Cronkite (61 page)

Nancy, Cronkite’s eldest child, had been a student at Syracuse University, but she left early to marry. Younger daughter Kathy was a sophomore at Prescott College in Arizona and married a fellow student there in June 1970. Chip, at thirteen, lived at home and attended private school in Manhattan. Perks came with having a famous father, but there were downsides, too. The three Cronkite kids often bemoaned the fact that their world-beat dad wasn’t home enough. “When I was little, I always used to sit in front of the television and scream, ‘Daddy, out of the box!’ ” Nancy Cronkite recalled. “ ‘Daddy, come home!’ ” One time, Cronkite sat little Nancy down to try to explain what CBS News did, how TV was a miracle of modern communication. “Dad explained to me all about how television works,” she said. “I was just a little tot, and he went on and on about how the airwaves go out. I was nodding and agreeing, and at the end of this explanation, I asked him, ‘But, Daddy, how do you get in the box?’ ”

During the early 1970s, Cronkite cut a deal with Pan Am airlines to fly the entire family to a series of international vacation spots. His friend Louis Player, a vice president at the airline, made the arrangements. Other families who went along were James and Mari Michener, Art and Ann Buchwald, and Bob and Millie Considine. Together they island-hopped the South Pacific, and Michener took them to Papeete (the region that inspired his Pulitzer Prize–winning
Tales of the South Pacific
). Michener was a Quaker and a pacifist; Cronkite saw himself heading down the same spiritual highway. On a different junket, The Group, as they called themselves, journeyed to Haiti. They were like a gigantic
National Geographic
field trip around the globe. “Dad loved to snorkel and swim,” Chip recalled. “He had a Leica with him and took all sorts of family photos. Sometimes the adults would drink doubles of whatever they could find. Dad and Art liked playing chess. Michener and I played Frisbee together all the time. He wrote about it in his book
Sports in America
.”

When Salant heard about the Pan Am junket, he was understandably upset. The trips were a conflict of interest. It was the first time Salant had seen Cronkite display bad ethical judgment. Cronkite defended himself, saying it had just been something between friends, but Salant wouldn’t buy it. “Walter had broken a ‘no, no, no’ rule,” Bill Small, Washington bureau chief, recalled. “He caught flak over it. But Walter was the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the CBS room. You couldn’t fire him.”

Cronkite was earning about $250,000 a year in 1970 as anchorman of the
CBS Evening News
. The U.S. median income that year was $8,730. After he won the prestigious William Allen White Medal for Outstanding Journalistic Merit, honors continued to pour in, so much so that a competition ensued between Cronkite and the economist John Kenneth Galbraith and the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. over who could win the most honorary doctorates. And Cronkite didn’t rest on his cascade of laurels. He continued to dig out stories and gossip by telephone with his old Washington sources, which were, most often, at the Cabinet and congressional committee chair level.

In the spring of 1970, Cronkite sparred with the Nixon administration yet again. The Justice Department had brought charges against
New York Times
reporter Earl Caldwell, who had refused to provide grand jury testimony on his reporting on the Black Panther Party. “Walter Cronkite was one of the first people to come forward,” Caldwell recalled in 2002, “to issue a statement that we would take into court arguing why you can’t [force journalists to reveal sources] and why it was wrong what the government was forcing me to do.”

Once again, Cronkite had spoken out to defend journalism. With Brinkley under siege from the Nixon administration, Cronkite assumed Edward R. Murrow’s mantle, worried that television was usurping newspaper readership. “In doing my work, I (and those who assist me) depend constantly on information, ideas, leads and opinions received in confidence,” Cronkite wrote in a letter to the editor of
The
New York Times
. “Without such materials, I would be able to do little more than broadcast press releases and public statements.”

