Cronkite (67 page)

In early summer 1974, Americans of all stripes were deeply concerned about American political affairs. While Cronkite was proud of the CBS News team for its Watergate coverage, he worried that America was coming unglued. When he was asked in Austin, Texas, if he planned on interviewing President Nixon in San Clemente, he quipped, “San Clemente or San Quentin?” When Chief Justice Earl Warren died on July 9, 1974, Cronkite felt great sorrow. He had first met Warren in 1956, and had occasionally called upon the chief justice as a source. He saw Warren as a judicial giant without tolerance for racial discrimination: a man like himself, getting more liberal with age. “The Chief Justice himself said he was simply following the dictates of the Constitution,” Cronkite said. “He wanted his court to be remembered as the ‘people’s court.’ ”

A people’s court is an apt way to describe what Cronkite thought of his
CBS Evening News
bully pulpit. Shuttling between Martha’s Vineyard, New York City, and Washington, he managed to cover the House Judiciary Committee’s hearings on the impeachment of President Nixon on July 25 and 29 and present special late-evening reports on July 24, 26, and 27. Even though Americans were losing faith in the White House, Cronkite encouraged his fellow citizens not to lose faith in their government and its ability to do great things. The public would need that reminder, for, on August 8, after the release of taped proof that he had lied about his involvement in the Watergate cover-up, President Nixon announced he would resign the presidency. The Watergate scandal, it seemed, was almost over. Nixon’s vice president, the genial Gerald Ford of Michigan, who had served in Congress from 1949 to 1973, would take over the White House.

When President Nixon finished his grand farewell from the Oval Office, Cronkite—in the Washington studio with Sevareid, Rather, and Mudd to provide the “instant analysis” that Nixon deplored—was anything but critical of the departing president. As with Agnew’s resignation, Cronkite refrained from any we-got-the-bastard gloating. He, Sevareid, and Rather were at moments downright laudatory that August day, referring to the “class” of Nixon’s resignation speech, calling it “magnanimous.”

Many liberals—in the public prints, at least—were perplexed, if not disgusted, by the respectful, even wistful, commentary of Cronkite. Longtime Washington insider Tom Braden, who worked for the CIA from 1950 to 1954 before working as a newspaper columnist in the 1970s, thought CBS News was engaged in the worst kind of pseudo-patriotic pandering. “Did they consort in advance to provide us with this charade?” Braden wondered. “Did they theorize that having been the bearers of bad news for so long, they must at the end address themselves to the 20 percent of Nixon hard-liners who always wanted to kill the messenger?” Cronkite disagreed. It wasn’t the job of CBS News, he said, to rub Nixon’s face in the mud.

Just weeks after Nixon’s resignation, Cronkite won five Emmy Awards for his investigative journalism on the
CBS Evening News
. Print reporters—not least Woodward and Bernstein—saw Cronkite’s performance on CBS News as Watergate unfolded between 1972 and 1974 as brave. Cronkite believed—as Woodward eventually did also—that Ford’s pardoning of Nixon was in the long-term interest of the country. He also told his press colleagues to cut Ford some slack. “We should declare a honeymoon,” Cronkite said, “on any vocal gaffes or errors of speech the new president should commit.” Many reporters listened to Uncle Walter, whose rationale was that Nixon, the antihero, lurked in the dark side of politics, while Ford “talks from the heart.”

Nothing slowed Cronkite that August after Nixon’s farewell. Back in New York City in the fall, he started putting together his team for the November midterm elections. Lesley Stahl, a recent CBS hire who had desperately wanted to be part of Team Cronkite: she got her wish when CBS News president Salant assigned her to work directly with Cronkite on Election Night, covering the congressional races in the West. Salant gave her a personal tour of the West Fifty-seventh Street set. “It’s quite cozy,” he said. “All of you are in a friendly circle. Nothing to make you nervous.” He started pointing out where everybody would be sitting. “This is where Walter sits,” he said, pointing to a desk with a
CRONKITE
nameplate. “And here’s Dan’s seat.” Sure enough, a nameplate said
RATHER
. Then came
MUDD
. “And here’s yours,” said Salant. Suddenly he blushed with embarrassment. All Stahl’s nameplate said was,
FEMALE
.

