Cronkite (73 page)

Even though Cronkite scored big interviews with Lech Walesa and Wojciech Jaruzelski, Poland’s last Communist prime minister, no one at Black Rock gave a damn about Poland. Apple Computer had introduced the first serious home computer, triggering a desktop revolution throughout the world, and CBS management was trying to see whether it would replace the wire service for instant news. Compounding Cronkite’s difficulties in stepping down as CBS News anchorman was his boneheaded decision to join the Pan Am board. It proved to be a terrible mistake. The hitch was that he was still getting paid $1 million a year to be a CBS News special correspondent. Pan Am had a contractual relationship with NASA and the Pentagon. How could Cronkite cover the space beat for CBS while serving on the board of a company that profited from the program? It was a clear conflict of interest. Accused of breaching journalistic ethics, Cronkite quit Pan Am to save his reputation.

Cronkite was turning more and more bitter toward the Rather regime as the competition feasted on the opportunities left by his departure. ABC, led by news division chief Roone Arledge, regarded the end of the Cronkite era as a rare opening for the third-place network to excel. To Arledge, the CBS News lineup with Cronkite had been like “the Yankees when they had Murderers’ Row.” But with Cronkite, the cleanup hitter, gone, the lineup would start to unravel. ABC was determined to turn the perennial two-horse race between CBS and NBC into a three-way contest. Arledge steadily and strategically bolstered ABC’s commitment to news, starting with its extensive coverage of the Americans held hostage in Tehran, from November 1979 to January 1981. Much of his strategy anticipated Cronkite’s eventual withdrawal from CBS. When March 6 arrived, said an ABC colleague, Arledge was “like a boxer who smells the kill and doesn’t want to wait for the next round.”

From March to October 1981 Cronkite promoted
Universe
. With an extra-high regard for scientists and professors, he visited the far reaches of the planet, trying to learn about the Islamic world, China, the South Pole, Alaska’s Mount McKinley, and even chimpanzees along the Gambia River in Africa. It was Lowell Thomas–type fare. Cronkite also signed on as chairman of Satellite Education Service, a nonprofit company that produced the series
Why in the World
for the Los Angeles PBS station KCET. Between
Universe
and the KCET gig, Ed Bradley quipped, his friend Cronkite was acting like a “senior citizen” taking “crash courses at This-Is-the-World night school.”

Universe
was conceived as a half-hour newsmagazine with two stories each program, one story reported by Cronkite and one by staff reporter Charles Osgood, who had a literary style and bountiful good humor. The show—which aired at 8:00 p.m. EST on Tuesdays—was built around Cronkite’s NASA, Israel-Egypt détente, and Earth Day accomplishments as CBS anchorman. “The basic idea was to take subjects that could have a strong impact on our world but were not getting attention from the evening news or daily newspapers,” Osgood explained. “The environment was a major area we were interested in—also scientific exploration and the cutting edge of science.”

For
Universe
, Cronkite retained members of his old
Evening News
team, from his loyal producer Bud Benjamin to his choice of researchers, writers, and off-camera assistants. During the spring of 1981, they completed thirteen episodes, to run during the summer. But Cronkite understood that building the
Universe
brand would be expensive; he worried that CBS was being chintzy on the promotional front. From June 14, 1981, to September 1982, Cronkite aired nine space-related segments on
Universe
, including programs on the search for extraterrestrial life; an advanced look at
Voyager 2
’s flyby of the ringed planet Saturn; Eta Carinae, a star one hundred times larger than our sun; an investigation of the aurora borealis and its effect on global communications and military surveillance; and a colorful look at Mars photographs taken by Viking spacecraft in the late 1970s. A few of the space segments fell flat (for example, a Camden, New Jersey, high school wanting to send ants into space), but for the most part,
Universe
was akin to PBS’s
NOVA
before its time.

