Cronkite (53 page)

Reflecting on Cronkite’s post-Tet dissent,
Newsweek
, echoing O’Brien, noted that it was as if Lincoln himself had ambled down from his white marble memorial seat and joined an anti–Vietnam War rally. Cronkite’s “Report from Vietnam” only grew in stature as the decades progressed and increasingly began to be taught as the turning point at which the U.S. government lost the confidence of the American people. “It was the first time in American history,” Halberstam wrote, “that a war had been declared over by a commentator.” The war, however, wasn’t over. It still had years of anguish, death, and tragedy in store.

PART V

Top Game

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-
T
HREE

Calm and Chaos of 1968

ASKING RFK TO RUN—SENATOR CRONKITE?—PEACENIK PRESS—LBJ BAILS OUT—THE ASSASSINATION OF MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.—WHERE ARE MY CHILDREN?—RFK IS KILLED—GOOFING AT BUCKINGHAM PALACE—CRAZINESS IN CHICAGO—A BUNCH OF THUGS—ANARCHY IN THE AIR—DALEY GETS A CRONKITE HUG—NO INSTINCT FOR THE JUGULAR—GROOVING WITH ABBIE HOFFMAN—HEALING WITH THE MOON

J
ust days after Cronkite’s “Report from Vietnam” aired, the CBS anchorman met privately with Robert Kennedy, the increasingly popular Democratic senator from New York. On March 12 Eugene McCarthy, a super dove, had scored a near-upset of Johnson in New Hampshire’s Democratic primary. To McCarthy’s die-hard supporters, this proved that the irascible Minnesota senator was a viable candidate. Political veterans, though, doubted McCarthy had the donors necessary to topple the Johnson reelection machine. Most of the speculation instead fixed on Kennedy. Frank Mankiewicz, RFK’s press aide, described Cronkite’s off-the-record meeting at Kennedy’s Capitol Hill office in great detail decades later in both
The
Washington Post
and on C-SPAN. According to Mankiewicz, Cronkite led the conversation at the Senate office. “You must announce your intention to run against Johnson,” he urged Kennedy, “to show people there will be a way out of this terrible war.” A wide-eyed RFK listened intently, asking Cronkite for his opinion of the situation in Saigon, Hué, and Khe Sanh.”

Evoking lessons learned from his UP days in the Second World War, Cronkite told Kennedy the war couldn’t be won, that a huge segment of the South Vietnamese population secretly supported the Vietcong. The American people, he believed, weren’t being properly informed about their nation’s expensive cold war commitment to South Vietnam. Kennedy asked whether Cronkite was a registered Democrat; the newsman replied he was an independent. “RFK,” recalled Mankiewicz, “listened thoughtfully and then, with the beginnings of a smile, said, ‘Walter, I’ll run for president if you’ll agree to run for Senate from New York.’ ”

Kennedy thought a Cronkite candidacy was a surefire winner; the anchorman was the most beloved man in New York City (maybe in all of America). Kennedy’s suggestion was playfully earnest, but the flattered Cronkite wasn’t seriously interested in a Senate run. Cronkite forfeited electoral politics to protect the integrity of American journalism. He feared that if he threw his hat into the ring, all prominent newsmen would thenceforth fall under suspicion of making news judgments based on their own self-promotional, future political ambitions. RFK persisted in pressing Cronkite to try for his New York Senate seat if he himself challenged LBJ that spring for the Democratic nomination, but no amount of lobbying was going to persuade Cronkite to run for the Senate. His answer to RFK was no, with no wiggle room. An unrelenting Kennedy continued to consider a presidential run, conferring day-by-day with a cadre of stalwart advisors and family friends (including Ted Sorensen, Richard Goodwin, Pierre Salinger, and Kenneth O’Donnell). All had been loyal New Frontiersmen in the days of JFK’s presidency. Brother Ted Kennedy and brother-in-law Stephen Smith were also members of the inner circle.

Hopes were high at the
CBS Evening News
on March 13 that Cronkite was about to earn the biggest scoop of his broadcast journalism career: getting RFK to announce his intention to run for president. The exclusive interview ended up being surprisingly flat. Cronkite led with a question to Kennedy on a potential run for the White House. Kennedy wasn’t biting. But he did leave the door wide open—a minor scoop. At one point, he commented on Nelson Rockefeller’s chances against GOP front-runner Richard Nixon. “I gather that Rockefeller will come into the primary in Oregon,” he said, and added that by that time, it probably would be too late to stop Nixon. Sensing he might have a scoop, Cronkite went off script, trying to find an ulterior motive. “Senator,” he said, “ I might trap you in a little word game there. You said ‘come into the Oregon primary’ not ‘go’ into it. Are you already in Oregon?” An amused Kennedy, charmed by Cronkite’s coyness, quashed the implication. But Cronkite was dutifully emphasizing for the audience what political experts already knew: RFK was indeed going to seek the White House. It now boiled down to a matter of timing.