Cronkite’s
Times
letter was repeatedly entered into the proceedings as the Caldwell case made its way through the courts. It served as a reference for all reporters in need of legal protection. It was Murrowism without Murrow. Moreover, in interviews, Cronkite, keeping his fingers crossed, swore that if he were ever in Caldwell’s position, he would go to prison before he’d reveal confidential sources. His outspokenness lent solidarity to journalists and restated a standard, one that many reporters would act upon. The Supreme Court decided against Caldwell—that is, against the right of reporters to keep sources secret. Now the specter of prison did loom for investigative journalists. Cronkite lamented the court’s retrograde radicalism. More than any other journalist of the early 1970s, Cronkite absorbed the Nixon administration’s anti-journalism punches without getting a scratch. Long before the term was applied to Ronald Reagan, Cronkite was “Teflon.”

In May 1971, Cronkite received the Broadcaster of the Year Award from the International Radio and Television Society at a Waldorf-Astoria Hotel ceremony. Hundreds of people from the upper echelon of the media world were in attendance. Cronkite graciously accepted the coveted award and then surprised his audience by eviscerating the Nixon administration’s assault on TV journalism. Speaking as a private citizen, he accused the Nixon-Agnew cabal of being perpetrators of an unwarranted “anti-press policy . . . a grand conspiracy to destroy the credibility of the press.” Cronkite was the Muhammad Ali of American journalism and every verbal punch he threw was greeted with hoots, hollers, and cheers. “Nor is there any way,” he continued, “that President Nixon can escape responsibility for this campaign. He is the ultimate leader. He sets the tone and the attitude of his administration. By internal edict and public posture, he could reverse the anti-press policy of his administration if that were his desire. As long as the attacks, overt and subtle, continue, we must even at the risk of appearing to be self-serving, rise to defend ourselves against the charges by which the enemies of freedom seek to influence a divided and confused population.” Murrow would have been proud.

At the 1972 Radio and TV Correspondents Dinner, Pat Buchanan was talking amiably to a friend over cocktails when he was unexpectedly introduced to Cronkite—an archenemy of the Nixon’s administration. “Hello, Pat, how are you?” Cronkite asked, hand extended.

“Fine, Mr. Cronkite,” Buchanan said with deference, “how are you, sir?”

For days, Buchanan was disgusted with himself for having kissed up to Cronkite. He treated the
CBS Evening News
anchorman as if he were royalty. “I was beside myself for giving the appearance of having truckled,” Buchanan recalled. “Both the ‘Mr.’ and the ‘sir’ had come out automatically, reflexively, because Walter Cronkite was an older man, and because of those years of indoctrination.”

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-
S
EVEN

Reportable Truth in the Age of Nixon

CHANNELING MURROW—THE PENTAGON PAPERS—TRACKING DOWN ELLSBERG—DR. STANTON GOES BEFORE CONGRESS—MAGRUDER PLAYS DIRTY—THE NEWS TWISTERS—COLSON STAKES NIXON—BUNDLING UP—THE GREAT OPENING OF CHINA—TOURING WITH BUCKLEY AND MICHENER—STIFFING BARBARA WALTERS—TABLOID FODDER IN SAN FRANCISCO—POLITICAL CONVENTIONS—MCGOVERN’S VP—THE STANHOPE GOULD FACTOR—RUSSIAN WHEAT DEAL—WATERGATE BRAVERY—THE MOST TRUSTED MAN IN AMERICA—COLSON AGONISTES—DISSED FROM THE ENEMIES LIST

C
ronkite’s verbal barrage at the Waldorf-Astoria was merely opening day of the fourth estate’s hunting season on Nixon, a season in which almost every big-city newsroom was loaded for bear. Nixon had failed to heed the oldest and truest cliché in journalism: never get into a pissing match with folks who buy ink by the barrel (or air hourlong special reports on prime-time TV). When Cronkite spoke out against Nixon’s ham-fisted intimidation at the Waldorf-Astoria, it was as if the ghost of Murrow hurled a lightning bolt from the podium. It didn’t hurt that Cronkite’s close friends included Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, publisher of
The New York Times
, and Katharine Graham, publisher of
The Washington Post
. Nixon, of course, wasn’t wrong about a liberal media elite disapproving of social conservatives. But unlike Eisenhower—who simply ignored his bad press—Nixon wanted blood. “Seventy-five percent of those group hate my guts,” he confided to White House press secretary Ron Ziegler on Christmas Eve 1970, about the Big Three network reporters. “They don’t like to be beaten.”

