documentary
Who Speaks for Birmingham?

There was nothing objective about Smith’s excellent documentary of the white-black divide in Birmingham; he clearly championed civil rights activists over the Big Police. He had put his finger on many Southern boils, larded with hatred, and then lanced them. It was painful television. Smith, quoting British philosopher Edmund Burke, ended
Who Speaks for Birmingham?
by saying: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

CBS News president Frank Stanton, CBS News vice president Blair Clark, and other executives were livid over Smith’s one-sided reporting. The provocative Burke line—a powerful documentary close—was deleted from the TV broadcast. An intransigent Smith, refusing to be bullied by Dr. Stanton and insisting that moral judgments were imperative in broadcasting news in a democracy, defiantly read his uncensored text on his CBS radio show. A confrontation with CBS management ensued. Who the hell did Smith think he was? Martin Luther King Jr.? The new Murrow?

Smith wrote a high-minded memo for CBS management about the need for subjective morality in journalism. It was the ultimate indictment of Paley as a money-driven millionaire. The finical Paley dismissed Smith’s argument, saying, “I have heard all this junk before. If this is what you believe, you had better go somewhere else.” When push came to shove, CBS News needed bigoted Southerners and fair-minded northern viewers alike. Paley, like any corporate owner with stockholders, didn’t want to alienate either vast demographic. Objective journalism was about not pissing anyone off.

Smith’s forced resignation from CBS News in late 1961 served notice to all of Paley’s headstrong news employees that the high-and-mighty days of Murrow’s ACLU-infused mania were over. Getting Smith out of the way was, ironically, a tremendous career booster for Cronkite. A popular story that circulated around CBS News held that Cronkite once called in sick on an Election Night (midterm) with one of his colds. Howard K. Smith was chosen to take his place. “Within fifteen minutes,” Smith wrote in his memoir
Events Leading Up to My Death
, “Walter was in the studio sucking on cough drops and sending me back to the Southern boards. Murrow told me that as author of his recovery I should send him a doctor’s bill.” Now Smith, his primary competitor in the race for the anchor job, had dropped like a fly.

With Smith gone, Eric Sevareid aimed for Edwards’s job. Craving Murrow-like fame and the quantifiable ability to be heard and heeded, Sevareid undoubtedly had the stature for the post. The problem was that Sevareid—nicknamed “Eric the Red” by GOP conservatives—was star-crossed. No one went after Joe McCarthy on CBS Radio with the verve and vengeance of Sevareid. And career-wise, no media personality paid for it more. There was about Sevareid the aura of an elitist in a country that honored Lowell Thomas and Walt Disney, not fourth-estate hauteur. If Sevareid was perceived as a Minnesota know-it-all who read too much Camus and Dostoyevsky to be trusted in the Edwards chair by conservative CBS affiliate owners, then Cronkite was the prototypical Middle American straight from the pages of Sinclair Lewis.

As the viable candidates for anchorman dwindled to a few, Charles Collingwood—the model for the Joel McCrea character in the 1944 Billy Wilder movie
Foreign Correspondent
—was also considered by Dr. Stanton to replace Edwards. The CBS foreign correspondent’s wardrobe proved problematic, though. While Cronkite always dressed like a Missouri businessman who shopped at Harry Truman’s favored off-the-rack Kansas City haberdashery, Collingwood usually dressed like the Gieves & Hawkes–tailored Prince of Wales. Some colleagues were quizzical about Collingwood’s showboating style. Others were even rude—he clearly had never spent any time picking Iowa corn or working on a Detroit assembly line. Depending on how the stars were aligned, Collingwood would dress in eye-catching Vincent Price capes or gray kid gloves or even wear jazz age spats on his shoes. In a perfect world, it wouldn’t matter if the TV anchorman were something of a Beau Brummell. But in Collingwood’s case, his dapper clothes hinted toward his love of Russian caviar and French espionage. To an average CBS affiliate owner in Toledo or Topeka, he just was not relatable.