A transcript of the RFK-Cronkite interview was reprinted in
The New York Times
the next day. The paper also printed a full transcript of Cronkite’s subsequent
CBS Evening News
interview with Eugene McCarthy. In the news industry, the flow was typically from
The New York Times
to the broadcast networks. The scoops and the ideas were so easily picked from the pages of the
Times
, in fact, that its influence was a primary reason the network news broadcasts often ran the same stories in the same order. Their respective producers weren’t in collusion; they just read the same Big City daily. In the Vietnam War era, network news shows took greater initiative, and Cronkite actively steered CBS into the lead for breaking news. His nightly broadcast at 6:30 p.m. EST was itself news in the making.

On March 16, RFK formally announced he was running for president. Instead of declaring it on the
CBS Evening News
, he did so in the Caucus Room of the Old Senate Office Building: the same place where his brother had announced his candidacy years before. All hell broke loose in the Democratic primary field. In the White House, the specter of Cronkite and his CBS Tet special seemed to have tamped out the fighting spirit of LBJ.

Less than two weeks later, on Sunday, March 31, President Johnson scheduled a televised message about limiting U.S. involvement in Vietnam by declaring a partial halt to bombing missions. Few thought the speech was going to be historic. The Oval Office was set up with cameras for the speech. As Johnson entered, he muttered to a CBS technician he recognized, “Cronkite isn’t going to like this . . .” Millions of viewers tuned in, thinking LBJ was only going to give a report on Vietnam. As the telecast began, LBJ stared at the television camera, looked uneasily at the lens for a second or so, and then spoke with his Hill Country twang. As expected, the president began talking about the Vietnam War. But then, quite unexpectedly, he announced, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

It was a shocking announcement. Cronkite, thinking the address would be nothing special, was not at the CBS broadcast center that night. Always wanting to be the voice of “breaking news” and ahead of the pack, he was embarrassed at being caught off-guard. Having been so focused on RFK that March, he hadn’t worked his White House sources properly. A question that immediately made the press rounds was whether “Report from Vietnam” had contributed to Johnson’s surprise decision to sideline himself. Johnson later insisted in a CBS News interview with Cronkite that he could have won a second full term in 1968, but that March he was a tired man, facing medical problems and a crisis of confidence across the country. Extricating the United States from the Vietnam quagmire would be a formidable job. His energies were needed at the White House, not for gallivanting around at Democratic fund-raisers. So, with the encouragement of his devoted wife, Lady Bird, the president abruptly bowed out of the 1968 presidential contest.

“We had not expected,” Cronkite wrote Bob Manning of
The Atlantic Monthly
, “that the president himself would react like he did. No one has claimed, and I certainly don’t believe, that our broadcast changed his mind about anything. I do believe it may have been the back-breaking piece of straw that was heaped on the heavy load he was already carrying—doubts about the reports he had been getting on alleged military success in Vietnam, concern that the military was now asking for another considerable increase in troop strength to finish the job, increasing public outcry as the nation headed into a presidential election. I think that we may have given him the last push over the edge of a decision he was on the verge of making anyway.”

CBS News was as unprepared as the other networks for the Johnson bombshell. No one could have predicted he wouldn’t seek reelection. Roger Mudd, covering the Oval Office speech from Washington, later wrote that the announcement “left me shocked, disbelieving and babbling.” Cronkite, relaxing with Betsy at home, had missed reporting the year’s biggest nonviolent political headline. But his “Report from Vietnam” was immediately seen as a catalyst by pundits in the Monday newspapers. They divined a cause-and-effect scenario between CBS and the White House: Cronkite turned dove, and the hawk Johnson lost his talons. “I think that Johnson felt like most of the American people said at that point: ‘Let’s just get out of this,’ ” Cronkite recalled. “But the president couldn’t get out himself. He was too deeply committed. So the thing to do was get out of the job.”

