Cronkite (58 page)

All Cronkite could do was stare. Words of any kind would have been sacrilegious.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-
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Avatar of Earth Day

“EARTHRISE”—RON BONN RALLIES—GOOD-BYE UNION CARBIDE—CAN WE SAVE THE PLANET?—WHERE ARE THE WHALES?—TAKING ON DOW CHEMICAL—IS HE ECO-MAD?—THE EARTH DAY PHENOMENON—ANTI-NUKING WITH BARRY COMMONER—THE DUBOS PHILOSOPHY—FOUR DEAD IN OHIO—EYE ON THE WORLD—EMMY MAVEN—EARTH AS LIFEBOAT

A
t Cronkite’s New York office was a desk covered with manuscripts, incoming and outgoing correspondence, pipes in a rack, and assorted nautical gear. Ever since he learned to sail Sunfish at Lake Gleneida in Carmel, New York, Cronkite had been an advocate of the conservation of rivers, lakes, bays, and seas. The Atlantic Ocean whales—humpbacks, minkes, and North Atlantic right whales—had by 1969 become touchstone species for Cronkite. Disturbed by the globe’s ecological woes, he kept a framed photo over his desk, the elegiac “Earthrise” (with the Moon in the foreground), taken by
Apollo 8
astronaut Bill Anders in late December 1968. That symbolic picture, in which no national boundary lines could be seen, shrank all the world’s troubles down to One World size. Earth was so lovely and fragile floating out there in the vast universe. With something akin to a conversion experience, Cronkite committed himself to protecting the planet from nature abusers, despoilers, and polluters. Lamenting the deteriorating condition of Earth’s ecosystems from human-induced causes, Cronkite believed a new global environmental standard needed to be adopted by the United Nations. The Apollo program, in Cronkite’s opinion, had been designed only to visit the Moon, but in the end, the emotional impact of images of the blue-green planet from a quarter million miles away had put humanity in ethereal communion with the universe.

As former Johnson Space Center director George Abbey noted, Cronkite wasn’t alone in being bowled over by “Earthrise.” Dozens of NASA employees developed “a new environmental appreciation” because of the profound photo. Joseph Campbell, the great American comparative mythologist, chose “Earthrise” to end a revised edition of his classic
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
—an endorsement of Cronkite’s view that the photo was a hallmark of modern times. “Earthrise,” in Cronkite’s opinion, raised questions of whether humans had a sacred obligation to protect the natural beauty of Earth. Weren’t huge corporations destroying rain forests, killing wildlife, and poisoning the oceans and skies? It dawned on Cronkite that the cold war mentality of the race to the Moon, which he had ardently promoted on CBS from 1961 to 1969, was perhaps off-kilter. Space exploration wasn’t about the United States versus the Soviet Union. Cronkite, influenced by Stewart Brand’s
Whole Earth Catalog
, which combined counterculture sensibility with computer musings and futuristic graphics, believed that technology could be used to help stamp out the evils of pollution. Cronkite decided he could use his position of media power at CBS to help protect the planet. Consulting with top scientists worried about toxic chemical pollution, contamination of groundwater, and endangered marine species, he turned into a proto-Green advocate.

Throughout the first half of 1970, Cronkite sought ways to connect the Apollo program with the environmental movement in the public imagination. It was an intrinsically difficult proposition. The
Apollo 13
mission, which lasted from April 11 to 17, 1970,
did
generate good ratings for CBS News, but only because there was an explosion in the spacecraft
Odyssey
’s service engine oxygen tank, forcing the mission to be aborted. Once Cronkite heard “Houston, we have a problem,” the live CBS broadcast became the drama of bringing the astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise back to Earth alive. They survived the ordeal, but public interest in the Apollo program steadily waned. Cronkite broadcast
Apollos 14
,
15
,
16
,
and
17
, but with fewer CBS resources. Congress got tired of funding the expensive NASA programs and ended up canceling
Apollos 18
,
19
, and
20
.

Later in life, Cronkite claimed that when the Apollo program ended in 1972, something in him died. Getting to know all those brave astronauts was the high point of his broadcast career. His critics claimed that his NASA obsession was overblown. He thought such people were fools. “Of all humankind’s achievements in the twentieth century and all our gargantuan peccadilloes as well, for that matter—the one event that will dominate the history books a half a millennium from now,” he believed, “will be our escape from our earthly environment and landing on the moon.”