As Election Day approached, Cronkite’s secretary called Stahl to invite her to dinner at his East Side town house. “I turned cynical,” Stahl recalled. “I thought he wanted to suck me dry of all my hard work in the West, will learn everything about Colorado and California from me and then use it on the air.” She couldn’t have been further off the mark. “We have a rule,” Cronkite told her at the door. “Zero shoptalk.” Stahl remembers a wild night as Cronkite—the vaudevillian—told ribald jokes about living in Russia in the 1940s and working with Charlemane the puppet in the 1950s. “He played all the roles in his stories, imitating women, Germans, Frenchmen, and people we even knew,” Stahl remembered in her memoir,
Reporting Live
. “And his jokes were earthy.” The Cronkites treated her as though she were family. Stahl also learned what a hoot Betsy Cronkite was. Stahl, a shrewd judge of character, found her both puckish and sophisticated.

Stahl realized that all Cronkite had plotted was conviviality before they worked together on air for Election Night 1974. This was part of his egalitarian strategy. He had built the best reportorial team in the history of U.S. television news by befriending talent. As an investigative team, they were sometimes competing with
The
New York Times
and
The Washington Post
. Cronkite shepherded the egos, making sure his flock stayed united.

Truth be told, for all his mentoring qualities, Cronkite didn’t tolerate competition. Being Mr. Nice Guy only went so far. By the time he became CBS News anchor in 1962, there were always hotshots wanting his job. He became very territorial with the Mudds and Rathers waiting in the wings at CBS News, eyeing his job. “He was very protective of his seat of power,” Brokaw recalled. “This nicest-guy-in-the-world was more Darwinian than you could imagine when it came to being top dog.”

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-
N
INE

A Time to Heal

SCHORR SCREAMS FOUL—CRONKITE THE GORILLA—WILD FACTS—BRINGING BRADLEY INTO THE FOLD—FORD PULLS OUT OF VIETNAM—DON’T BLAME THE PRESS—AMERICA TURNS TWO HUNDRED—THE GURU FOR LOCAL NEWS ANCHORS—BARBEQUE TOURISM IN KAYCEE—FRIENDSHIP WITH NICK CLOONEY—REAGAN CHALLENGES FORD—CARTER AND THE SECRET SERVICE PLOY—I NEVER WORKED FOR THE CIA—TOSSING ON ELECTION NIGHT—GOOD-BYE, JERRY—MAD AS HELL FOR LUMET’S
NETWORK

S
ince Walter Cronkite was considered the “Most Trusted Man in America,” the attack Daniel Schorr levied at him in a January 1975 speech at Duke University stung. Schorr, who had won Emmys for reporting in each of the Watergate years of 1972, 1973, and 1974, accused Cronkite of kowtowing to the White House when former president Richard Nixon fled in disgrace to San Clemente, California, under threat of impeachment. Schorr was saying, in essence, that Cronkite was a whore for CBS management. At issue was Schorr’s charge that network executives had forced Cronkite (along with Dan Rather and Eric Sevareid) to benignly report the historic news of Nixon’s dramatic resignation. A disgusted Schorr believed that CBS had cut a deal with incoming President Ford—a quid pro quo—to “soft-pedal” an entire shopping list of Nixon’s crimes and misdemeanors in order to establish a “general atmosphere of sweetness and light” under which America could bask. Brian Lamb, who later founded C-SPAN, was the publisher of the influential twice-monthly
Media Report
and reprinted Schorr’s remarks verbatim.

