Cronkite (74 page)

When Cronkite first read
On the Edge of the Spotlight
, he didn’t know how to feel. At a Manhattan dinner with Kathy, a couple of autograph seekers walked up to them mid-meal, thrusting pieces of paper at the CBS anchor; Kathy didn’t seem to mind. Now, after having read her book, Cronkite knew better. Having a private meal out with Dad wasn’t possible. In some ways he was annoyed by his daughter’s complaints about being the child of a media star. But upon further reflection, he digested
On the Edge
as a guide for better parental behavior in general. It hurt him to look in the mirror and realize he had been an absentee parent. “There were moments when reading this book that I wanted to say of it: ‘shocking,’ ‘appalling,’ ” he wrote in the foreword. “There were others, however, when I found my throat tightening and my eyes welling with the warm tears of overwhelming love.”

Throughout the fall of 1981, Cronkite was determined to be relevant. Egyptian president Anwar Sadat—a Nobel Peace Prize winner because of his role in the Camp David accords with Menachem Begin of Israel—was watching a military exercise on October 6, 1981, when a vehicle stopped in front of the reviewing stand. Suddenly two men dressed in khaki army fatigues attacked the stand with explosives and gunfire. The fundamentalist cleric Omar Abdel-Rahman had issued a
fatwa
against Sadat that was carried out by soldiers loyal to a terror group called the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Reports of the assassination attempt were heavily covered by all the networks.

Cronkite, a Sadat confidant, was invited to join Dan Rather on air at CBS. Seeking word of Sadat’s condition, Rather secured an exclusive interview with former president Jimmy Carter, who said his Egyptian sources had confirmed that Sadat was all right. Rather was treating the Carter comment as a scoop, when Cronkite broke into the discussion. “I would caution against taking too literally these early reports from Cairo,” he said. “We can be almost certain the regime is going to cover up what his real condition is.” It was a wait-and-see situation.

CBS News senior producer Mark Harrington decided that if Sadat died, the network should have Cronkite travel to Cairo to broadcast. The thirty-one-year-old Alan Weisman, a producer, was tapped to accompany Cronkite to the Middle East. They had never been in the field together. “The Concorde leaves from Paris at two o’clock,” Harrington told Weisman. “Walter will meet you in the lounge. Do
not
get on the plane unless Walter is with you. He’s your responsibility. Never let him out of your sight.”

A dutiful Weisman raced off to Kennedy Airport. While checking his baggage, news reached him that Sadat had died. Cronkite had been right to temper Rather’s Carter exclusive. Pacing around like a caged animal, worried that Cronkite was nowhere in sight, Weisman kept obsessively checking his watch. Where was Cronkite? Weisman grew almost ill with nervousness. The plane’s door was about to close. When Cronkite, at last, arrived with only two minutes to spare, Weisman sighed with relief. When he boarded, everyone on the plane was abuzz. Weisman, in an unpublished diary, wrote that he could
feel
the happy whispers. A mega-celebrity was traveling with
them
. Rifling through his carry-on bag, Cronkite turned grumpy.

“She forgot my socks,” he said.

“What?” Weisman asked.

“Betsy forgot to pack my socks. I was in such a rush she just forgot. The only pair I’ve got I’m wearing,” Cronkite said.

“We’ll get socks in Paris,” Weisman assured him.

“I’ll need three pair. Blue or black,” said Cronkite.

“I’ll take care of it,” Weisman replied.

It was an uneventful flight with lots of shut-eye and a few cocktails. Once Cronkite and Weisman landed at Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport, they had a limo pick them up. On the way to the Paris hotel, Cronkite saw a red-light district, strip joints, and XXX video shops. “Boy,” he said. “I sure would like to stop right here. But someone might recognize me.”

Weisman surmised that Cronkite was a “dirty old man,” but he was “too smart to let anyone see it.” After a night in Paris, Cronkite and Weisman went airborne again, stopping to refuel on the island of Crete before heading to Cairo. Cronkite said he needed to visit the tiny airport newsstand to purchase pipe tobacco. “I watched from a distance as he walked up to the stand, bought his tobacco, slid over to the magazine rack, and after making sure no one had seen him, began thumbing through the girlie magazines. For me that was another smile. ‘God bless you, Walter,’ I thought. ‘I’ve got your back. Knock yourself out.’ ”

The CBSers took a Caravelle jet—similar to the Lear jet—to Cairo. There were just the two pilots up front and Cronkite and Weisman in the back. The charter company had installed a wire service printer in the cabin, and Cronkite and Weisman spent the flight scanning rolled-up dispatches about the Sadat assassination and his successor, Hosni Mubarak, from around the world. But the big news was that President Reagan had dispatched three former U.S. presidents (Ford, Carter, and Nixon) to attend the memorial service, along with what seemed to be half of Reagan’s State Department. As Cronkite stepped out of the plane and down the staircase onto the tarmac in Cairo, he surveyed the terrain and said, “I was here when Nasser died. There were thousands in the streets. Look at this. Nothing!”

