Cronkite (4 page)

Even after his father left for Kansas City, Cronkite remained a good kid without any glint of rebellion. His mother instilled tolerance and liberalism in him. She also made him go to church most Sundays. When asked as a CBS News anchorman about his Christian upbringing, Cronkite explained that he had a “Presbyterian-Lutheran kind of Calvinist background.” (As an adult, he became a token Episcopalian.) As a single mother, Helen doted on Walter. She established strict curfew hours. She grounded him for misdemeanors. Cronkite told a
Parade
magazine interviewer in 1981 that he once persuaded a Houston pharmacist to allow him to purchase a watch on credit. When Helen learned that her son had made a major purchase in that way, she confiscated the watch, paid the druggist a dollar for it, and kept it hidden until Walter could pay her back. “Don’t you see?” she asked him. “You don’t know how you’re going to earn the money. There’s no outright dishonesty here, but you’re flirting with it. It’s one of those gray areas, Walter. Be careful of gray—it might be grime.”

Working on
The Purple Pup
at Lanier had kept Cronkite out of trouble. The idea of trying to teach reporting was a relatively new one in 1929—the nation’s first journalism school had been established at the University of Missouri–Columbia in 1908. As more journalism schools opened through the 1920s, newsroom veterans debated whether a good reporter could be manufactured from classroom learning. Some said that journalism couldn’t be taught and couldn’t be studied; it was a natural bent. A former reporter in Houston, Fred Birney, strongly disagreed and set out to prove his point by teaching journalism part-time throughout the metropolitan area, including at San Jacinto High, where Cronkite had recently been named sports editor of the student paper, the
Campus Cub
.

Birney—in Cronkite’s memory a “wiry man” and a “bundle of energy”—taught the class to write with economy and speed when necessary and with accuracy under any circumstances. The students were enthralled by Birney’s tales from the world of print. “I had a sense,” Cronkite said of Birney, “whenever I was in his presence that he was ordering me to don my armor and buckle on my sword to ride forth in a never-ending crusade for the truth.” The metaphor might have been merely playful coming from almost anyone else, but it is obvious Birney set Cronkite’s standards for decades to come. “He was so in love with his work,” Cronkite recalled of Birney, “that he passed it on to all of us.”

Not every article printed in the
Campus
Cub
had to be seized with armor and a sword. A typical news flash, which might be attributed to Cronkite (or “Cronky,” as he was sometimes called), covered the annual picnic for the journalism classes or a stray feline on school grounds. The Cronkite pieces in the
Campus Cub
don’t stand out markedly from the others, but even so he was voted by his peers as best reporter. Cronkite found that he couldn’t resist the excitement of editing the school rag. According to the 1933 San Jacinto yearbook, the
Campus Cub
had been able to maintain a “high standard of quality” in spite of the Great Depression, even while other high schools were forced to close shop.

Another teacher Cronkite took a shine to at San Jacinto was Sarah Gross Cory, who encouraged him to pursue a newspaper career. While Birney was a stickler for the rules, Cory saw young Walter through a more maternal and comical lens. “He was always running up and down the corridors with a little pad and pencil,” she told
Parade
magazine fifty years later, “looking for news items.” Besides writing for the high school paper, Cronkite joined the Houston chapter of the junior version of the Masons—the Order of DeMolay—to find fellowship. It soon followed that the Order of DeMolay of Houston had a mimeographed newspaper, edited by one “WLC”—inevitably, wherever Cronkite went, a newspaper byline would emerge.

While Cronkite was in high school in the 1930s radio became all the rage. The number of radios in use in the United States rose by two-thirds in the first half of the 1930s, to 30.5 million sets by 1935. This reflected the increasing potency of radio networks, which provided entertainment programming in the evening. The one laggard in radio was general news reporting. Although many of the most powerful stations in each city were owned by newspapers, interest in developing radio journalism was mixed. Inept in gathering and delivering straight news, radio invented what it called the news commentator: someone who would describe some current event with either style or authority or both and then editorialize lightly upon it. CBS signed the documentarian Lowell Thomas of Ohio as a news commentator–entertainer in 1932. In addition to delivering his own essays on current events, the energetic Thomas produced
The March of Time
, which reenacted news articles from the pages of
Time
magazine.

