Cronkite (35 page)

Regardless of the Telstar excitement, Cronkite’s
Evening News
broadcast was still a work in progress, victim to the truest maxim in television: “In news an audience is slow to grow and fast to go.” Cronkite was very good, very clear, very quick, and very second place. CBS had increased budgets, such that it topped the other networks in the number of reporters, producers, cameramen, and script writers, but not in the number of viewers tuning in. Cronkite managed to stop the
Evening News
from hemorrhaging viewers, but that wasn’t enough of an accomplishment for Paley. CBS had to be first. The public knew Cronkite mainly as “Iron Pants” or “Mr. Space.” To be successful, he would have to become “America’s Anchor,” quite a tall order. “He’s nervous,” Fred Friendly said, “No. Not just nervous. I think Walter is running scared. And that’s good. That’s healthy.”

Just a couple of months after Cronkite became the
CBS Evening News
anchorman, William Small, a news director at WHAS-TV in Louisville, Kentucky, became the news director and bureau manager of CBS News in Washington, D.C., leapfrogging over a stable of more obvious candidates for the prestigious, high-octane job. Before moving from Louisville to Washington, Small spent an arduous couple of weekdays in New York City getting to know Cronkite and other bigwigs at CBS corporate headquarters. They got along splendidly from the get-go. Small learned a secret about Cronkite’s modus operandi: if you were a brand-new hire he treated you like a prince. Grooming newbies at CBS, helping the rookies machete through the weird thicket of Mr. Paley’s world, was de rigueur behavior for Cronkite. It was how you turned staff into your stable.

Hanging around Cronkite all day had made Small mistakenly think that CBS News was a genteel place. When Cronkite left the studio to use an electric razor, the abrasive Don Hewitt, chewing a cigar, banished Small from the high-tech studio. Dutifully following instructions, Small headed up to the glass booth overlooking CBS Studio 42 in Grand Central Terminal to watch the Cronkite telecast. The countdown had started. Usually the sequestered holding tank was reserved as a courtesy zone for corporate sponsors of the
CBS Evening News
. That night, Small was left alone with an elderly woman counting down the minutes before broadcast. When Hewitt entered the dugout in full cock-of-the-walk mode, he pointed to the granny in the booth sitting next to Small. “Who is that old bitch?” he blurted out. For a split second Small was mortified. After dropping such a word bomb, Hewitt then scurried back to his control room seat. It was Helen Cronkite, the anchorman’s mother, whose tongue could be pretty raucous.

“Are you really going to run the Washington bureau?” Helen asked Small incredulously.

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied.

“Well,” she said, “you’ll have a lot of influence.”

“Suppose so,” he answered.

“Well, look,” she said. “When the press does profiles on Walter they often mention my age—they make me feel undateable. You make sure they leave my age out of it. Okay?”

Small felt as if he had walked into the New York City version of the popular CBS show
The Beverly Hillbillies
—he was an outsider, for sure. “Turns out Helen was a swinger,” Small recalled. “She dated retired naval admirals and the like. She wasn’t kidding about her known age hindering her dating life.”

The network relentlessly publicized Cronkite’s unmatched Soviet-analyst experience in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis that October, presenting him as the cold war anchorman to trust at a time of anxiety. For thirteen days, President Kennedy dueled with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev about Soviet missile launch sites in Cuba. And for thirteen days, Huntley-Brinkley beat Cronkite in the ratings. Instead of firing Cronkite, Paley doubled down. In December 1962, Salant proposed that the
CBS Evening News
be expanded to a half hour. (At the time, all network news shows were only fifteen minutes long, patterned after radio news.)

Cronkite loved the idea. In a half hour he could give TV viewers the front page, along with a bit of the editorial page, some of the features, a peek at the business section, and even some sports, when warranted. Considering that by 1962 most other television programming was packaged and sold in minimum half-hour increments, the idea would seem to have been obvious. Looking for free publicity, CBS News announced the expanded broadcast with fanfare on the Fourth of July. “To listen to [CBS],” wrote John Horn, TV critic for the
New York Herald-Tribune
, “the half-hour news show was a communications creation second only to the printing press.”