Just how appreciative other journalists were that Cronkite stood up for his profession became apparent when he won the George C. Polk Award (named for a CBS correspondent killed during civil strife in Greece in 1948) for resisting White House attempts to discredit the
CBS
Evening News
for its disclosure of the Bau Me atrocity. The Polk Award coincided with Paley’s announcement that CBS was bringing back
You Are There
, the dramatic historic reenactment series of the 1950s, as a Saturday morning children’s show, with Cronkite once again serving as host. Not only was Cronkite winning over converts in his battle with the Nixon crowd, but he was now courting a future generation of children with the beloved Bugs Bunny as his lead-in. Sick of all things Cronkite, the White House kept looking for clever ways to undermine his sterling credibility with the public.

It was a document leak, in the end, that turned the White House attack on CBS News into trench warfare over journalism’s enduring role in the American republic. In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg, a Harvard-educated military analyst with the Rand Corporation, absconded with a photocopy of a Pentagon report titled
United States–Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of the Defense
. It was classified top secret, with only fifteen copies printed. Ellsberg described the Pentagon Papers, as the report became known to the public, as “seven thousand pages of documentary evidence of lying by four presidents and their administrations over twenty-three years, to conceal plans and actions of mass murder.” The report charted decades of Department of Defense misinformation, focusing most on the mendacity of the Johnson administration, which dictated Pentagon policies at the time the report was written. “I decided I would stop concealing that myself,” Ellsberg wrote. “I would get it out somehow.”

After serving in the Marine Corps from 1954 to 1957, Ellsberg had received a doctorate in economics from Harvard in 1962 while working for the Rand Corporation. An authority on decision theory and behavioral economics, he began work in 1964 as special assistant in the Defense and State departments. He returned to Rand in 1967 to work on the top-secret Pentagon Papers. What Ellsberg learned was that the Vietcong weren’t going to collapse soon, that they were stronger than ever. When the upbeat Johnson administration hawk Walter Rostow, LBJ’s national security advisor, gave Ellsberg an insanely optimistic account of imminent victory in Vietnam, the strategist balked. “I don’t want to hear it,” Ellsberg scolded Rostow. “Victory is not near. Victory is very far away. I’ve come back from Vietnam. I’ve been there for two years. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to see charts . . .”

“But, Dan, the charts are very good.”

Ellsberg had first turned against U.S. policy in Vietnam in early 1967. Too many American troops were being slaughtered for a gargantuan Johnson administration policy mistake now being exacerbated by the Nixon crew. “A line kept repeating itself in my head,” he recalled in his memoir,
Secrets
: “We are eating our young.” Ellsberg was also galled that the Nixon White House, spinning a web of distortions, had manipulated decision making in Congress and among the American people. Offered a first look at the Pentagon Papers,
New York Times
reporter Neil Sheehan and his legendary editor Abe Rosenthal made the courageous decision to publish excerpts from them, beginning on June 13, 1971. If it meant the end of the Vietnam War, Ellsberg was ready to go to jail. He went into hiding to escape the long arm of the FBI. Cronkite thought Ellsberg brave; others concluded he was a little nuts. Charles Colson, special counsel to President Nixon, started spreading rumors that Ellsberg was a sexual pervert who shot children from helicopters in Vietnam for sport—real ugly stuff. “Colson is a liar,” Ellsberg argued in his defense. “Years later, after he went to prison and wrote
Born Again
, he claimed to have apologized to me. That was a lie. I tried to reach him on four or five occasions. His secretary would take down my number. But he wouldn’t get back to me.”