Cronkite took notice. Such live radio broadcasts gave listeners something they could not find in a newspaper: the present tense. Newspapers retaliated by joining together and insisting that wire services such as United Press and Associated Press no longer sell content to radio. The flow of wire service news to radio stopped in early 1933. Left in the lurch, stations and networks now had to gather their own news, which they were ill equipped to do. The radio broadcasting field was more crowded than that of newspapers, and like Hollywood, it demanded a certain charisma, which Cronkite tried to develop. With careful practice, he crafted a “radio voice.” In true Lowell Thomas fashion, he interviewed anyone who would stand still and speak into whatever faux microphone prop he held. When FDR delivered his first “Fireside Chat” a week after his inauguration in 1933, he sounded incandescent, as if he’d been “dipped in phosphorous,” as Lillian Gish put it. Cronkite, thinking about a career in radio for the first time, wanted to glow like FDR someday.

Continuing his apprenticeship in print, Cronkite, after his junior year, landed a summer job as “an exalted copy boy” at
The Houston Post
, one of the three largest dailies in the city and the one that Cronkite thought reigned supreme. His up-from-delivery duties were generally confined to running messages around the newsroom. Occasionally he was allowed to conduct research for a reporter. Darting around the desks, amid the shouts of the editors, he saw how the
Post
transformed a slate of random information into a neatly spaced line of fresh newspapers rolling off the presses. The urgency of the newsroom and the rush to fill the paper made him want to excel in a way that his schoolwork never did. “I wasn’t really employed there; tolerated is more like it,” Cronkite later recalled of his stint at a paper on the edge of bankruptcy. “I had discovered journalism to be my life’s ambition.”

When a little article that Cronkite wrote was published on June 29, 1932, he jumped for joy. Seeing his byline gave him an “ego-fulfilling” feeling that he had only dreamed of while selling copies of
The Kansas City Star
five years before. But now he had that feeling for real. “I could watch fellow passengers reading my story on the Mandellvine streetcar,” Cronkite boasted. He clipped the
Post
article out for his scrapbook; “Page 4,” he wrote. “First story.” And then, best of all: “No corrections.”

In the fall of 1932, Cronkite began his last year at San Jacinto High. He was now the editor in chief of the
Campus Cub
, and under his aegis the paper leaned toward the humor of Harvard University’s student-run
Lampoon
. It also gave in to the circulation-building habit of mentioning as many potential readers as possible, and it combined both tendencies by printing column after column of one-line witticisms. Under Cronkite’s leadership, the
Campus Cub
was a good but not brilliant student paper. Sometimes Cronkite wrote his articles at hangout spots such as Ye Olde College Inn, where a friend of his mother waitressed. When Birney suggested books on journalism for his students, Cronkite sought them out and read them voraciously.

So it was that he happened to be perusing
Best News Stories of 1924
in the spring of 1933 as graduation approached. Whether Cronkite studied their style or simply enjoyed the stories in the book, he was unquestionably well versed in the major news of 1924 when he walked into a newswriting contest in the spring of his senior year. The contestants were to be given a random topic and a short time in which to write a story about it. When the moderator disclosed the subject of the news story in question, Cronkite had to smile. It was the sensational newspaper story of 1924: the Leopold and Loeb murder case originally published in
The Chicago Daily News
. Cronkite had read not only a riveting account of the trial the night before, but also the “best interview” of 1924, which was with none other than Nathan Leopold, and it really paid off. The only entrant with a plethora of just-studied facts in his brain, Cronkite won the contest easily. Luck had something to do with it, but so did diligence, a quality that remained with him as a journalism trademark. The contest taught the valuable lesson that the first rule to being a top-flight journalist is being well informed about the world at large.

