Cronkite (5 page)

Becoming a first-rate print reporter was more a pleasant daydream than a burning ambition for Cronkite in the mid-1930s. The newspaper industry that Cronkite entered looked primarily to one of the wire services—led by the Associated Press and the United Press—to obtain general news. The Hearst Corporation’s International News Service (INS) was the third largest. What Cronkite soon learned about the fiercely competitive wire service industry held true for all journalism enterprises: internal corporate policy and budget requirements shaped the direction of news coverage.

The idea behind AP, founded in 1846, was that this association of newspapers would sometimes share reporting and otherwise underwrite the cost of gathering news in bureaus around the country and the world. The influence of the AP was tremendous, and its slant eastern and conservative.

Edward W. Scripps founded the United Press in 1907 as, in his words, “the people’s news source,” and any paper could buy its service—even those that were subscribers to AP. The United Press never grew quite as big as AP, but its brilliant reporting from Europe during World War I gave it a reputation for high standards. By the time Cronkite entered the newspaper field in the mid-1930s, the general feeling was that AP was a more prestigious place to work, but it was just a journalism job. By contrast, UP, where resources were thin, was sold to cub reporters as a sacred calling.

Cronkite’s big Austin break came when Vann M. Kennedy of Corpus Christi hired him in 1934 to write stories for the Austin bureau of INS, in a small office “up with the pigeons” on the press wing of the state capitol. An Alabaman by birth, the stiff-necked Kennedy was a gifted mentor. An advocate of objective journalism, Kennedy, an expert wire transmitter, was fact-driven and judicious, believing that reporting was a dignified occupation. “I learned the principles of great journalism from him,” Cronkite said, “because he lived them.” As an assistant reporter, Cronkite was basically a gofer at INS. But Kennedy, wanting him to earn his medals, refusing to offer a soft landing, also assigned him the heady job of covering Texas government. Kennedy represented intelligent and principled journalism to Cronkite. “I have never found anything I like so much as working at the Capitol,” Cronkite wrote in a letter home. “I go down a little after ten and work until one. . . . This week I met nearly all the Houston members of the legislature and worked the Teletype machine.”

At INS Cronkite learned how to write in an adjective-free way and how to send a wire report. Journalism wasn’t a conceit to Cronkite—it was a trade with stature, a concrete way to earn money in the Great Depression. Under Kennedy’s watchful eye, Cronkite was taught how to get a story, how to write it, and how “ethics” mattered most of all. Competing head-on, the wire services undoubtedly made one another hungrier, and news in America stronger. Day in and day out, AP, UP, and INS raced one another for scoops with fanatical energy, commitment, and concentration. The battle for stories was brutal. The industry was not for the timid. Only an instinctive counterpuncher could prevail, one with a tough hide and a knack for making correct split-second judgments to scoop people. Cronkite of INS, patching together a living as a freelance writer in Austin, competed with the major wire services. “The columns to weekly papers over the state concerning the Capitol doings fell through,” he wrote home. “It seems that those who are able to support such a column already get weekly Associated Press or United Press columns for a very nominal sum.”

After a year at INS, Cronkite was hired as a rewrite man by
The
Houston Press
, which was owned by Scripps Howard. He moved to Houston’s Montrose neighborhood to live with his mother. “Hours,” he wrote a friend soon after moving back to Houston, “7 a.m. to 3 p.m., salary, $15 per week. My duties consist of taking stories over the phone and whipping them into shape.” The
Press
also asked Cronkite to organize the morgue (the newspaper archives). As a born bon vivant and lover of jazz, Cronkite soon owned the nightclub beat in Houston and Galveston Island—a truly great job for a hot-to-trot single man looking for a girlfriend. His journalism about music revues and movies was third-rate. And he drank too much whiskey.

When Cronkite wasn’t judging the rollicking nightlife in Galveston, he covered the sedate Methodist and Baptist church news for the
Press
. For the first time he read the Bible with a sense of true understanding. He wasn’t writing political analysis yet, as he had hoped, but then, he wasn’t yet twenty. Time was on his side. He was generally happy with his
Press
work. But being desk-bound meant that “the poor old wanderluster”—himself—had no “means of wanderlusting.” With a fedora on his head, scrawny as a ship mouse, trying to grow a pencil-thin mustache to look older, he repeatedly begged his editor for an oceangoing vessel assignment, with the promise that he would write fun articles about the Caribbean.
The
Houston Press
wasn’t interested—and in truth, even Cronkite wasn’t that adventurous when push came to shove. In the summer of 1934, for his first paid vacation, he didn’t book passage on a freighter out of Galveston to Jamaica, but went to Anna, Illinois, to see Bit Winter; the visit proved disastrous.

