Cronkite (71 page)

The hostage crisis consumed President Carter in 1979 and 1980. Cronkite, worried that the media would abandon the story prematurely, made a bold decision, along with producer Ernie Leiser, that had far-reaching consequences. At the end of every
CBS Evening News
broadcast, Cronkite would sign off with the number of days the hostages had been held. CBS News started this count on Day 74. Cronkite’s nightly in-your-face reminder of the hostages was a public relations disaster for the White House. It was as if, every day, Cronkite was chastising Carter, saying, “You still haven’t brought our boys home, sir!”

Once again, Cronkite led the charge and the rest of the media followed suit. Before long, NBC News made updates from Khomeini’s Tehran its feature story. ABC News launched the 11:30 p.m.
Nightline
, which focused for fifteen minutes almost exclusively on the Iranian hostage crisis—ABC would banner it “America Held Hostage.” Former State Department undersecretary George Ball blamed Cronkite for starting a national TV soap opera. “Night after night, the television news dramatized the number of days the hostages had been held,” First Lady Rosalynn Carter complained. “I tried to turn off the television quickly if we were watching CBS before Walter Cronkite could sign off with the daily count.”

Despite his constant bluff about retiring, Cronkite was busier than ever at CBS News. But in a November 1979 interview with Michael Gorkin for the magazine
50 Plus
, Cronkite laid out his fantasy plan to retire and sail around the world, maybe get good enough to compete in the America’s Cup. His wife, Betsy, knew the seafaring plan by heart. Whenever Cronkite grew depressed about the Iran hostage crisis, Three Mile Island, double-digit inflation, or long gas lines, his glorious dream lifted his spirits. “We’d do it slowly,” he told Gorkin, “across the Atlantic to the Azores, then around Africa to the Persian Gulf, and so on . . .” He then closed his eyes, as if studying a nautical chart in his mind, smelling the spray of sea. “We could stop in various ports around the world, go ashore and spend time with friends, then sail on. It would be wonderful, absolutely fascinating. And really, could there be any better way for an old journalist to spend time after he’s left his trade?”

Throughout the 1980 presidential election campaign, it was no secret that Cronkite’s clock was running down at the
CBS Evening News
. That didn’t mean his popularity was waning; to the contrary. With the exception of a couple of odd weeks, his
CBS Evening News
had topped the ratings ever since 1967. On the 1980 presidential campaign trail, Cronkite was a bigger celebrity than the politicians he interviewed (excepting Carter and Reagan). But he had grown overwhelmed by the workday grind of two jobs. He’d always been absentminded about keeping track of personal belongings, but now that tendency increased. Lost keys became almost a medical condition. He was also getting puffy under the eyes. When a friend from Houston visited the
Evening News
set, he was surprised to see how thick Cronkite’s on-air makeup was. “I’ve spent thousands of dollars developing these bags under my eyes,” Cronkite chuckled, “and CBS spends thousands of dollars trying to hide them.”

Livid against exit polling, computer predictions, and “action news” as being “perfectly ridiculous,” Cronkite criticizing news-as-entertainment became as predictable as the swallows returning to Capistrano. The gullibility of the American electorate worried him. “We need courses, beginning in junior high, on journalism for consumers,” Cronkite said. “How to read a newspaper, how to listen to the radio, how to watch television. . . . People have got to be taught to be skeptical so that they won’t become cynical about all news sources.” Cronkite never grappled with the possibility that he—the biggest TV news star in U.S. history—was part of the cultural problem.

Duke University professor James David Barber accurately wrote that a revolution in presidential politics meant the new kingmakers weren’t the Democratic or Republican parties, but Cronkite and other elite TV journalists. In April 1980, Barber published
The Pulse of Politics: Electing Presidents in the Media Age
. According to Barber, journalists could now make or break a candidate. If you were Reagan or Carter, kissing up to Cronkite was far more important than kissing babies on the campaign trail.

That spring, Hugh Sidey of
Time
covered a Chicago focus group evaluating voter trends in the coming Illinois primary and seconded the Barber thesis. “Their focus was not on a local luminary but on Walter Cronkite, who had come to the provinces and set up his majestic broadcast booth,” Sidey wrote. “His noble gray head appeared at the bottom of the screen, a gigantic red, white, and blue map of the U.S. spread out behind him. Not since George C. Scott opened the movie
Patton
had such a dramatic entrance been filmed. There were quiet gasps among the appreciative Chicagoans.”