Cronkite’s high school sweetheart was Cornelia “Bit” Winter, who was a year behind him at San Jacinto. Bit was an extremely popular girl. Her picture appeared in
The
Houston Press
in October 1931: she was the recipient of an American Legion youth medal. With curled auburn hair, perfect teeth, and an actress’s flare, Bit was irresistible to Cronkite. He held on to her after school as if she were the living embodiment of a Miss America trophy. Not only did they date, but they also hatched plans to perhaps get married someday. Every dollar Cronkite earned in high school doing odd jobs went to filling up his car at the Texas Company (Texaco) station at Main and Bremond and then taking Bit out for blue-plate dinners. In Winter’s scrapbook she scrawled next to a picture of Cronkite, “Tall, very Blonde—Good Dancer . . . Good date.”

That spring, as Cronkite approached graduation from San Jacinto High—which would also count among its alumni racecar driver A. J. Foyt, heart transplant pioneer Dr. Denton Cooley, and future mayor of Houston Kathy Whitmire—he couldn’t afford to buy a Balfour class ring. It was the only time he felt pitiful. All his buddies were showing theirs off during the last week of high school, but Cronkite’s hand was bare. His mother tried to compensate by getting him a cheaper department-store ring with a black onyx stone in the middle.

Later in life, Cronkite used to joke that graduation was his favorite high school memory. Like many of the 425 graduates in San Jacinto’s class of ’33, he was desperate to cut his own swath in the world. However, Cronkite never lost touch with his high school friends, and they occupied a special place in his heart. Every five or ten years, he would return to Houston for reunions to swap stories over cocktails. Perhaps out of all the class of ’33 reunions Cronkite attended, the fortieth was the most fun. Everybody swarmed around the famous anchorman. Like all class reunions, everybody was checking out who was the baldest, heaviest, sickest, and richest, and Cronkite was targeted for a lot of the class of ’33 humor jabs; it was their job to keep his ego in its place. A special 1973 edition of the
Campus Cub
, in fact, lampooned Cronkite as “the only man alive who can shuffle one piece of paper.” Former assistant principal E. C. “Gumshoe” Gates held court about all the trouble Cronkite had supposedly raised. (Nobody could believe he remembered.) In reality, Cronkite had been respected in high school. “I used to see him in the hall,” recalled Fay Shoss, who was two years Cronkite’s senior. “People used to point him out as the smartest person in the school.”

The highlight of the evening, however, was when the class of ’33 gave the Credibility Gap Award to “the man Americans are most likely to buy a used car from.” The razzing continued until Cronkite, winner of the National Press Club’s very first Fourth Estate Award for outstanding contributions in both electronic and print media, took the floor for rebuttal. “There’s nothing I would like to have more,” he said, looking at his new faux gift, “except the money that went into this award.”

It was noticed at the fortieth reunion that Cronkite was one of the few class of ’33 graduates still without a proper ring. This lingering Depression-era deficit was rectified in 2004 when he narrated the PBS documentary
Proud to Serve
, about soldiers in the U.S. Army. Executive producer Andrew Goldberg hoped to get Balfour to sponsor the documentary because the company manufactured jewelry for the U.S. military. Reminiscing about his Houston youth one afternoon, Cronkite had told Goldberg he’d been too poor to purchase a Balfour class ring back in 1933. “It was quite moving,” Goldberg recalled. “He went on for a while about just how broke his mother had been.”

A few days later, Goldberg acted on a brainstorm: he invited a top Balfour salesperson to visit Cronkite at his CBS office in New York. Cronkite was eighty-seven years old, but he was excited to talk about the history of Balfour rings, which dated from World War I. The company, to Cronkite’s surprise, presented him with a San Jacinto class of ’33 ring, with a journalism seal on one side and the
Campus Cub
logo on the other. A black onyx stone was affixed in the middle, to honor Cronkite’s mother.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

Learning a Trade

ROAD TRIP TO THE CHICAGO WORLD’S FAIR—TV HAM—STRUGGLING LONGHORN—THE FAILED MINING ENGINEER—GOOD-BYE TO BIT—FREELANCING AND BOOKIE JOINTS—THE CURTAIN CLUB—SPORTS HACK WRITER—VANN KENNEDY AND THE ART OF INS MENTORING—K.C. DREAMING—THE VOICE OF KCMO—FAUX FOOTBALL—THE NATURAL CADENCE OF EDWARD R. MURROW—HIDING BEHIND WALTER WILCOX—HOT JAZZ IN K.C.—COURTING BETSY MAXWELL—FIRED FOR HONESTY

U
pon graduating from San Jacinto High in May 1933, Cronkite went on a road trip in a late-model Dodge with Houston buddies to the Chicago World’s Fair (officially, “A Century of Progress International Exposition��). The fair’s motto was “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Adapts,” and it was held on 427 acres on the Near South Side of Chicago, along Lake Michigan. While Cronkite enjoyed hearing the Andrews Sisters sing live and studied dwellings in a “Homes of Tomorrow” exhibit, it was the “See Yourself on TV” interactive display that owned his enthusiasm.