The CBS News bureau in Cairo was dingy. Bureau chief Scotti Williston, a woman in her thirties with large black-framed glasses, had prepared briefing books for Cronkite. Everything he needed, except socks. Cronkite interrogated Williston about the lay of the land. Cronkite was interested in interviewing all three presidents
together
. But he was mostly hell-bent on getting an exclusive interview with Mubarak. With amazing speed, Cronkite managed to arrange a one-on-one with the new Egyptian president. How could Mubarak say no to Walter Cronkite?

Mubarak didn’t know that Cronkite was
extremely
pro-Israel—many of his New York friends were borderline Zionists. Cronkite, full of consternation, was deeply worried that Mubarak wouldn’t uphold Sadat’s peace overtures to Israel. Before long Cronkite and Mubarak, who reeked of cologne, met for the interview. Cronkite was surprised to see Mubarak dressed in a pinstripe suit, looking more like a Russian gangster than an Egyptian statesman. Cronkite missed Sadat even more.

The interview began with Mubarak assuring Cronkite (and by extension the American people and the Israelis) that he would continue Sadat’s foreign policy, that he would honor the Camp David accords. Cronkite later joked that Mubarak was trying to tell the American audience, “I am not one of the crazies . . . I’m a moderate . . . you’ll have no trouble with me.”

Not willing to be bought off that easily, Cronkite zeroed in on Mubarak’s brutal oppression of dissidents, book burning, and other hard-line tactics used in Cairo in the wake of Sadat’s death. “We must have discipline!” Mubarak said emphatically. “Discipline in the streets! Discipline in the factories! Discipline in the schools!” Cronkite had drawn Mubarak into expressing how he really felt. The CIA had a dearth of information about Mubarak, so what Cronkite was doing proved
very
helpful to Middle East watchers—which in September 1981 was the entire world.

After about forty-five minutes, the interview ended. Weisman scooped up six videocassettes from each camera, dropped them in a carry bag, and headed into the street with Cronkite, scrambling to find their car. Weisman, feeling victorious, grabbed the two-way radio to tell the bureau
mission accomplished
. “Put that down,” Cronkite instructed. “You don’t know who is listening. Let’s keep this quiet until we’re ready to go.”

Because of the seven-hour time difference between Cairo and New York, Cronkite and Weisman were able to perfectly edit the piece for the
CBS Evening News
. But satellite technology was still hit-or-miss in 1981. Weisman concocted three different ways to relay the Cronkite-Mubarak interview to New York. The main facility in Cairo was ringed with troops and armored personnel carriers, standard procedure in a developing country when a leader was assassinated. Through grit and persistence, Weisman got the interview patched through. “The reaction in New York was ecstatic,” Weisman recalled. Cronkite’s exclusive led the broadcast and ran about five minutes, an eternity on an evening news program.

Having hit a home run with Mubarak, Cronkite and Weisman wanted to hit a triple—the exclusive interview with all three U.S. presidents.

“Weisman,” Sandy Socolow said, “you deliver that and you get a week in Paris on our company.”

“Deal,” he replied.

When Cronkite and Weisman approached the Cairo hotel where all three former presidents were congregating, they were swamped by a mob of reporters and camera crews. Everything was cordoned off. Cronkite, puffing his pipe, told Weisman to follow along. Playing Moses, he walked determinedly straight ahead; the seas parted. The Secret Service, with earpieces and wires, smiled and stood at attention for Cronkite. “Good evening, Mr. Cronkite,” one said. “So nice to see you again.” Another asked, “How are you, Mr. Cronkite? We haven’t seen you in a while.” Cronkite replied, “Fine, just fine, fellas. Still climbing the stairs. Nice to see you too.”

The Secret Service agents acted like little boys in awe of Cronkite—not the ex-presidents. Carter’s former press secretary Jody Powell came racing up to Cronkite, clutching an “extra” edition of the English-language paper with the exclusive Mubarak interview bannered across the top. “You did it again!” Powell exclaimed.

Cronkite was easily able to get President Ford to agree to an interview. But he hit a snag when he broached the idea with President Carter. When Rosalynn Carter saw the anchor emeritus, she blanched. “It was a killer look,” Weisman recalled, “one of utter disdain.” She was still bitter about Cronkite’s sign-off as anchorman during the Iran hostage crisis. President Carter reluctantly agreed to do a one-on-one interview with Cronkite, but
not
with Nixon and Ford. It saddened Cronkite a little that the Carters held a grudge against him.