The public response to LBJ’s shocker was welcomed by supporters and opponents alike. The president’s popularity as measured in polls rose dramatically. Eugene McCarthy believed it was his own incredible showing in the New Hampshire primary on March 12—losing by only 230 votes—that caused Johnson to throw in the towel. Some analysts believed that after Tet, regardless of Cronkite, the president reached his own conclusion that the war wasn’t worth the United States spending $30 billion annually. Another factor was the
New York Times
story about LBJ wanting to increase the number of troops by 206,000. Most Democrats believed that was an awful idea. Somewhat surprisingly, Cronkite was saddened by Johnson’s unexpected withdrawal—to a degree. When not anchoring the
CBS Evening News
, he had praised on CBS Radio Johnson’s Great Society domestic policies, including Medicaid-Medicare, wilderness preservation, civil rights, and a hopper full of antipoverty measures. Cronkite actually thought LBJ was a good president; it was only on the Vietnam War that the record soured. “Daddy and Walter stayed close,” Lynda Johnson Robb, daughter of the president, maintained. “There were strains. They never let the war get between them.”

Many CBS viewers wrote to Paley demanding that Cronkite be fired in the wake of “Report from Vietnam,” which supposedly led to Johnson’s decision not to run for reelection. But the New Left now heralded Cronkite and Eugene McCarthy as the Establishment peace heroes. While not quite a guru to New Left intellectuals such as Herbert Marcuse or Frantz Fanon, Cronkite was cheered as an honest journalist with a deep sense of public morality. But, at least in 1968, he declined to take victory laps. He was quite stunned at how ferocious the antiwar protests became all over the world and recognized that CBS News was in part responsible. Many of the public protests were being held to attract TV cameras. It was a main lesson of Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent movement: protests equal cameras equal Cronkite’s
Evening News
broadcast. Like all the networks, CBS thought street demonstrations were excellent television. The lesson Cronkite learned anew from the connection between “Report from Vietnam” and LBJ’s resignation was that TV didn’t just report events in the 1960s; it also helped shape them.

Decades later, Lady Bird Johnson made gracious efforts to reassure Cronkite that her husband always understood that his Tet dissent on CBS News had been an inherently patriotic act. By February 1968 her husband knew in his heart of hearts that Vietnam had been a godawful mistake. Instead of bemoaning Cronkite’s stalemate analysis, LBJ understood that he had lost the political center. Cronkite’s views were already in sync with what polls were showing: that the country was losing faith in the pro-war rhetoric of Westmoreland and McNamara. LBJ wasn’t angry at Cronkite. He feared that the “middle-of-the-road folks,” who had bought into the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, were having buyer’s remorse about Vietnam.

Whenever Cronkite went to Austin in the coming decade, he’d socialize with Lady Bird and her personal assistant, Liz Carpenter. “You have been a great force for good in this country,” Lady Bird wrote to Cronkite. “We love you so much. A stalwart with whom we’ve shared moments that touched depths of despair and the farthest reaches of space. We’ve mourned with you some of America’s saddest days and soared as we celebrated some of mankind’s highest aspirations and achievements. You’ve been an advocate for what is best in the United States, and we are better for it.”

While CBS News did receive hate mail for Cronkite’s perceived role in causing LBJ not to seek a second term, it wasn’t much. Whenever Cronkite was in New York, people thanked him for his candor. The pro-war GOP hawks likewise thought LBJ needed to go. Folklore, however, snowballed into the questionable assumption that it was his “Report from Vietnam” that had caused LBJ not to seek reelection; it was impossible to put the brakes on the myth. “Walter went out of his way to avoid the cause-and-effect syndrome,” Sandy Socolow recalled. “A lot of people were trying to connect Walter’s Tet offensive report to Johnson’s abrupt resignation. Walter completely shied away from that kind of specious claim. There were over six weeks between the events. To his mind, they shouldn’t be linked in history.”

Press secretary George Christian also rejected the Cronkite-is-the-reason theory years later in an oral history. “Well, I don’t buy it,” he said about the broadcast’s influencing Johnson’s decision. “It didn’t quite happen that way.” Marvin Kalb of CBS News explained the impact of Cronkite on LBJ best: “What Walter was saying about Vietnam wasn’t all that dramatic,” Kalb believed. “He just moved the story an inch or two forward. Cronkite was scrupulous in being objective, of keeping himself out of the news. In many ways, all he had done was report the obvious. But LBJ, it’s fair to say, was enormously impressed by anything Cronkite said on CBS. He had a huge, huge audience. So Walter made a difference.”

Over time, Cronkite was of two minds about being branded the cause of LBJ’s decision to step down. On the one hand, it made him beloved by liberals. Yet it called his Mr. Objectivity persona into question. Depending on whom he was talking with, Cronkite would flip-flop on the question over whether he was in any way responsible for LBJ’s surprise March announcement. His most succinct answer occurred in a Q&A with Richard Snow of
American Heritage
. “I don’t feel that a journalist’s influence is so great that you can change the course of human events by a single broadcast,” he said. “Whether it’s a president’s decision to act or not act, it doesn’t work that way. It’s just one more straw.”