Nixon was not implicated in the Pentagon Papers (which were written before he took office), but his administration struck back hard, obtaining a court order to force
The New York Times
to cease publication of the illegally obtained documents—the first time the U.S. government had gagged a newspaper in more than a hundred years. The classified documents contained shocking proof of deliberate government malfeasance. But there was a shrill disagreement over the ethics of Ellsberg’s action; some argued that the leak potentially aided the enemy, but others that the First Amendment protected a free press. During the second half of June 1971, the Pentagon Papers became a lightning rod in an already charged and polarized America.
CBS Evening News
covered the story heavily, with Cronkite interviewing many people about the explosive government documentation of the Vietnam War.

The Pentagon Papers leak lacked the key elements of effective television news: action and clarity. The enticing fascination of the Department of Defense documents lay in their mountains of detail, in which academics, not TV viewers, revel. When Ellsberg offered NBC News and ABC News a chance to release a portion of the Pentagon Papers, both flat-out turned him down. The documents were radioactive. Disseminating the report would take a network into precarious legal territory as well as dangerously dull television. Another reason NBC said no was that its news division was in flux: Chet Huntley had retired in 1970 and David Brinkley was in the process of retiring. Ellsberg went to CBS News, home of
60 Minutes
, hoping it would have the guts to air explosive revelations. If Cronkite deemed it okay to report the Pentagon Papers—secret government deliberations about the Vietnam War—then a pack of journalists would follow suit. “We’d done what we could with them on the air,” Cronkite recalled. “We wanted to interview Daniel Ellsberg, but he was on the lam from the FBI.”

Mid-June also saw CBS embroiled in its own First Amendment struggle. Longtime CBS president (and trustee of the Rand Corporation) Dr. Frank Stanton was facing serious legal consequences over “The Selling of the Pentagon.” Right-wing politicos charged that the
CBS Reports
documentary had been deliberately unfair, even doctoring quotes to distort the story. A subcommittee of the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce subpoenaed Stanton and the CBS News Department, demanding that they turn over outtakes and extra footage. Stanton, in a heroic First Amendment stand, refused, personally accepting the consequences. He would be exonerated, but as of mid-June 1971, there was a very real possibility that CBS’s president would go to jail for contempt of Congress.

Given Stanton’s situation, CBS might well have been wary of interviewing Ellsberg. Contact with the outlaw could potentially put the network in further legal jeopardy. It would certainly anger the committee members charged with deciding Stanton’s fate. Even so, the
CBS Evening News
couldn’t resist the scoop: the first televised interview with Ellsberg. Gordon Manning, CBS’s vice president for hard news, negotiated with Ellsberg on two occasions, a cloak-and-dagger process involving clandestine meetings and communication by code. Reading parts of the Pentagon Papers over the air, as Ellsberg wanted, was impossible, but Manning arranged an exclusive interview with the fugitive for CBS News.

Cronkite remembered the advance work differently, claiming in
A Reporter’s Life
that he used a personal connection with Ellsberg’s family to land the interview. Nobody in America circa 1971 had a better Rolodex than Cronkite. He was encyclopedic about the comings and goings of bluebloods, military officers, and corporate CEOs. He made it his habit to trade in career updates, summer vacation plans, and casual gossip with the rich and otherwise powerful in American life. While other journalists were trying to fathom the real Ellsberg, Cronkite already knew: the now former Rand analyst was married to Patricia Marx, the daughter of Louis Marx, who with his brother had founded Marx Toys in New York City in 1919. As the FBI launched an all-points-bulletin manhunt for Ellsberg, Cronkite simply called a Marx family member from Lake Placid, while on assignment. It was a warm exchange. An arrangement was made for Gordon Manning to have a secret rendezvous with Ellsberg, who kept changing locations, in Cambridge. Cronkite, once protocol was set, wanted to quietly slip into town, allow himself to be blindfolded, and be whisked away to a secret location.