The saga of Bit Winter had turned sordid for Cronkite. During the summer of 1934 he learned that she had been two-timing him. Just weeks after Cronkite began his sophomore year, Bit, who had graduated from high school in Anna, married twenty-year-old H. E. Hunskaker. To break the news, the new Mrs. Hunskaker wrote Walter a letter about the surprise marriage. Chi Phi pledge Woody Williams told Cronkite, who had been at a college lecture by folklorist J. Frank Dobie, that a letter from Anna was waiting for him at the frat house. Cronkite practically floated home to get it; he soon turned ill. “The old breath went out, the heart skipped a beat and sank as I read the parenthesized Mrs. H. E. Hunskaker,” Cronkite wrote her back. “And as I delved into the contents of the letter I had a million different sensations ranging from depths of sadness, which really prevailed throughout, to the heights of happiness that I imagined I was sharing with you.” Cronkite, in the same letter, went on to write a long, rambling, brokenhearted missive that read like a Hank Williams lyric. Bit had implied that he drank too much, and now, defending himself in a dust storm of temperance, he promised never again to “touch a drop.” It was all in vain. By letter’s end, Cronkite, recognizing that he had lost her heart, offered a melancholic good-bye. “Keep up the smoking though and maybe, when you’re in a reminiscent mood, you’ll see old Walt in those smoke rings and I can and will be seeing you in my dreams,” he wrote. “Please don’t forget me Bit. But don’t feel under any obligation to write. I will understand.”

Cronkite was beyond devastated. His stomach regularly did flips. He couldn’t study. His heartbreak knew no bounds. He worried that his relations with women in general were vexed. After the fall semester, during the Christmas hiatus, Cronkite finally came to terms with the betrayal. Free of foul humor, he wrote Bit, expressing hope they could remain special friends. Bit filed for divorce in 1935. Cronkite once again had a flicker of hope that she could be his wife. But instead of marrying Cronkite, in a fever she married the ambitious Illinois lawyer John Paul Davis. Cronkite, playing the fool, had been stiffed again.

Although Cronkite never earned a degree from the University of Texas, completing only two years of classes before quitting in 1935, he considered himself an alumnus. Hook ’Em Horns forever. Because
The
Daily Texan
had allowed him to write feature stories as a budding reporter, he remained beholden to the university once he made it big at CBS News. UT’s burnt orange and white colors were his coat of arms. In the 1990s, he lent his signature voice, pro bono, to a whole host of public service announcements promoting the university. If you attended a Longhorn sporting event, you’d see the huge face of Cronkite suddenly appear on the Jumbotron, making appeals for financial support for UT. On a couple of occasions, asked who his best friend was, Cronkite would jokingly name Bevo, the university’s Longhorn mascot.

But Cronkite’s UT boosterism had its limits. He was a Texan by adoption only. Given a choice, he always claimed he was a Missourian first and foremost. During his later journalism career, Cronkite traveled to more than fifty countries, but he tended to keep his pocket watch on Kansas City time. Throughout his life, he romanticized the City of Fountains, and in 2000 he emceed Kansas City’s 150th birthday celebration before a sold-out crowd at Arrowhead Stadium with rock ’n’ roller Little Richard as cohost. Cronkite concurred with something painter Thomas Hart Benton once wrote about Kansas City people: “I have not met a really complete ass among them.”

In May 1936, Cronkite drove from Austin to Kansas City to visit family.
The
Houston Press
gave him two weeks off. His plan was to visit his father and have a secret rendezvous with the married Bit in Illinois, hoping she’d dump number two. But the scheme—chasing after a married woman—left him feeling duplicitous. While in Kansas City, Cronkite, without moral compunction, was drawn to the previously forbidden Twelfth Street music clubs. He had inherited his father’s penchant for drink.