To Cronkite’s utter astonishment, he got the warmest reception from Richard and Pat Nixon. “Walter,” the former president said with genuine warmth, “How are you?” Cronkite was amazed at how tanned, rested, and ready Nixon looked. “Walter!” he gushed. “Do you remember when you and I and President Sadat sailed down the Nile? Wasn’t that a time!”

It was astounding. No bitterness over Watergate or differences of opinion about Cambodia, no bad blood after Agnew’s venom and Colson’s dirty tricks. Cronkite and Nixon bonded in Cairo. They were both veterans of American history, worn down a bit, but still gladiators who had struggled in what Teddy Roosevelt called “the arena,” where men are “marred by dust and sweat and blood,” but who nonetheless “strive valiantly” onward.

At the funeral dinner for the U.S. delegation, Cronkite was the only journalist present, seated at the head of the table along with Henry Kissinger, three former presidents, and their wives. After the program, Cronkite hopped in a car with Weisman to ride back to the Cairo bureau to do some work. That night, even a shot of Maker’s Mark couldn’t help him get to sleep. Worn out by his restlessness and the interminable memorial, Cronkite was anxious to fly back to France. This time Cronkite and Weisman arrived early and boarded their own private Caravelle. Cronkite was famished, having barely eaten since they’d arrived in Egypt, fearful that the food would make him sick. Suddenly, an Air France truck pulled up beside Cronkite’s jet and the pilots produced a tray of smoked salmon and caviar along with several magnums of champagne. “Whoa!” Cronkite exclaimed, raising his famous eyebrows above his glasses. “Where are the dancing girls?”

Cronkite had done an incredible job for CBS News in Egypt. But assignments to contribute to Rather’s
Evening News
dried up after Sadat’s funeral. Even though Cronkite worked his Middle East sources, scoring the huge Mubarak interview, the Rather team cut the wire. The exemplary caution that Cronkite had displayed during CBS News’ early Sadat assassination coverage now became his new calling card: Wise Man of TV Journalism. “It was very clear to me,” Connie Chung recalled, “that Walter had grown bitter at Dan. He blamed CBS dissing him after the Sadat funeral on Dan. But Walter kept the aura of sage.”

CBS News was undergoing major changes in personnel in late 1981 that would continue throughout the decade, presenting a stark comparison to the stability of Richard Salant’s years as division president. In November, the president of CBS News, Bill Leonard, was replaced by a brash former executive at CBS Sports, Van Gordon Sauter, who wanted to make his own mark at the network. He had no particular use for Cronkite. On the corporate level, William Paley was fighting his own losing battle to maintain control of the company he’d founded.

Rather had his own troubles in late 1981. On air, he seemed a little stilted in the early days, not entirely comfortable in his own skin. Even worse was that CBS News had lost its comfortable front-runner lead, along with approximately 2.5 million viewers each night; this translated into about $20 million in annual revenue. Rather was well aware of the rumor that if his ratings didn’t improve quickly, he would be replaced by Charles Kuralt, whose Rockwellesque “On the Road” segments—that wonderful hybrid of prose and picture narrated by a deep, soak-it-up baritone voice—were beloved. Kuralt was bald, with a headful of interesting bumps and a wry whiskey smile. But he was a wonderful reporter and a real bon vivant to boot. Cronkite, furious at his post-Cairo treatment, promoted the notion that Kuralt should replace the interception-prone Rather as the quarterback of the
CBS Evening News
.

One way for Rather to bolster his audience share would have involved using Cronkite on a more regular basis. But Rather was not interested in that cotton-up approach. He was as vitally competitive as Cronkite had ever been. His team moved Cronkite out of the
CBS Evening News
office suites and the core of the news division as well. Given his druthers, Rather would have banned Cronkite from the broadcast center entirely. The story was as old as any transfer of power in any field. Cronkite knew it, understood it, and was utterly aghast when it was happening to him. Second-guessing his decision to leave the CBS anchor chair, he told historian Don Carleton in an oral history interview that his retirement in March 1981 had been premature. “I very much regretted it because it didn’t work out as it was planned,” he said in a volcanic display of disgruntlement. “Rather and company shut me out from doing anything. . . . [The thinking was] as long as I was on the broadcast, there would be unfavorable comparisons with Rather, and Rather couldn’t establish himself as his own man. Well, I don’t disagree with that too much. I can understand their coming to that . . . I think if I had been in the same place I would have had the same feeling about it. But, the thing is, it went on for ten years, it goes on to this day. And that’s unconscionable, unreasonable.”