The fifty-four-year-old Cronkite was acting like a cub wire service reporter for the United Press or Scripps-Howard, hungry for an edgy exclusive. That very evening, Manning received a telephone call. Speaking in the cryptic language of espionage, a “Mr. Boston” said a taped interview with Cronkite “might be possible.” The Old Library building on Harvard’s campus near midnight was chosen as a rendezvous spot. Manning met with Mr. Boston, a college-age antiwar leader, who drove him to a Cambridge cottage where the Pentagon Papers (wrapped in brown paper and tied with string) were hidden. Arrangements were made for Cronkite to interview Ellsberg—the White House’s number one enemy—the next afternoon, at the Massachusetts hideaway. Dick Salant worried that CBS News would be accused of aiding and abetting a fugitive, but the network’s lawyers reassured him not to worry.

“I was proud of Cronkite for his Vietnam stalemate report in February 1968,” Ellsberg recalled. “I was in D.C. at the time working as staff for Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford. When I had come back from Vietnam in 1967 with hepatitis, I had one goal: to get people to understand that Vietnam was a
stalemate
. President Johnson had given a direct order never to say
stalemate
. It was taboo. When Cronkite said the word, it meant a lot. So I wanted Cronkite to do the Pentagon Papers interview because he was the most famous journalist in America.”

Cronkite, like a character in a John le Carré novel, was directed to meet a contact for Ellsberg in the lobby of the Commander Hotel in Cambridge on June 23 (the very day Stanton appeared before the Senate subcommittee). The hotel manager immediately recognized the famous CBS anchor and tried to be helpful, interrupting Cronkite’s attempt to case the lobby for his secret contact. Cronkite felt like he was on an undercover operation that was going to backfire. He talked with the manager about where he might make a telephone call. The pay phone was downstairs, next to the bathrooms. Cronkite, afraid that his waiting around could be interpreted as looking for a “homosexual pickup,” was starting to second-guess himself. “There were many amateurish aspects to the plot,” Cronkite later said, laughing, “but the most obvious never occurred to any of us. It turned out to be pretty difficult for the anchorperson of the most popular television news broadcast in America to go incognito.”

A young man finally made eye contact with Cronkite, who instinctively followed him out to the street. The FBI couldn’t find Ellsberg, but after a cloak-and-dagger rendezvous worthy of spy intrigue, Cronkite could; that made him chuckle. Now in a getaway car and in the hands of anti–Vietnam War radicals helping a fugitive, Cronkite was asked to keep his head down so he couldn’t retrace the route for the FBI. The car stopped at a nondescript house, and Cronkite went inside to find Manning and two film crews—and the visibly stressed Ellsberg—already waiting. Carefully the two exchanged updates on all things Vietnam. Although Ellsberg had debated Nixon’s Cambodia bombing with Senator Bob Dole (R-Kans.) for the TV show
The Advocates
, a public television production of KCET in Los Angeles, he wasn’t camera-savvy. The former Defense Department analyst didn’t want to speak solely about the Pentagon Papers or his own employment experience in the mid-1960s for President Johnson. Manning and Cronkite argued over how many documents would be read on the air. Determined to end the Vietnam War, Ellsberg wanted to “present at some length to a prime-time national television audience an understanding of Nixon’s secret strategy.”

Parts of the Cronkite-Ellsberg interview were broadcast on the
CBS Evening News
that day; a longer version was shown on a prime-time special the next evening, June 24. Ellsberg and Manning had collaborated to come up with the perfect CBS stock footage from Vietnam—shot since 1965—to accompany the commentary. Ellsberg’s story was full of gaps, and he artfully avoided Cronkite’s most probing questions. At times, Ellsberg went into monologue mode (as was his tendency). The CBS anchor didn’t push much in the way of follow-ups. When he asked Ellsberg why, at the very moment that President Nixon was winding down the war, he chose to kick the hornet’s nest, the fugitive’s unsatisfactory answer was, “We are seeing 1964 all over again.” What? Cronkite just let the Gulf of Tonkin reference hang. No real news came out of the interview except that Cronkite had tracked down the FBI’s most wanted ex-Pentagon official. This was enough to send the White House reeling. Why didn’t Cronkite or Manning make a citizen’s arrest? Or set up a sting operation with the FBI? A better question was: how could Cronkite find Ellsberg between tennis matches and the FBI couldn’t?