On February 6, 1980, Cronkite gave
The Washington Post
the scoop: he would be leaving the
CBS Evening News
sometime in 1981. The announcement was big news across the country. A reporter for the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
compared the retirement to ripping Linus’s blanket away from an electronic America. Brushing aside rumors, Cronkite insisted that management hadn’t forced him out. “I’d like to be able to step out right now,” he said. He had adopted the get-out-while-you’re-on-top strategy.But, he added, he would stay through the election season and probably leave on or around his birthday, in late November 1981.

With that, speculation about his replacement grew fervent. All America was guessing. On February 15,
The New York Times
made it official: the darkly handsome Rather would replace Cronkite as the
CBS Evening News
anchorman. The announcement, made by the new CBS News president Bill Leonard, was something of a shock. Mudd had been the Vegas bookies’ favorite. The normally laconic Mudd, on the boil, cleared his desk immediately. He spent hours browsing the antiquarian shelves of novelist Larry McMurtry’s Booked Up shop in Georgetown, pondering his plight. He would go to work for NBC News within the year. The rumor mill held that market researchers found Rather polled better than Mudd. Adding insult to injury, CBS News refused to let Mudd out of his contract early, knowing he would sign with ABC News or NBC News.

Cronkite played good soldier, telling the
Times
that Rather was extremely well qualified for the anchorman job. Whatever their personality differences, Cronkite knew that Rather was the relentless investigative gumshoe reporter of the JFK assassination, civil rights, the Vietnam War, and Nixon woes; he was proud to call him his successor. But Cronkite also made it clear that
he
was in charge of CBS News’ 1980 presidential election coverage. “I’ve covered every inauguration since Harry Truman’s,” he said, “and I want to do one more.”

Just how dramatic the 1980 election would be became clear as Cronkite hosted a debate in Manchester, New Hampshire, among seven Republican candidates—Ronald Reagan, Howard Baker, Philip Crane, John Connally, Bob Dole, Harold Stassen, and George H. W. Bush. It was quite a playing field. Mark Harrington, Cronkite’s assistant producer, was once again his human time prompter at knee level, flashing cards like a railroad brakeman. As
The Washington Post
joked regarding the debate, “Harrington tells Cronkite what is happening. Harrington is Cronkite’s reality; Cronkite is ours.”

Although Cronkite was a noncontroversial interviewer, he was a stopwatch stickler. Ronald Reagan learned this the hard way. At one juncture, when Reagan was on a roll, Cronkite interrupted and said time was up, cutting Reagan off in midsentence. Reagan’s campaign team went ballistic after the broadcast. They believed that Cronkite had tried to make his friend George H. W. Bush look polished and Reagan the fool. Cronkite wouldn’t have any of it. Live TV was no place for rambling. Any good high school debater knew you couldn’t run over the clock time. It made the politician look selfish, hogging the competition’s allotted time. When you entered the debate realm, Cronkite said, you played by the rules. Reagan now understood, like Walters, that despite all the off-camera avuncular charm, Cronkite, like Reagan himself, was a tough customer.

Congressman John Anderson (R-Ill.) declared an Independent candidacy for president in 1980, eventually running in the November election against Ronald Reagan on the Republican side and President Carter on the Democratic ticket. At heart, Anderson was a Rockefeller Republican with an overweening Earth Day sensibility who had served admirably as a U.S. congressman from the Sixteenth District in Illinois. As a registered Independent, Cronkite, amazingly, was suggested as a vice presidential candidate for Anderson. The idea snowballed. Wherever Anderson went that month, he was dogged by reporters’ questions about Cronkite as his running mate. At Georgia State University, Anderson fueled the rumor by ending his speech with Cronkite’s trademark “And that, my friends, that’s the way it is, April 29, 1980.” The crowd went wild with applause.

On May 3, 1980, Morton Kondracke of
The New Republic
accurately reported that Cronkite, floating a trial balloon, told him “he’d be honored if asked” to join the Anderson ticket as vice president. A dispute erupted over whether the chat was supposed to be off the record or not. CBS News executives in New York got bombarded with media queries. Had Cronkite shed his objectivity yet again? Cronkite, unreachable for a few days, was off on
Wyntje
, away from radio contact. Then the hullabaloo caught up with him. “Oh my God,” Cronkite said in horror. “He totally misrepresented the spirit of our conversation.”

