Cronkite (54 page)

What no one debated was that the spring of 1968 was a time of great upheaval. On April 4, just days after LBJ announced he wouldn’t seek reelection, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. He was preparing to lead a peace march to quell the racial violence that had broken out in the Mississippi River city because of a sanitation workers’ strike. Cronkite, broadcasting from CBS’s Washington, D.C., studio, provided the bare details of the Memphis shooting at the end of the 6:30 p.m. news. During the commercials that followed, Dan Rather broke the news of Dr. King’s death in a special report from New York City. Moments later, Cronkite broadcast the news of the assassination on the 7:00 p.m. feed of the
CBS Evening News
. In a verbal tone that was, if anything, far more forceful than usual, Cronkite, visibly upset and angry, called Dr. King “the apostle of the civil rights movement.”

When Cronkite got off the air, he sobbed in shame. Cursing, his head a mess, he predicted riots across America to his colleagues at the CBS News bureau. “I’d hate to be up on U Street tonight [in Washington, D.C.],” he muttered to coworkers as he wandered out of the M Street studio in a trance. Once at the Hay-Adams Hotel, where he was staying, he called his three children to discuss the King murder: eleven-year-old Chip, a student at St. Bernard’s School in New York; eighteen-year-old Kathy, at school in Vermont because the ski trails were awesome; and twenty-year-old Nancy, a student at Syracuse University. Somehow he needed reassurance that the family was whole.

The year 1968 was turning out to be a brutal, appalling, harrowing one. Ever since the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, CBS had prided itself on its King coverage. The thought that King had been murdered caused all the CBS reporters who covered civil rights—Cronkite included—to fear for the nation. Cronkite wanted to attend King’s funeral in Atlanta, but the grueling Democratic primary schedule in March prohibited him from doing so. Joan F. Richman, who oversaw special events for CBS News, dispatched the reliable Charles Kuralt instead.

Less than two months later, on the night of June 4, Cronkite was in New York City anchoring CBS’s one-hour prime-time special coverage of the California Democratic primary. Preliminary results showed Kennedy on his way to a crucial victory over Eugene McCarthy. CBS News had two correspondents, Roger Mudd and Terry Drinkwater, working the floor at the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where Kennedy supporters had gathered to await the results. Presuming the coverage would trail off after Kennedy’s victory speech and comments by Mudd and Drinkwater, Cronkite went home for the night. It was just after nine o’clock in Los Angeles when Kennedy made his victory speech, one dotted with humor and filled with hope that the nation would be less sharply divided in the future. CBS cameras were rolling as Kennedy made his way out of the rollicking ballroom. The cameras focused on the confetti-filled atmosphere of the primary triumph because Cronkite wasn’t around to provide his usual commentary.

Just as RFK’s followers began to chant, “Kennedy, Kennedy, rah, rah, rah,” screams broke out from a corner of the room, with terrible anguish replacing the victory smiles. Mudd’s voice could be heard asking bystanders what had happened and telling the control room to “keep me plugged in.” Mudd, a personal friend of Bobby and Ethel Kennedy’s, dashed into the chaotic passageway leading to a hotel kitchen, where shots had just been fired. RFK had been shot with a .22-caliber revolver by Sirhan Sirhan, a Christian Arab from Jerusalem angry about the senator’s pro-Israel stance.

Cronkite recalled on his
Cronkite Remembers
video memoir, released in 1996, how he himself heard the news about Bobby Kennedy. “I’d left our New York newsroom right after reporting that primary and the Kennedy speech,” he said. “I’d gotten home barely twenty minutes later and I was just undressing when the telephone call came. Another Kennedy had been shot. Well, I ran for a cab, buttoning my shirt on the way. The driver had his radio on. We were both just listening, speechless, I guess. Listening to the turmoil in that hotel kitchen, we cried. That cabdriver and I cried. We cried. And we weren’t ashamed.”

Americans of all stripes were stricken by the Los Angeles shooting, the second assassination in two months, the second Kennedy brother murdered in four years. The death of Robert Kennedy in many ways shattered the American psyche. Americans wondered about the moral character of their beleaguered nation, and whether worthy candidates would come to the fore in the future if the specter of assassination hung over all American leadership. Cronkite provided brief comments during CBS News’ fifteen-hour coverage of Kennedy’s funeral, concluding, “Robert Kennedy was shot at 12:15 am Pacific Coast Time, the end of a brilliant political and public career. . . . At the age of 42, Robert Francis Kennedy was dead. . . . The people weep for the Kennedys. Perhaps they should weep, too, for themselves. . . . This is Walter Cronkite, reporting.”