While Cronkite continued to champion the Apollo program in early 1970, venturing down to Cocoa Beach and Houston as often as possible, his space passions now transitioned directly into the environmental movement. To him, pro-environment warriors such as photographer Ansel Adams, oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, biologist Barry Commoner, and Sierra Club executive director David Brower were, like the astronauts, heroes of the first order.

While
Apollo 11
dominated news coverage in 1969, Cronkite had
CBS Reports
investigate two environmental catastrophes that occurred that year: the blowout at a Union Oil offshore well near Santa Barbara on January 28, which dumped more than three million barrels of crude oil into the southern California waters; and the Cuyahoga River, Ohio, fire of June 22, in which oil-soaked debris ignited and torched a railroad bridge. It seemed to Cronkite that industrialization run amok spelled doom for mankind. “The North American continent seemed ringed by oil slicks,” Cronkite lamented, “off Alaska, off Nova Scotia, off Florida, and most dramatically, in the Gulf Coast off Louisiana.”

At the CBS Broadcast Center in New York, there was a post–
Silent Spring
belief that the Tiffany Network had an obligation to spread the gospel of the age of ecology. A
CBS Reports
segment in September 1962 had Eric Sevareid famously interviewing the literary biologist Rachel Carson about the perils of the insecticide DDT at her home in Silver Spring, Maryland. Cronkite, at the time, had been focused on the Earth-orbiting flight of the second Mercury launch. But now that Neil Armstrong had walked on the Moon, Cronkite sensed that ecology would soon replace space exploration as
the
national obsession. CBS News producer Ron Bonn recalled precisely when Cronkite put the network on the front line of the fight. “It was New Year’s Day, 1970, and Walter walked into the Broadcast Center and said, ‘God damn it, we’ve
got
to get on this environmental story,’ ” Bonn recalled. “When Walter said ‘God damn it,’ things happened.”

Cronkite pulled Bonn from nearly all other CBS duties for eight weeks so he could investigate environmental degradation. He wanted a whole new regular series on the
CBS Evening News
—inspired by
Silent Spring
, the philosophy of René Dubos, and those amazing photos of Earth taken by the
Apollo 8
astronauts. The
CBS Evening News
segments were to be called “Can the World Be Saved?” “We wanted to grapple first with air pollution, the unbreathable air,” Bonn recalled. “But then we wanted to deal with the primary underlying problem, which was overpopulation.”

In January 1970, the promise of a new environmentalism brought about the end of
The Twenty-First Century
(which had succeeded
The Twentieth Century
in June 1967). No longer would Cronkite tolerate Union Carbide (a major polluter) as a sponsor. The Texas-based Fortune 500 company was the enemy of “Earthrise,” he told Bonn. At Cronkite’s insistence, CBS canceled
The Twenty-First Century
to coincide with the debut of the “Can the World Be Saved?” segments.

No one at any of the Big Three networks, with the exception of Charles Kuralt, cared about environmental issues with the passion of Cronkite. By assigning his science producer Bonn, a trusted ally since their trip to South Vietnam together in 1965, Cronkite was getting way ahead of the news curve on the environment. In the mid-1960s, Bonn had done a couple of landmark
CBS News Special Reports
on global warming and overpopulation. Together, Cronkite and Bonn decided to begin CBS’s coverage of the environment with an eight-minute piece on April 20—two days before Earth Day.
CBS Evening News
’ graphics department made a special bumper slide for the “Can the World Be Saved?” segment that consisted of Bonn’s hand clutching Earth (a photograph taken by the
Apollo 8
crew). “Earth, you understand, wasn’t in the palm of my hand,” Bonn explained. “We were trying to show humanity squeezing the Earth to death.” The image became synonymous with the
CBS Evening News
, essentially the show’s visual calling card.

Cronkite and Bonn launched the “Can the World Be Saved?” segments in the spring of 1970. The segments constituted perhaps the most important, if unsung, part of Cronkite’s CBS legacy. More than any other top-tier American newsman (although David Brinkley and Charles Kuralt were nature lovers too), Cronkite put environmentalism on the front burner of public discourse. No longer would pollution be treated in a back-of-the-book, reserved, or filler way. Stories treated as major news included the Lake Erie perch being mercury-poisoned; the U.S. government recklessly pouring twenty-two million tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere; Dow Chemical’s ghastly dumps into Lake St. Clair and the Detroit River; sewage-coated Florida beaches closed for business; bald eagles being killed by DDT; towering garbage dumps choking the land; and the Everglades dying. The Cronkite judgments fell like hard rain on polluters. On his office wall at CBS was posted a Pogo comic adopted by environment activists: “We have met the enemy and they are us.”