By 1974, Cronkite had become disdainful of Schorr, whom he considered a phony-baloney I-Am-the-Reincarnation-of-Murrow grandstander. Cronkite joined Sevareid and Rather in writing an incensed joint rebuttal letter to
New York
, a popular liberal magazine that referenced Schorr’s arch accusation. In a rare show of solidarity, the three newsmen denied “that executive orders at CBS News were handed down to ‘go soft on Nixon’ ” or that “those of us who felt constrained from whipping an obviously beaten man behaved in response to such orders.”

When Cronkite, who was on vacation, was asked by a reporter about Schorr’s claims, hurled like a thunderbolt at his reputation, he said, “Oh, that the son of a bitch had done it again.” From Cronkite’s perspective, the arrogant Schorr had anointed himself as “one-man ombudsman” for CBS News. He thought Schorr was a terrific reporter but a lousy colleague. Cronkite believed the feud began when Schorr was excluded from CBS News’ Nixon resignation speech analysis, which featured Cronkite, Rather, Mudd, and Sevareid. His Duke speech was payback.

After the frenzy surrounding the Duke University allegations settled, Cronkite treated Schorr as persona non grata in the CBS newsroom, refusing to put up with the field reporter’s “strange wickets” anymore. Cronkite wanted Black Rock to quietly dismiss the fly-in-the-ointment reporter. “There was always a Schorr version,” Cronkite groused, “and everybody else’s version of almost everything that transpired.” To Cronkite’s way of thinking, the truth of the matter was simpler than that. “I think,” he said in his own defense, “the circumstances required a sort of decency at that moment.”

According to CBS News president Dick Salant, the joint letter to
New York
that Cronkite signed was less than truthful. CBS had planned to devote nearly five hours of coverage to the Nixon resignation speech on August 9, 1974. With hours of airtime to fill, Salant fretted that Cronkite, Sevareid, and Rather would have no real-time direction. That dead-air problem had plagued CBS News during takeoff delays in the Gemini and Apollo programs. “Our reporters would have to ad-lib all night except for the half-hour or so of the president’s talk,” Salant noted. “All that we in CBS News management could do was to try to set the general tone. So we telephoned the correspondents who would be covering the story that night to remind them that it was not a time, no matter how any of them felt and no matter what Nixon decided to do, for gloating remarks or for editorial attacks. Rather, we told the reporters, if, as appeared likely, Nixon was going to resign—the first presidential resignation in American history—it was a time for national unity and national healing so that the U.S. government and the nation could move forward.”

Salant’s posthumous memoir wasn’t published by Columbia University Press until 1999, long after the Cronkite-Schorr flap of 1975. It seemed to validate Schorr’s charges, at least in part. The joint letter to the magazine, in which Cronkite participated,
had
been misleading. Executive orders at CBS News had indeed been handed down for Cronkite to treat Nixon (a beaten man) with kid gloves. That was not necessarily the wrong decision, and it had not been the result of a tit-for-tat agreement with the White House. But it was wrong for Cronkite to deny Schorr’s charge unequivocally. To revert to Cronkite’s template of the newspaper city desk, editors often told a reporter how to cover a story: from what angle and with what basic conclusion. It remains the prerogative of management in journalism, as in any business, to give direction. Problems arise when forces outside the newsroom—the advertising department, for instance, or the mayor or the publisher’s tendentious spouse—begin nixing or assigning or editing stories. According to Salant’s memoir, this didn’t happen at CBS News on the night Nixon resigned. The gray area remained that CBSers
had
been presented as commentators, presumably independent commentators, which they apparently were not on that extraordinary broadcast. So each side of Schorr versus Cronkite-Rather-Sevareid was half correct. Schorr believed Cronkite’s motivation (placating the conservative affiliates) was suspect and his conclusion (Nixon didn’t deserve an exit drubbing) mistaken. Nixon had been an enemy of the fourth estate and Schorr wanted him to suffer accordingly. “It is as wrong [for the media] to take on the role of nation-healers as it is to take on the role of nation-wounders,” Schorr argued. “That is the job of others, and we report it. . . . The media were accused of manipulation against Nixon, which was not true. We should also not engage in manipulation for him.”