Cronkite’s conceit was that he could become a public educator like Carl Sagan or Jacques Cousteau or Jane Goodall—at least in making environmental science entertaining to the masses. He visited a remote African village to compare its holistic medicine with that of the West. He spent time with field biologists in the Amazon. He studied photosynthesis and chemosynthesis. Playing a modern-day Robert Peary, he later flew low over the frozen Arctic Circle expanse. The world-famous Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts allowed him to explore fissures on the seafloor with its top marine biologists. He rode in a small submarine to a depth of 8,700 feet off Cabo San Lucas, Mexico (“10 hours in a tin can,” he called it). “I wouldn’t go down that far,” CBS cameraman Izzy Bleckman remembered of a submarine trip. “Walter essentially ran the camera on the
Alvin
himself. Adrenaline was racing through him. Sea life was everywhere.”

Whatever it took: Cronkite simply
loved
reporting on the far corners of the Earth to the American TV viewer. No outdoor adventure was dismissed as being too dangerous. What didn’t appear on air—the outtakes—would have made ideal programming three decades later as reality TV. A reviewer could be forgiven for thinking that the making of
Universe
was more interesting than the show itself. When the Cronkite-Bleckman team went to the Amazon, for example, they rented a motorized dugout canoe. The weather got incredibly hot, so Cronkite stripped down to his underwear and went for a river swim. Bleckman soon joined him. After only a few minutes in the water, they felt something nibbling at their legs; it was little four-inch piranhas. They quickly leaped out of the water. That evening they ate piranha cooked in olive oil at a little village restaurant. It tasted pretty good. “I asked the owner about the fish,” Bleckman recalled. “He brought me to a little eddy where he kept the fish. For my benefit he dumped garbage in the pond. They all gobbled it up. We had just eaten garbage-fed fish.”

Not all Cronkite’s time filming
Universe
was spent in the bush. Charles Osgood recalled bumping into him by accident once in Paris, with Betsy at his side. They were headed to the Louvre to prepare a segment on Leonardo da Vinci. “I said, ‘Walter, the Louvre is closed today,’ ” Osgood recalled. “I just got back from there.”

“Great,” Cronkite said. “Let’s go drink at the Ritz Bar.”

Universe
was an expensive show to produce. Unlike
60 Minutes
, it was generally lacking in controversy, as was Cronkite himself, though the program was technically very sophisticated. The golden rule for
Universe
was that the science magazine didn’t cross the line into entertainment. While noble, such old-school integrity hurt the ratings. In a stubborn display of archaism, Cronkite rejected using bells, whistles, drum bands, and colorful graphics to jazz the show up a bit (as cable networks like Animal Planet and the History Channel would do in the twenty-first century). To Cronkite, that would be akin to dumbing down learning. “Cronkite,” wrote his friend Andy Rooney in a 1981 tribute, “is not a genius at anything except being straight, honest and normal.”

Neil Postman, one of America’s foremost communications theorists, challenged Cronkite’s boast that he didn’t pander to entertainment imperatives in his book
Amusing Ourselves to Death
. He mocked the fact that the official title of the CBS show was
Walter Cronkite’s Universe
(not just
Universe
). “Television’s strongest point is that it brings personalities into our hearts, not abstractions into our heads,” Postman wrote. “One would think that the grandeur of the universe needs no assistance from Walter Cronkite. One would think wrong. CBS knows that Walter Cronkite plays better on television than the Milky Way.” But the Cronkite of
Universe
was only magnetic to science buffs and environmentalists. Many TV viewers of the 1980s wanted to know about Michael Jackson’s moon walk or Princess Diana’s wedding or the behind-the-scenes gossip of ABC’s
Dynasty
, not bioluminescent plants.

Working with Cronkite on
Universe
was his old writer-producer friend Dale Minor, formerly of
CBS Evening News
. One episode of the show was to be shot in wild Alaska, where high-tech digital mapping was being developed by the U.S. government. It was the pre-Google era, and Cronkite thought this technology could, in the end, be an amazing tool for TV broadcasters. Betsy had gone along for the Alaska junket to enjoy the grandeur of the Denali wilderness. As a surprise, Minor helicoptered in a card table, cooked turkey, and vintage wine so the Cronkites could have a high-altitude lunch with snowcapped Mount McKinley as the backdrop. “It was our way of telling Walter thank you,” Minor recalled. “We made it this incredibly romantic lunch for them.”