Standing stationary in front of a new-fangled contraption called television—really just a twitching little screen—Cronkite looked into the camera and mugged by playing two clarinets at once like Benny Goodman gone mad. Besides his clowning around, all that was noticeable about Cronkite on the display screen was some Texas barber’s idea of a haircut. “They were inviting people to come up and be on television,” Cronkite recalled. “Naturally, being the ham I’ve always been, I stepped up immediately.” This thirty seconds of World’s Fair camera time allowed Cronkite to comically boast that he was on the Tube long before Murrow, Brinkley, Sevareid, or anybody else.

When it came time for college, Cronkite, to the surprise of his friends in Houston, enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin for the fall semester. Most of his classmates assumed he would attend the University of Missouri at Columbia; his father had opened a dental practice in Kansas City. But Fred Birney had advised him that
The Daily Texan
was an amazing college newspaper. And he was officially a resident of Texas, not Missouri; this meant his UT tuition was far more affordable. Cronkite’s father offered some financial support if his son went the economical UT route. The real kicker was that Bit Winter would be finishing high school in Houston. By going to UT, he could see his “darling” on weekends.

Cronkite entered the mining engineering program instead of journalism (now, to the surprise of friends, deemed an extracurricular “flirtation”). Like many Houstonians, he dreamed of huge fortunes in the oil industry. Everyone in Texas was always only a Spindletop away from shopping at Neiman Marcus. Cronkite, to his detriment, was prone to sleeping late and soon discovered that learning the intricacies of hydraulics, mineral determination, and blasting was a complex business. By October 1933 it was brutally apparent that the E = mc
2
physics in Professor C. Paul Boner’s class was too complicated for Cronkite to master. In the ne’er-do-well fashion of youth, Cronkite preferred attending stadium-rattling Longhorn football games and Dixieland stomps à la the Duke Ellington Orchestra to dull science classes.

Instead of living in a dormitory, Cronkite moved into the Chi Phi fraternity house at 1704 West Avenue in Austin. It was the former home of Colonel Edward M. House, Woodrow Wilson’s closest advisor. The editor of
The
Daily Texan
was a Chi Phi named D. B. Hardeman. Cronkite became fast friends with him. Determined to be the big man on campus, Cronkite went to every social function imaginable, usually with Vance Muse Jr., a former classmate at San Jacinto High who now wrote a
The
Daily Texan
column called “Musings.” In letters to his mom, Cronkite boasted of dating popular girls from the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority, including Louise Rhea, “the campus big shot of Fort Worth,” whom he brought to his fraternity’s formal dance one year. Later in Cronkite’s life the humorist Art Buchwald took exception to the anchorman’s overdrawn boast of prowess with Longhorn women, claiming his friend graduated from the University of Texas a “magna cum virgin.”

Life, however, threw Cronkite a real curve ball in the fall of 1933. Quite unexpectedly, Bit Winter was yanked out of San Jacinto High by her mother and relocated to Anna, Illinois. Cronkite was devastated. He had chosen the University of Texas, in part, to be near her. During the Great Depression, with commercial air transportation minimal, the 750-mile distance between Austin and Anna was insurmountable. So he and Bit resorted to letter writing, with dreams of wild summertime adventure exploring America.

