Cronkite (8 page)

United Press was operating a London bureau in 1940, in the News of the World Building just off Fleet Street. When German bombers struck London again in October, swooping right past Parliament at only four thousand feet in altitude, UP reporter Wallace Carroll was on duty. He logged detailed stories that Cronkite read over the wire machine in Kansas City. Cronkite was a long way removed from the London air-raid sirens that Murrow, Middleton, and Carroll experienced that fall. While life with Betsy was wholesome, he itched for more exciting assignments than Chamber of Commerce meetings and Missouri murder whodunits.

But by the fall of 1941 everything had started to unravel for Cronkite. Betsy, for starters, suffered a terrible career disappointment in October, when the
Journal-Post
was sold (the paper would cease publication entirely in March 1942) and she lost her job. Their shoestring budget was now missing a shoe. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, wiping out half of America’s Pacific fleet, the Cronkites knew their world had changed.

UP was the first to report the surprise Japanese attack. The next afternoon, Walter, Betsy, and a gaggle of their journalist friends gathered around the big-box radio as FDR declared war on the Japanese Empire, saying the day of the strike on Pearl Harbor would “live in infamy.” And so it did. Incredibly, by December, Germany had conquered most of Europe, even dealing Great Britain a crippling defeat at the battle of Dunkirk. Decades later, Cronkite, in a long National Public Radio interview, recalled how frustrated he was that when FDR declared war on Japan and Germany, UP had him working stateside in Missouri. “It was,” he said, “a long year of waiting.” What most concerned Cronkite was that the Japanese Mitsubishi Zero, or Zeke, fighters in the South Pacific traveled higher and farther than any comparable aircraft in the U.S. arsenal, a deficiency that needed to be remedied at once.

In January 1942, Cronkite finally received the UP transfer to New York that he’d been coveting. His longest bout of job stability—K.C. bureau chief—was at an end. He packed for the United Press headquarters on Park Row to train as a credentialed war correspondent. His unemployed wife was equally excited about the temporary move to the Big Apple. Neither had ever been to the East Coast before; Chicago was the swarming metropolis for all Midwesterners. Storing furniture in a K.C. relative’s garage, Cronkite left for New York that month from Kansas City’s Union Station, reading newspaper reports from Europe along the way. Betsy would arrive at Penn Station a few weeks later by train.

Cronkite was assigned the U.S. Navy office (at 90 Church Street in the financial district, just a few blocks from UP’s headquarters) as his beat. He was tasked with building a Rolodex of naval officers for UP to rely on as sources during the war. Two
New York Times
staff members—Kip Orr and Oliver Gregg Howard—taught Cronkite the ropes of living in Manhattan, from using the YMCA to discovering the best all-night doughnuts-and-coffee shops. That winter, a lifelong love affair began between Manhattan Island and Cronkite. (As it turned out, Walter and Betsy would raise three children on the Upper East Side.) “I’m convinced,” Cronkite wrote his mother, “that New York is one of the finer spots on earth.”

Cronkite now had a fixed vision about excelling as a UP war correspondent in the European Theater. Because of his 4-F status, which made him ineligible for the draft, Cronkite remained a prime candidate for a combat zone correspondent. Only poor eyesight kept him out of the military—he was still perfectly fit for acrobatics, long runs, and trail hikes. His vitals were strong. When Hitler had declared war on America in December 1941, he captured all the U.S. journalists operating in Germany and Italy and sent them to a detention camp at Bad Nauheim. A whole host of UP reporters Cronkite knew from their bylines had been a part of Hitler’s reprehensible roundup. In March 1941, Richard C. Hottelet, then a UP correspondent and a future roommate of Cronkite’s in Moscow after World War II, was arrested by the Germans for espionage.

Being a reporter in wartime was inherently dangerous, and Cronkite was worried about testing his personal courage should he go overseas and be exposed to the
real
European shooting war. Such existential concerns are common enough for anyone approaching the foxhole for the first time, but the nagging doubts may have been worse in Cronkite’s case because he was a nonviolent man. The sight of blood made him wince. A nonhunter ever since shooting that sparrow in Houston, he couldn’t kill any creature; even spiders and flies that entered his living quarters had to be “rehabilitated” (put outside) rather than swatted dead. Years after the war, at a Phoenix, Arizona, roast in his honor, Cronkite, a cat enthusiast, told an audience of more than a thousand journalists that he was a “nut animal-lover” who “carried an ant out of the house on a piece of cardboard rather than step on it.”