Not since the Civil War had a six-month span been so full of deadly tragedy at home as the first half of 1968. Cronkite, while continuing as the bearer of disturbing news, was again filling his other role as a steadying presence in frightening times. He was a national leader of a new sort: the healer in chief. He hadn’t sought the post. He had no real agenda. Even those who disliked his liberal leanings accepted his irreplaceable presence at the center of American events in 1968. According to an informal poll, politicians of all stripes considered him the fairest of the national newsmen. Everyone of consequence, it seemed, thought Cronkite gave people an honest shake in interviews. He was also reassuringly permanent when so much was in flux. Even when he was announcing tragic news, he was himself a reminder that America would persevere. Jack Gould of
The New York Times
, who had pointedly refrained from praising Cronkite over the previous decade, found something to appreciate during 1968 in the anchorman’s ability to communicate the nuances of complex circumstances. Gould called him “the master of subtle variations in intonation of speech and facial expression.”

That Fourth of July, in need of a break, Walter and Betsy flew to London for a week to be with friends ahead of the conventions. To start his July Fourth celebration, Cronkite took Morley Safer out for a bout of heavy afternoon drinking. Safer had been in London when Cronkite delivered his “Report from Vietnam” and was elated that the CBS anchorman had turned dove. Earlier that evening, Safer had met Jane Fearer, a graduate student in anthropology at Oxford, and they went on a double date with Walter and Betsy that evening. After dinner and a lot of wine and laughs, they decided to go for a nightcap. “It was after midnight. . . . I had an old Bentley convertible with a rumble seat,” Safer recalled. “The four of us piled in, Walter and Betsy in the rumble seat. As we made our way to a favorite pub, Walter suggested we go past The Mall to Buckingham Palace. As we arrived, Walter stood up and did a remarkably convincing impersonation of Queen Elizabeth II, complete with that loose-wristed wave she reserved for adoring throngs. He insisted I make a half-dozen circuits of the palace, clearly trying to get the guardsmen in their red coats and busbies, to crack a smile, or even shift an eyeball, all to no avail. They could have been made of stone. That was my first date with Jane. We got married in October ’68.”

After Cronkite’s return to New York, he met with Salant to reconsider how CBS News would cover antiwar marches and riots that summer. After the JFK and MLK assassinations, they didn’t want to encourage kooks to seize Oswald, Ray, or Sirhan Sirhan–style notoriety. The national conventions were a particular concern. To impress upon the news division the need to refrain from using sensational images of protesters, Stanton issued a three-page guide that July, saying that “the best coverage is not necessarily the one with the best pictures and the most dramatic action.” To Cronkite and others, Salant and Stanton were imbued with “near paranoia” about possible unrest at the Republican convention in Miami and the Democratic one in Chicago. Major corporate sponsors of CBS were urging the network not to turn a ragtag band of street protesters into TV heroes.

CBS management didn’t tell Cronkite how to behave at the 1968 conventions. All they told him was that a lot of money was at stake. Covering the entire 1968 election cost CBS $12.3 million. Black Rock didn’t want sponsors to pull advertising because CBS cameras were giving antiwar protesters extensive TV exposure. Salant never put profit ahead of integrity, but he also couldn’t afford to lose sponsors over Yippies, Black Panthers, and malcontents. “Avoid using lights when shooting pictures,” Salant said in an August 20 meeting, “since lights only attract crowds.”

NBC and CBS might have been virtually tied for viewership in the main event, evening news, but every four years the presidential race offered an arena for even keener competition. The summer political conventions of 1968 presented each network with a fine opportunity to lure new fans and whip its rivals. Conventions could be what Cronkite once described as “great, brawling sweatshops of American political history” (that is, great TV drama). But everything about 1968 had Paley, Stanton, Salant, and Cronkite wondering if their own journalistic instincts were starting to crack. “We anticipated trouble,” Cronkite recalled. “Before we ever got to Chicago, the Grant Park encampment was taking place near Lake Michigan and the Hilton Hotel, which was the Democratic headquarters. That’s where the Weathermen and SDS and hippie anti–Vietnam War people camped out.”