Encouraged by his fraternity brothers at Chi Phi, where he cut a popular figure, Cronkite ran his only political race—for freshman class vice president. His campaign slogan read: “Freshmen, Vote for the New Deal Ticket. For President—GEORGE ATKINS of North Texas, Halfback of Football Team. For Vice-President—WALTER CRONKITE of South Texas,
Daily Texan
staff. FAIR—SQUARE—INDEPENDENT.” His ticket was beaten badly. What made the election licking unbearable was that Joe Greenhill, a friend from San Jacinto High School and his Chicago trip companion, was the ballot box victor. Losing punctured Cronkite’s whole big-man-on-campus façade. The only consolation he ever gleaned from the defeat was Greenhill’s success later in life as chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court from 1972 to 1982.

It was quite understandable that Cronkite, as a UT freshman in the early 1930s, made a temporary divestiture (sort of) from journalism. To make it in the fourth estate you had to develop a brand identity like Arthur Brisbane, Heywood Broun, or Walter Lippmann. Getting paid by the word was a hard racket during the deep Depression years. Studying the communications industry—learning how to be a radio operator, for example—made only slightly more job market sense. When a popular gossip columnist such as Walter Winchell of the New York
Daily Mirror
took to radio, beginning his broadcast with “Good Evening, Mr. and Mrs. North America and all the ships at sea,” it was clear that a global radio revolution was under way. A well-rounded knowledge of world affairs, it seemed, was a prerequisite for an aspiring broadcaster. Cronkite was too lackadaisical with his studies to rise quickly in journalism. He never learned a foreign language. The day-to-day monotony of applying himself was unappealing. If UT stood for anything to Cronkite, it was partying at the Chi Phi house. “I missed a lot of classes,” Cronkite admitted. “I should have spent a lot more time there and concentrated more on my studies.”

When corresponding with Bit and his mother, Cronkite wrote about Hell Week, pledge hazing, tennis matches, bull sessions at the O.P.K. restaurant, and sleep deprivation. His waning grades were an embarrassment. “I still want to be a journalist and hope to specialize in political analysis,” he told his St. Joseph grandparents. “Therefore my college tendencies are toward government, economics, English, and journalism. I am experiencing great difficulty in staying on the beaten path that leads to a degree.”

Getting to write newspaper articles now became Cronkite’s primary focus. While most of his articles for
The
Daily Texan
were of the calendar event kind, he did score a coup with an interview of Gertrude Stein at the Driskill Hotel, located at the corner of Brazos and Sixth Street. Accompanied by Alice B. Toklas, her famous partner, Stein was in town to give a public lecture. If one were to pick a high point of Cronkite’s journalism career in the 1930s, it would be his profile “Miss Stein Not Out for Show, But Knows What She Knows.” Cronkite took a real shine to Stein, who was dressed in a “mannish blouse, a tweed skirt, a peculiar but attractive vest, and comfortable-looking shoes.” Calling Stein a “modern,” Cronkite enthused that the famed author of
Three Lives
was a twentieth-century-thinking woman visiting a nineteenth-century-thinking Austin. “She is genuine,” Cronkite reported after his forty-five-minute interview with Stein, “the real thing in person.”

Using his
Campus Cub
and
Daily Texan
clippings as bait, Cronkite secured a job at
The
Houston Press
freelancing articles. He wore a suit to work—soft fabric with a vest, a shining watch chain (set on Kansas City time) across his vest, and two-toned wingtips (never polished). Developing a keen interest in politics, Cronkite, in time, was freelancing well-crafted columns about campus life and the legislature to several other Texas newspapers. These papers paid a pittance (for one column in a local paper, he received ninety cents). Others didn’t pay at all. But college cost money, while journalism actually paid him. Writing columns on Lone Star governmental issues for two struggling newspapers was a start. It provided spending money for dating and drinking, hoots and sing-alongs.

From then on Cronkite focused on learning the gritty trade of journalism in a hands-on, tangible way, even as he took UT courses. But it didn’t pay much. When a mysterious Mr. Fox offered him $75 a week (more than his father made as a dentist) to announce horse races at a bookie joint, he seized the opportunity. With piles of money at stake, it was a dangerous mob-related job. The sawdust-floor Texas establishment smelled of smoke and rye. Spurring horses toward the finish line out of a megaphone, he made acquaintance with shady characters—gamblers, swindlers, drunks, and con men. “Well, I’d never been in a place like this before, so I gave them the real Graham McNamee approach on this, described the running of the race and all,” Cronkite recalled. “A mean character ran this place—a guy named Fox . . . came chasing into the room and asked me, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? We don’t want entertainment! We just want the facts!’ ”