In an op-ed for
The New York Times
, Cronkite defended being an Independent and quashed the Anderson rumor. “To be among the best reporters and analysts of government,” he wrote, “does not in itself equip one to become a government leader, no more than being a good sportswriter equips one to play for the Dallas Cowboys.” Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, a political centrist, had also been bandied about as Anderson’s vice presidential pick. He felt, in fact, that Anderson had offered the job to him. With devious humor, Moynihan wrote Cronkite that “knowing” the CBS News anchor’s “devotion to TRUTH,” he felt obliged to rip the curtain back on Oz. “The fact is,” Moynihan told Cronkite, “that you were No. 2 for the No. 2 spot on the Anderson ticket.”

Cronkite also found himself in a controversy over his urging President Carter to do something urgently dramatic to gain release of the U.S. hostages in Iran. On April 24, 1980, Carter’s rescue attempt, code-named Operation Eagle Claw, proved disastrous. Two of eight U.S. helicopters were destroyed after colliding in midair, resulting in the deaths of eight American soldiers and a failed mission. James Reston wrote a
New York Times
piece lambasting the president and his buddy “Ayatollah Cronkite,” an “innocent villain,” but in part responsible. “It seems slightly mad,” Reston wrote, “but it happens to be true that the character in the White House really felt some pressure from Uncle Walter’s announcing every night the number of days of captivity of the hostages.”

Because people knew Cronkite would be retiring soon, the outpouring of emotion for him was torrential. One morning Cronkite joined Ted Kennedy, the liberal Massachusetts senator, on the campaign trail for a flight to Erie, Pennsylvania. As they left the aircraft together, the crowd went wild—for Cronkite, not Kennedy. “Walter!” they shouted. “It’s Walter!” Cronkite was overshadowing the candidate. As Kennedy worked the crowd, everyone wanted to shake Cronkite’s hand, not his. According to
The New York Times
, Cronkite was “seemingly embarrassed” by the commotion he had caused. He tried to get out of the way, maneuvering to a different part of the tarmac. But the crowd acted as if he were all four Beatles rolled into one and Kennedy was Pete Best. One woman shouted out, to cheers, “You ought to be running, Walter!”

On June 6, Cronkite earned an honorary doctorate of law from Harvard University. He was in a state of disbelief, for the first time seeing his career as truly historic in nature. At the commencement ceremony, he was praised for being the “preeminent figure” in contemporary journalism. No longer would he carry the stigma of being a college dropout. Now he was Dr. Cronkite, with “Harvard” affixed to his name. He embraced the advanced degree with awe and embarrassment. “You know, Anna Freud [daughter of Sigmund] got an honorary degree, Professor so-and-so who won a Nobel got one,” a humbled Cronkite told Fred Friendly, with a trace of forced modesty, after the ceremony. “And yet, when I stood up, there was a standing ovation. What’s it all about?”

“You know what that’s about,” Friendly snapped.

“You mean television?” Cronkite responded.

“No,” Friendly said. “Not television. At a time when everybody was lying—fathers, mothers, teachers, presidents, governors, senators—you seemed to be telling them the truth night after night. They didn’t like the truth, but they believed you at a time when they needed somebody to believe.”

The Republican Convention—held in Detroit from July 14 to 17—had a spell of drama, with Cronkite acting as the catalyst. Reagan, the voice of conservatism, seemed likely to win the GOP nomination. The big unknown was who would run with him. A movement, somewhat unprecedented, was launched to have former president Gerald Ford be Reagan’s running mate. Thirty-three-year-old David Kennerly had been White House photographer for the affable Ford. A great friendship—almost of the father-and-son variety—had developed between them. Ford invited Kennerly to tag along with him in Detroit, snapping a few photos and sharing some laughs. Barbara Walters of ABC News thought she had scooped Cronkite by getting an exclusive first interview with Ford. Cronkite found himself number two in the pecking order and wasn’t happy. But while Walters got the first one-on-one, it was Cronkite who scored what Tom Shales of
The Washington Post
called the “scoop of scoops.”