Like CBS News,
The
Washington Post
also declined a victory lap in covering Nixon’s fall from power, presenting the incoming Gerald Ford as the steadiest of public men, a football-playing Middle American at ease with himself and loyal to the republic. “Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee issued a ‘don’t gloat’ order that August eighth,” Bob Woodward recalled. “Nixon’s story, they believed, was in many ways a tragedy. Ben ran a picture of Nixon hugging his daughter on the front page. There was a sense of ‘let’s be humane’ about it all.”

Perhaps Cronkite didn’t go comically soft on Nixon, but he was filled with human sympathy for the ex-president that late summer. Public humiliation made Cronkite uneasy. There was no thrill for him in having Nixon walk the plank just so reporters could throw tomatoes at him. From August 1974 to Nixon’s death in 1994, Cronkite was surprisingly generous toward Nixon, praising his intellectual acumen as a global statesman and Sino-Soviet expert on many public occasions. Friends in the Vineyard recalled Cronkite’s fury whenever it was intimated that the
CBS Evening News
was responsible for Nixon’s flushing from the White House because of its edgy Watergate segments. It wasn’t a mantle Cronkite embraced. He publicly rejected the “CBS got Nixon” allegation, praising the ex-president’s “overtures in international politics” to China, the USSR, and Egypt in a
Denver Post
interview.

Schorr’s accusation caused a permanent rift between him and the Cronkiters at CBS News. Sevareid repudiated him to the grave. Cronkite barely remained on handshaking terms with him. Nevertheless, when the crusading Schorr made public the contents of the classified Pike Committee report on illegal CIA and FBI activities in 1976, risking imprisonment by refusing to reveal his sources to Congress on First Amendment grounds, Cronkite wrote that he was “behind” Schorr “all the way.” When CNN hired Schorr in 1979, Cronkite, perhaps with good riddance at heart, wrote him a generous good-luck note.

With only minor deviations, the
CBS Evening News
continued to hold a lead in the ratings race throughout Ford’s presidency. Wags referred to the
CBS Evening News
roster in the post-Watergate era as a kind of family, an oddball version of the popular show
The Waltons
, then running on CBS every Thursday night. Cronkite was a fan of the warmhearted hourlong drama set in the Blue Ridge Mountains, which celebrated familial strength in rural America during the Great Depression. The
CBS Evening News
edition of
The Waltons
included Papa (Cronkite), the wayward older son (Daniel Schorr), the cheeky little sister (Lesley Stahl), a prickly nephew (Dan Rather), the upstanding if distant brother (Roger Mudd), and, to be sure, the perspicacious grandfather (Eric Sevareid). The CBS News lineup was first-rate, perhaps even hitting a high mark in the mid-1970s with the inclusion of Richard C. Hottelet, Marvin Kalb, Charles Kuralt, Richard Threlkeld, Bruce Morton, Terry Drinkwater, Connie Chung, Phil Jones, and Ike Pappas. Some media critics credited the success of the
CBS Evening News
to the excellence of the roving correspondents rather than to the anchor. Yet it was Cronkite, always wearing his trademark CBS Eye cuff links, who was the personality. He was the hub, and all those talented correspondents—and perhaps the executives and producers—were the spokes. No one really thought of Leiser, Socolow, or Salant as Cronkite’s bosses. “He knew,” said Bill Leonard, “that his only boss was his wife, Betsy.”

To his CBS News colleagues in New York City and Washington, Cronkite was seldom “Uncle Walter,” the loving moniker used by viewers around the country. Like a gregarious friend, Cronkite, the public believed, was always in high spirits and at ease with breaking news, big debates, and famous people. The CBS employees, a close group, still called him “the eight-hundred-pound gorilla,” who, Les Midgley explained, “gets anything he wants.” One name that no one at CBS News dared call Cronkite was “Walt.” Dan Rather, in
The Camera Never Blinks Twice
, the book he co-authored with Mickey Herskowitz while still working with Cronkite, poured on the adjectives to describe Cronkite circa 1974, including “assured,” “unflappable,” and “perfectly aimed.” But he didn’t dare call him “Walt.”