Cronkite was leisurely reading
The Kansas City
Star
on the front porch of his grandparents’ home on May 13, 1936, his eyelids heavy from a hangover, when an article caught his eye. It reported that a license had been granted to the new owners of the local radio station, KWKC, to begin broadcasting under a different set of call letters, KCMO (as in “K.C., Mo.”). Despite Cronkite’s steady job at
The
Houston
Press
, the item reignited his old interest in broadcast news and tempted him to take another crack at radio. As Cronkite perused the article, one name jumped out at him—Tom Evans, a family friend. This was his gold-star opportunity to enter the wireless medium.

KWKC had struggled since it went on the air in 1925. It had a weaker signal than other local stations, and so had trouble finding an audience. By 1932, a distant fourth among Kansas City’s four commercial radio stations, it was forced to reduce its broadcast hours. And two years later the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) seized the station in lieu of back taxes. But at the beginning of 1936, as the article reported, three businessmen made an offer to purchase KWKC; one of them was Tom Evans, a principal in the city’s Crown drugstore chain. At first the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which regulated broadcasting, was in no hurry to approve the transfer of ownership from the IRS. So Evans asked Missouri first-term senator Harry Truman to sit in on a meeting with representatives of the IRS and the FCC. Evans had known Truman, who was from nearby Independence, since they ran retail stores in the same northside K.C. neighborhood and attended KCDO meetings. Evans wasn’t asking Truman to do anything unethical, only to help untangle the red tape in the two government agencies that had stalled the deal.

The nineteen-year-old Cronkite knew a good ride when he saw it. KCMO could be a fast-moving station in a growing industry. Because it was still at the bottom of the heap in Kansas City, it would probably have room for a fellow like him—especially if that fellow had an “in” with Tom Evans. Dr. Cronkite had attended the Kansas City College of Pharmacy at the same time as Evans’s father. With things starting to fall into place, Cronkite canceled his visit with Bit (she would die a year later in a car crash). Full of excitement, he reported his big radio break to his mother in Houston. “Yesterday I went to K.C.M.O., a new station in the Commerce Trust Building and was given an audition,” he enthused. “The program director, a Mr. Simmons, handed me some stuff to read. He stood in the other room listening over the amplifying system and when I had finished he came dashing into the studio, grabbed my arm and said, ‘Come on, we’re going to see the manager.’ We got into the manager’s office and Simmons said, ‘Here is a man with the best radio voice I’ve heard in my years of radio.’ ”

During the following week, the station manager formally hired Cronkite. His strong yet relaxed voice would earn him twenty-five dollars per week, ten dollars more than
The Houston
Press
had been paying him as a cub reporter and rewrite man. Knowing firsthand just how hard it was to research, write, rewrite, and edit—and then re-edit—a single article for a newspaper, Cronkite was intrigued to be in the more modern stream of media, in which he would be paid just to talk. Technically, he had applied for a job as a newsman—a role that barely existed in local radio at the time. News reporters scoffed that radio commentators were expositors of fact at best, prose thieves at worst. Joining the Ringling Bros. or entering into vaudeville was considered nobler work than radio. Newspaper journalists crashed through daunting obstacles to find the truth and confirm facts. To be a newspaper reporter—whether trained at college or in the school of hard knocks at an obituary desk—was to uphold high standards of clarity, accuracy, and objectivity that had made newspapers “the fourth estate” across America, and an adjunct to decent democratic government.

Radio news, by contrast, had no standards (except that curse words were verboten on the air). The new medium seemed rudderless and gimmicky in terms of integrity to something other than filling airspace. In radio, men with velvety baritones could earn a living by repeating news purloined from the daily paper, boiled down into two or three declarative sentences. By the most generous calculation, radio news was only fifteen years old in 1936, when KCMO had its license upgraded to increase its broadcasting range. A more steely analysis would conclude that in terms of news gathering, radio had yet to arrive. Later in life, Cronkite was asked what his greatest achievement was in his long, storied broadcasting career; his answer was “helping establish . . . news standards.”

The hearty and pleasant Cronkite went on air at KCMO in 1936 with a modulated voice that was, if not quite velvety, surprisingly rich for a man his age. Having that airtime experience in Austin had proved helpful. And with a slight staccato-like delivery, as if typing out the news while talking, he was
very
distinctive.