Former vice president Richard Nixon, the presumptive GOP nominee, had used primaries and caucuses to win a commanding block of delegates, making the Republican Convention predictable from the outset. “I don’t know whether the convention is arranged for TV or whether TV is arranged for the convention,” Mudd pondered, decrying the public relations atmosphere.
The
Washington Post
reviewed the coverage of the Republican convention under the blunt headline “Boring Convention Ignored by Viewers.” NBC didn’t do any better. Ultimately, American viewers preferred real drama (or comedy), with the result that only one-third of the nation’s televisions were tuned into the convention coverage during prime time.

As the Democratic Convention began in Chicago on August 26, the protesters ran headlong into nightstick-wielding security forces assembled by Mayor Richard Daley, who intended to show that his city was under his tight control. The security forces he assembled, however, acted like goons, proving more disruptive than the demonstrators. In what an investigative report later termed “a police riot” and what contender Hubert Humphrey called “storm-trooper tactics,” Daley’s cops used violence in the streets and in the convention hall itself. Moreover, citywide strikes by telephone workers and taxi drivers hindered the free flow of communication and transportation. As the acrid smell of tear gas filled the air, television trucks weren’t allowed to park near the convention hall and reporters were chased by police from the area. In an on-air commentary, Eric Sevareid compared the deteriorating situation in Chicago to the Soviet Union’s violent suppression of Czechoslovakia’s Prague Spring reform movement for political liberalization. The main difference, he said, was that in Prague, at least there were “tanks in which to travel from A to B.”

CBS News correspondent Jack Laurence teamed up with producer Stanhope Gould to cover the fighting in Grant Park on the first night of the convention. It was radical and bloody beyond belief. They were under extraordinary deadline and technical pressure to get footage of the mayhem in time for Cronkite’s broadcast. Russ Bensley was the only one to check the reporting before it went on the air. “All the executive producers were busy at the convention hall,” Laurence recalled. To put it mildly, Laurence’s five- or six-minute segment did not make the Chicago Police Department look good. “No one from the news division or corporate headquarters criticized me to my face about the story, but they took me off the air for at least the next twenty-four hours. I just could not get a camera crew or producer to work with me, although there were stories to be covered everywhere you looked.”

The battle that raged on Michigan Avenue in Chicago and on hundreds of college campuses around the country also echoed in the Cronkite home. The conversations throughout 1968 often turned ugly. The Cronkites’ two daughters, Kathy and Nancy, were teenagers more in tune with the counterculture than with their parents. “We both went through a period of time,” Kathy wrote in her book
On the Edge of the Spotlight
, “when we didn’t get along with the parents.” Chip, the youngest, was still a boy, old enough to play a good game of tennis with his father but too young to rebel. Both Kathy and Nancy chafed under parental rules intended to keep them on a straight and respectable path.

Strangers sometimes asked the Cronkite children whether their father was as genuinely nice in real life as he seemed on television. Kathy sometimes gave an unvarnished answer, feeling emotionally barricaded by being the child of somebody so highly visible; she could be livid with him for putting his work ahead of their family. “I was awful when I was growing up,” Kathy admitted. “I’d go on and on about how I hated his guts and how he made me stay home and gave me a curfew. I’d just give them the whole rap about what a drag I thought he was. . . . People thought I was fucked up, I’m afraid.”

The generational tension in his household distressed Cronkite until he realized that many families were divided along the same lines: the Greatest Generation versus the Baby Boomers. At least he was now in agreement with the counterculture on the Vietnam War: the troops needed to come home. What Cronkite objected to most was that the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon acted as though the Vietnam War was too complicated to explain properly to the general public—a stance that was not acceptable when young men were at Walter Reed General and Bethesda Naval hospitals without arms or legs or genitals or faces. Nonetheless, Cronkite didn’t have much use for either the SDSers or the Yippies (Youth International Party)—despite Kathy and Nancy being, in appearance and outlook, very much sixties hippies. “I didn’t like their attitude,” he said of the hippies. “I didn’t like their dress code. I didn’t much like any of it.”