As Cronkite admitted about his Chicago World’s Fair TV debut, he was a bit of a ham, a jocular egotist wanting to please and show off in front of adoring crowds. Unfortunately, people simply didn’t see Cronkite as he saw himself. While he aspired to be the leading man in a UT Curtain Club production, he was instead cast as the stodgy, middle-aged university president born into squarely bourgeois circumstances. Cronkite considered himself a colorful card, even dashing; other people thought of him as the embodiment of Mr. Beige. During the play rehearsals that went on from 7:00 p.m. to midnight, Cronkite learned that to his peers he was a rather muted and mundane classmate.

What Cronkite came to understand, even in the improvident rush of those college days, was that he’d never become a Broadway or Hollywood star. He tacitly abandoned the stage in favor of a communications field in which everyone was then an adventurer. Broadcast radio was entering its own golden age during the Great Depression, with live programming on local stations all through the day. Stations needed singers, musicians, announcers, and whipcord personalities, along with Christian clergy for prayers and pundits on world affairs. Each local U.S. radio station created a carnival in its studio. The four preeminent radio networks—CBS, Mutual, NBC Blue, and NBC Red—provided regional or national programming in the evenings. Cronkite’s best asset in 1934 was a budding reputation as something of an authority on sports—a boon in tackle-hard Texas. Years later he recalled that he failed his freshman engineering class at UT in part because he couldn’t fathom the workings of a pulley. Yet he had a steel-trap memory for football rosters, baseball box scores, and horse racing numbers.

Scrambling for cash to stay afloat on his own in 1935, Cronkite was hired by KNOW, a major AM radio station in Austin, as “the man who gets behind the campus news.” It was a heady prospect, since he would be not merely a reporter but the “talent”—earning a dollar a day. The fact that Cronkite landed the job at KNOW, whose studio was in an alley behind Sixth Street, without any real radio experience indicated that he could sell himself. Later, the station asked him to write and read a sports report every Tuesday and Friday at 5:15 p.m. As an added perk he got to drink free 3.2 percent beer. In his memoir,
A Reporter’s Life
, Cronkite writes eloquently of how incredible it was to be alive in the “crystal days” of radio reading the Western Union baseball score ticker. “One could tell a wireless faddist,” Cronkite recalled. “He or she was the one whose eyes were rimmed with dark circles from having stayed up all night when reception was best, bringing in distant stations.”

At KNOW, Cronkite was shackled by the same conundrum that faced all radio at the time: corroborating facts was difficult. His boss, Harfield Weedin—later to become the general manager of Lady Bird Johnson’s Austin radio station, KTBC, and then West Coast head of CBS Radio—warned Cronkite of misusing the airwaves with erroneous babble. Nevertheless, Cronkite was expected to read aloud sports scores with flare even though he didn’t have the actual play-by-play color at his disposal. Because the wire services wouldn’t pay for access to these game results, Cronkite had to be cunning and resourceful. A local Austin tobacconist, who encouraged patrons to linger in the shop and smoke, paid for a ticker service to provide up-to-date box scores, and Cronkite furtively looked at the ticker and memorized the teams, the scores, and the highlights for his broadcasts later. His modus operandi for collecting sports stories had its banana republic side, but it worked. Later in the year, the CBS network would form its own news service, organizing news sources, reporters, and stringers around the country. Radio news gathering was getting streamlined.

In the spring semester of 1935, after two years at the University of Texas, Cronkite dropped out. At the time, college was still considered a luxury, not a birthright, and given Walter’s steadily diminished return, the family couldn’t afford his UT tuition. He had squandered the opportunity to be a college-educated man. Antsy beyond words, Cronkite also didn’t have the patience to sit still in UT classes. He preferred toiling in the newspaper field full-time, but later in life he told his daughter Kathy that he was embarrassed because he hadn’t earned a degree at UT. Kathy pointed out that without a college diploma he had nevertheless become the best TV broadcaster in American history. “Yes,” Cronkite shot back, “but if I had gotten a formal education, I could have been the Kaiser!”