Even though Cronkite’s celebrity status as anchorman transcended journalism in many ways, he seldom operated without reportorial allies when grappling with environmental issues. Two
New York Times
reporters—Gladwin Hill (a fellow Writing Sixty-Niner during World War II) and Joseph Lelyveld (the longtime
Times
correspondent who became executive editor of the newspaper from 1994 to 2001)—were lending their considerable prestige to making ecology front-page news. Once again Cronkite was reading the zeitgeist. The Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969 had become a rallying point for a new environmental awareness sweeping the land. When Hill wrote that the “environmental crisis” was “eclipsing student discontent over the war in Vietnam” in “intensity,” Cronkite paid attention. The time had come, he intuited, for CBS News to act.

The Nixon administration’s top environmental lawyer, William Ruckelshaus, who in December 1970 became the Environmental Protection Agency’s first administrator, believed that Cronkite’s coverage was a key factor in getting Nixon to back a spate of environmental legislation in the early 1970s. “Once Cronkite got on the environment, everybody started talking about it, worrying that we were destroying America,” Ruckelshaus said. “Back when Sevareid interviewed Carson, the environmental problem was in black and white. By 1970, with Cronkite’s ongoing ‘Can the World Be Saved?’ series, the belching smog and landfills and burning rivers were in color. That’s what grabbed the public’s attention.”

Sandy Socolow, along with many others at CBS News, thought that Cronkite had gone eco-mad. Riled up about polluters, Cronkite was, as Socolow put it, the “grizzly bear” at CBS who insisted that the ecologically charged “Can the World Be Saved?” be a prime feature on the
Evening News
. “Walter was almost a nutcase about the environment,” Socolow recalled. “He was really, really bothered by big companies’ pollution and the destruction of America’s natural resources. Everybody bemoaned that their stories were getting crowded out due to Walter’s need for a new environmental awareness. He was over the top, a real pioneer in getting the mass media to profile American landscapes being desecrated.”

Many of the CBS News technicians and producers thought that Cronkite was going a little gaga with his “Can the World Be Saved?” obsession. Whenever Cronkite ran an ecology story, the “Earthrise” graphic would appear behind him, with Bonn’s hand holding the planet.
CBS Evening News
director Ritchie Mutchler would regularly bark to his assistant, “We’ll need the hand job tonight!” To CBS News correspondent Bob Schieffer, it was akin to “Quiet on the set!” Feeling that he was being mocked, Cronkite, usually unflappable, called Mutchler aside. “Uhmm, could we call that thing something else?” he asked. “Every time I hear you call it that, my mind sort of wanders.”

At Cronkite’s insistence, CBS News played a major role in publicizing the first Earth Day observed across the United States, on April 22, 1970 (it also happened to be his son Chip’s birthday). Not only did Cronkite build up Earth Day on his nightly broadcast, but he anchored a
CBS News Special Report
from 10:00 to 11:00 p.m. EST on that historic day when twenty million Americans launched the Green movement. He began “Earth Day: A Question of Survival” with Commoner, a Washington University biology professor who in February had been dubbed “the Paul Revere of Ecology” by
Time
magazine. While Cronkite continued to use Walter Schirra as his astrobuddy for Apollo launches, starting in 1970 he recruited Commoner—who had just finished his seminal book
The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology
—as his eco-cohort (Cronkite didn’t hold it against him that he was a critic of space exploration). “This planet is threatened with destruction and we who live on it with death,” Commoner stated. “The heavens rock, the waters below are foul, children die in infancy, and we and the world which is our home live on the brink of nuclear annihilation. We are in a crisis of survival.”

While Cronkite had been cognizant of Commoner as a serious antinuke scientist, it was the professor’s 1966 book,
Science and Survival
, which he read to prep for Earth Day, that further startled him out of a stupor. Commoner was remonstrating against what happened when the industrial order spun madly out of control, when society so fully believed in technology that it arrogantly treated nature as its slave. “Science can reveal the depth of the crisis,” Commoner concluded, “but only social action can resolve it.”