The typical complaint about the
CBS Evening News
time expansion was perplexing: Was there really that much
news
to fill a half hour each weekday evening? At best, TV news was merely a headline service that read viewers the condensed AP and UP wire service reports. Salant felt CBS News’ well-received coverage of the November 1962 midterm elections had generated a bit of critical momentum. This caused Paley to choose December as the ideal time to declare that its
Evening News
was more important—and needed to be longer—than the shallow
Huntley-Brinkley Report
.

Some people remembered where they were when they heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor or the D-day landings. Reuven Frank, the former NBC News producer of
The
Huntley-Brinkley Report
, remembered precisely where he was when he heard about the half-hour
CBS Evening News
. As Frank told it, he had just parked his car and was walking toward the NBC News offices at Rockefeller Center when he met a friend from the same network.

“What do you plan to do today?” he asked me.

“Sit in my office and wait for [NBC News president William] McAndrew to call.”

“Why?”

“It was in today’s
Times
.”

“Haven’t seen it yet.”

“CBS is expanding Cronkite to a half hour.”

As Frank suspected, he was called in by his NBC bosses. They all had catch-up work to do. The Peacock Network, hungry for parity with CBS, immediately announced that
The
Huntley-Brinkley Report
would also be expanded to thirty minutes. ABC News would eventually follow suit in 1967. The changes at each show were scheduled for the late summer of 1963, as each hired yet more staff members. The expanded broadcasts came just in time to cover the Vietnam War, Project Mercury, civil rights, and the antiwar movement. Theodore White, the author of the classic
Making of the President
book
series, properly believed that CBS’s news expansion “revolutionized” the American political process.

After the time for commercial breaks was subtracted,
CBS Evening News
, in reality, was to be twenty-two minutes long. Such excellent reporters as Robert Pierpoint (White House), George Herman (State Department), Roger Mudd (Capitol Hill), and Charles von Fremd (Pentagon) girded their reports with both wire service news and original research. One of Salant’s first decisions was to devote two minutes each night to a commentary, labeled as such, by the sagacious Eric Sevareid. Cronkite saw this as a handicap. He wasn’t enthusiastic about ceding two of his precious minutes to a Murrowite like Sevareid, full of pompous ways, but he didn’t have a vote in the matter. CBS assigned Sevareid—who had been host of a weekly CBS News show called
Conquest
—to the close spot and built the commentary around him, even down to ending each of his essays with a graphic of his signature, larger than John Hancock’s on the Declaration of Independence.

During the first six months of 1963, CBS News staff grew excited about the start of the new thirty-minute experiment to be launched around Labor Day. Hewitt—at great pocketbook expense to Paley—had Cronkite tape a series of thirty-minute unaired broadcasts as a sort of dress rehearsal for the fall premiere. “Hewitt wanted to get all the kinks out of things,” Socolow recalled. “Harry Reasoner did the fifteen-minute live news broadcasts over the summer, while Cronkite did thirty minutes as a trial-and-error exercise.” It cost a fortune, but Paley green-lighted the shadow broadcast. Cronkite’s new writer, Ron Bonn, recalled that when the CBS broadcast was only fifteen minutes, script makers would “rip stories off the half-dozen wire service Teletypes chattering away in the corner, rewrite them as stories to be read aloud, and then hand [them] to Douglas Edwards.” Now, with Cronkite at the helm, and the broadcast thirty minutes long, CBS News changed from
disseminating
news to
gathering
news.

For Cronkite, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a large-scale political rally in support of civil rights for African Americans in August 1963, was uplifting. Having won a Peabody Award that spring for his nightly assignments on CBS, he hoped his coverage of the march would lead to repeat glory. He had no compunction about deeming Dr. Martin Luther King one of the great orators of the century. But Harry Reasoner was primary anchor for CBS’s special-event summertime coverage as an army of journalists descended upon the National Mall to document the Dr. King–dominated spectacular. On Wednesday, August 28, the evening before the speechifying began, Cronkite hosted a one-hour
CBS News Special Report
on the state of the African American freedom struggle. By the luck of the draw, CBS had been chosen by lot to coordinate the pooled coverage for what was being billed as a “Jobs and Freedom” march.

Each of the Big Three networks had slated four hours of live telecast on August 29; only CBS stayed with the activities (including King’s awe-inspiring “I Have a Dream” speech) to the culmination. The Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company provided nearly thirty television station pickups to enable CBS to beam the event worldwide. “They called it the March on Washington for jobs and freedom,” Cronkite broadcast that evening. “They came from all over America, negroes and whites, housewives and Hollywood stars, Senators and a few beatniks, clergymen and probably a few communists. More than 200,000 of them came to Washington this morning in a kind of climax to a historic spring and summer in the struggle for equal rights.”