No one understood Cronkite’s Puritan work ethic better than his workhorse producer Sandy Socolow, who became like a second son. Everyone at CBS News knew the Cronkite-Benjamin-Socolow motto: “Get it first, but first get it right.” He insisted that every broadcast be flawless. “God help us if NBC had a good story that we didn’t, or handled a story better than we did,” Bonn recalled. “Walter, flushed and furious, would come bursting into the fishbowl, and his first words would be, ‘God damn it!’ All of us were Type-A competitive to start with, and we
hated
to get beaten on a story. But Walter and his red-faced ‘God damn it!’ made us
really
hate to get beaten on a story, so it didn’t happen very often.”

Cronkite’s defining quality remained competitiveness. After the nightly broadcast, the staff would frequently gather to watch the later broadcasts of the ABC and NBC news programs; Cronkite often joined in the group critique. CBS News correspondent Bob Schieffer, who had idolized Cronkite before joining CBS in 1969, thought the old Unipresser possessed more curiosity than any other individual in the media world. “Walter was the nicest guy in the world,” Morley Safer recalled. “But as a managing editor, he was brutal.” According to Roger Mudd, the CBS Washington correspondent bench was widely known, and got their phone calls answered, because the sources knew they could get their stories on the Cronkite newscast.

By and large, colleagues saw Cronkite as a tough old pro with the certain, decorous air of a sea captain. If a new hire was nervous in his presence, he told filthy jokes to put him at ease. He might not have been easygoing, but his mien was that of a serious professional; he didn’t
overtly
play favorites inside the newsroom or as a reporter. But he was a master of graceful thank-you notes, condolence letters, and Christmas cards. Rigid ideology and political correctness bored him. Yet CBS News had an anti-Nixon slant from 1968 to 1974—no question about it. He publicly admitted that his stable of CBS reporters—himself included—were nondogmatic liberals; it came with the job description. “Most newsmen have spent some time covering the seamier side of the human endeavor; they cover police stations and courts and the infighting of politics,” Cronkite told
Playboy
. “And I think they come to feel very little allegiance to the established order. I think they’re inclined to side with humanity rather than with authority or institutions. And this sort of pushes them to the left. But I don’t think there are many who are
far
left. I think a little left of center is probably correct.”

In the days before the Internet, it wasn’t easy to find information about an election in Algeria or an earthquake in Honduras at the snap of a finger—yet Cronkite demanded specifics about any and all subjects worth reporting on. One of his favorite phrases was “Find the Facts.” To him, the effort to obtain and explain hard facts wasn’t drudgery; quite the opposite. His demand for buttoned-down facts, those “Walter Wants,” at CBS News was life-sustaining. “He took nothing for granted,” remembered Don Hewitt in his memoir,
Tell Me a Story
. “He picked up the phone and checked with people he knew would give him a straight answer and, at the same time, throw in a couple of facts that made his reporting better than anyone else’s. I can’t think of anyone, including the president, who wouldn’t take a phone call from Walter Cronkite.”

During Ford’s truncated 895-day presidency, it seemed as if Cronkite tried to help him out every chance he got. The atmosphere in Washington had improved a lot since Nixon left. After contributing to the downfall of Johnson (his Tet special) and Nixon (the Watergate reports), Cronkite was willing to grant Ford a year’s worth of mulligans to grapple with the great politics of the day. During Ford’s presidency, Cronkite anchored
CBS News Special Reports
on the historic
Apollo-Soyuz
rendezvous, the assassination attempts on Ford’s life, and the accidental president’s four-day trip to China. He helped Ford make a great TV epic out of ordering a U.S. military strike against Cambodia’s meager forces for having seized the
Mayaguez
, an American merchant ship, in disputed waters.