While
Universe
had a devoted following, the ratings were lukewarm. For one show, Cronkite flew out to Palo Alto, California, to interview the founder of a company called Failure Analysis. Although the company’s business was aimed at teaching companies how to grow, Cronkite joked that
Universe
should be a client. Back in New York, one of the producers wore a Failure Analysis ball cap, which generated a lot of laughs before
Universe
was canceled in 1982.

A veteran of forty-five years in journalism, Cronkite was now passé. Programs such as
Universe
just couldn’t hack it in the Nielsen ratings sweepstakes of the Big Three networks; they belonged on PBS, where information was treated as something near-divine. “I suppose when
Universe
fell away, I could have said, ‘let’s have a Walter Cronkite piece once a week or once in a while,’ ” Dan Rather reflected in a 2011 interview. “But by the time
Universe
was finished, Socolow and Cronkite were just banging the tom-toms against me.”

There was another door opening in 1981 where Cronkite might flourish. Cable television had been around for decades, but in the late seventies and early eighties it burgeoned into a new frontier of independent national channels. Turner Broadcasting launched the Cable News Network on June 1, 1980, a time when channels of all types sprang into existence. In 1981, when Cronkite reentered the TV journalism field, as a CBS personality on the prowl, he was competing with a far larger crowd and at a faster pace than would have been the case just five years before. What was new in television in the Reagan era was just about everything. Millions of new cable subscribers were exploring dozens of new channels such as C-SPAN, HBO, CNN, and WTBS, where formerly there were only three or four. The new world of television offered an exponential expansion on the old industry model, with hundreds of new shows and thousands of personalities. Cronkite had reentered the job market, so to speak, at an inopportune time for familiar faces. Viewers just then were delighting in unfamiliar ones.

The Big Three networks would continue to matter in the new cablecentric world, but they would be up against a lot more free-market competition from entertainment channels like ESPN, Disney, and Playboy. John Hendricks, founder of the Discovery Channel, surmised that one reason why Cronkite was so adaptable to the birth of cable television was that he was devoted to documentary films. Cronkite believed the new cable revolution would allow for a greater number of documentaries to be seen by larger audiences. And networks such as the Discovery Channel could feature more films produced in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. The more international news programs America received via satellite, Cronkite firmly believed, the more informed the public would be. Already he was thinking about traveling to South Africa with director Ken Sable to expose the apartheid system for a CBS News documentary that would be titled “Children of Apartheid.” His anti-apartheid project aired on December 5, 1987, and won both an Emmy for “Outstanding Achievement in a Documentary” and the Overseas Press Club’s Edward R. Murrow Award for “Outstanding Documentary.” Someday, Cronkite hoped, South Africans would have their own CNN and C-SPAN, broadcasting political conditions truthfully from Johannesburg to Cape Town (two of his favorite cities) so the world could learn more about the extraordinary country.

Although Cronkite stayed amazingly busy, he was not prepared for his retirement from
CBS
Evening News
. He had quit too soon. While he still cut an unforgettable figure wherever he went, he no longer exuded power. A void had now entered his life that all the trips to Timbuktu or the Amazon couldn’t fill. He had never felt more hopeless. He had a partial interest in everything, without a sharp sense of mission about any one thing. When Bleckman visited the Cronkites at the Vineyard one summer, he recalled Walter holding court in the parlor, punctuating every sentence with anchorman-like authority, pontificating about world events, scarcely making a dent in his lunch. A hallmark of the Cronkites’ successful marriage was that Betsy could cut Walter down to size—and he loved it. “Walter,” Betsy sharply chided him at one juncture. “You don’t
have
to be the most trusted man in America anymore!”

In 1981, Kathy Cronkite published
On the Edge of the Spotlight
, a frank and well-rendered book on the difficulties associated with being the child of a celebrity. Fame in America was difficult enough, but being the child of an icon was a strange burden in need of understanding. Wherever Kathy went, people asked her questions, such as “What is it like to be Walter Cronkite’s daughter?” or more specific ones aimed at procuring gossip, such as “What does your dad
really
think of Jimmy Carter?” Using her book as a forum to let the children of celebrities speak out—including the kids of William F. Buckley, Gerald Ford, and Zsa Zsa Gabor—Kathy Cronkite pulled few punches. She let readers know how people made her feel—like a “caterpillar in a jar.”