That August, while King was the hot interview to procure in TV journalism, Hewitt and Cronkite kept their focus on President Kennedy. A deal was struck with the White House for Cronkite to interview JFK on September 2 (Memorial Day) for his inaugural thirty-minute
Evening News
broadcast. The Kennedy family summer home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, was the venue. Cronkite was deeply grateful to the president for the exclusive, oblivious to the possibility that the White House was using him to float a new Vietnam policy initiative. Hewitt had cut a deal with Kennedy’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger: give Cronkite the exclusive, and CBS News would be able to present U.S. involvement in Vietnam front and center in a beneficial way.

Not everybody at CBS News thought Cronkite’s coming to Cape Cod was a good thing. The White House press corps felt that Cronkite wasn’t being an objective journalist, that he was in cahoots with Kennedy. “As I drove up to the motel where the White House press corps stayed,” Cronkite recalled, “our veteran correspondent was waiting at the steps. He lit into me in a show of daring disrespect for the anchorman.”

CBS correspondent Robert Pierpoint—a native of southern California who had worked at CBS News since 1951 as one of the Murrow Boys—was livid. And for good reason. The Associated Press inferred that President Kennedy was indeed using the Cronkite show to make a public policy statement on South Vietnam. Cronkite, in order to garner the attention of critics and create buzz for his new half-hour format, the story said, was essentially allowing President Kennedy to manipulate the
Evening News
. But Pierpoint had yet another problem with it: Cronkite’s bigfooting.

“Listen, if you’re going to break a big story,” Pierpoint fumed to Cronkite, “it seems like the least you could do is tell your own White House man about it.”

“What big story?” a genuinely confused Cronkite asked.

“That the president is going to make a major statement on Vietnam on your broadcast tomorrow night. It’s all over the AP.”

Pierpoint’s harangue unnerved Cronkite. The rumor sweeping through the White House press corps was that he had told Kennedy the questions in advance. Not only did this make Cronkite seem like a White House patsy, but it was also prohibited by CBS News guidelines. “I was getting a little fed up with the bigfoot idea, that is, an anchorman like Cronkite jumping in on my beat,” Pierpoint recalled. “Ed Murrow never would have done what Cronkite did. When Ed visited me in Korea, he said, ‘You’re going to do my broadcast tonight because you know the politics, terrain, and people better than I do.’ It was a sign that Ed respected my work. So, yeah, I resented the fact that Walter came to Hyannis to bigfoot my beat. I was ticked.”

A defensive Cronkite, wounded by the allegation that he was a conduit for Kennedy, suspected that Salinger was behind the misleading AP story. When Cronkite encountered Salinger, a supposed friend, at a Hyannis bar, he lit into him with a vengeance, driving his forefinger into Salinger’s chest. Cronkite contended that his journalistic integrity had been compromised by Salinger’s big mouth. “I promise you I’m not going to even bring up Vietnam when I talk to the President tomorrow,” an agitated Cronkite threatened, red in the face. “I’m not even going to bring it up!”

“You’ll be sorry, Walter,” Salinger told him.

Once Cronkite arrived at the Kennedy compound on September 2, still bickering with Salinger, he had an epiphany. The problem, he decided, was that the president controlled the interview because he was able to talk about Vietnam if he pleased. A tactical change of plan was made by Cronkite: he would ask Kennedy about Vietnam late in the interview, as a ploy designed to torment Salinger. When Cronkite and the president got seated in their lawn chairs, waiting for the CBS News camera crew to set up, Cronkite chatted with Kennedy about Newport and Martha’s Vineyard. He told him how covering the America’s Cup for
Eyewitness
had transformed him into a yachtsman. Then it was camera-ready-action. A full ten minutes into the interview, Cronkite—following questions about the effect of civil rights on the 1964 election, unemployment, and the nuclear test ban treaty—indeed turned to South Vietnam. “It is their war,” Kennedy told Cronkite. “They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them; we can give them equipment; we can send our men out there as advisors . . . but in the final analysis it is their people and their government who have to win this struggle. All we can do is help.”