Ostensibly the flow of information for a UP correspondent covering the war, such as Cronkite, was by way of the Office of War Information. The popular director of OWI was Elmer Davis, an ex-CBS radioman with an admiration for the wire services and Murrow. Working closely with the Librarian of Congress, the poet Archibald MacLeish, who headed the Office of Facts and Figures, Davis believed that
truth
was the smartest type of propaganda. This was in stark contrast to the Axis nations, which banned opposition newspapers, censored stories, and screened every dispatch. Fortunately, the Allied and Axis countries purportedly shared an adherence to the Geneva Convention, which stipulated that members of the press couldn’t carry firearms. So when he finally shipped out, Cronkite, in essence, would be a civilian in uniform.

As the spring of 1942 wore on, Cronkite contrived to prepare for his first foreign assignment with UP. Proudly he donned an olive-drab “foreign war correspondent” uniform. On his left arm was a green felt identification embroidered on the side and a big
C
patch. Somehow the uniform made him seem more handsome. There were a spate of rules of engagement Cronkite was sworn to follow. He took the oaths proudly. When on combat missions, Cronkite would be limited to duffel-bagging only 125 pounds of luggage and a musette bag for his portable typewriter and other tools of the trade. He would be one of just 1,646 American news correspondents and photographers who covered the global war from 1936 to 1945. (He was blessed not to be one of the 37 killed or 112 seriously wounded. While war correspondents earned 203 Purple Hearts and 108 Silver Stars during the war, Cronkite would not be among their ranks.) “I did everything possible,” he later admitted “to avoid getting into combat.”

Cronkite exaggerated his pacifism to emphasize his Quaker-like aversion to war; he could easily have arranged with UP to stay in Kansas City or line-edit cable copy at a New York desk. Instead, that July, fully accredited by the U.S. Navy, he boarded the U.S.S.
Arkansas
, a battleship anchored off Staten Island. The
Arkansas
sailed through the submarine-infested waters of the North Atlantic, dodging torpedoes, in a convoy bound for Great Britain. It was escorting a little flotilla of heavily loaded cargo ships headed for English port towns. (For the August convoy, which was Cronkite’s first assignment as a war correspondent, he was given the “simulated rank” of field-grade officer.) The cruise didn’t exactly temper Cronkite for the hardships to come. “I occupied the admiral’s cabin on the escorting battleship,” he wrote in a letter home, “private bedroom, lounge with desk, and private bath, all on the main deck.” For a while Cronkite felt that the men aboard the
Arkansas
treated him weirdly, always looking at him with downcast eyes. He soon found out why. “I could not help noticing how well-behaved the naval officers seemed to be in my presence: no swearing, no bawdy jokes, no talks about women. This was going to be an unrewarding journey, I thought. The reason, I soon learned, was the C on my uniform. They thought I was a chaplain.”

According to Cronkite’s own reporting, the convoy was the largest one sent to England up to that time. His UP story, slugged as “At a British Port,” made a superlative of the size of the convoy, but because of censorship restrictions Cronkite couldn’t mention the number of ships or their types, the personnel on board, or the destination of the cargo. Censorship was one of the many hurdles that made a war correspondent’s job a catch-22—it wasn’t easy to write about a convoy without saying anything about the convoy. Given that
Arkansas
had anchored safely in England, Cronkite used a bit of humor to distract from the many missing details in his article. He mentioned that one of the escort ships in the convoy had radioed the other ships that it had spotted a submarine and attacked it immediately. “But a derelict merchantman wreck had been mistaken for a submarine,” Cronkite wrote, “and the only result of the bombing was that a ‘slick’ of lemon extract appeared on the surface.”

While the
Arkansas
regrouped for the return trip to New York, Cronkite had ten days to acquaint himself with London. It was by no means the harried place of two summers before, during the first German blitz. But the ravages of war, as he wrote Betsy, were all around. Cronkite got his first real take on the horror of war when he interviewed a survivor of the failed raid of Dieppe (a costly August 19, 1942, Allied raid on the French port). Of the 6,086 Allied troops who went ashore at Dieppe, 3,623 British were killed, wounded, or captured, all without the Allied air force luring the Luftwaffe into open battle; the Allies lost 96 aircraft to Germany’s 48. Two years later, in 1944, Cronkite would use the mistakes made in Dieppe to explain how the Allies strategically retooled to win the Battle of Normandy, thereby initiating the heroic liberation of Western Europe.

During the return trip on the
Arkansas
in October, the U.S.S.
Wakefield
, a former luxury liner commissioned for troop transport in 1941, caught fire. Cronkite was the only reporter within a hundred-mile radius. He therefore had a big scoop. But UP couldn’t run his story until it was officially approved by U.S. Navy censors. During the delay, Cronkite wrote to his mother. “The cruise home was just like a cruise as far as the weather was concerned, in fact, it was a little boring,” he confided. “We did get a little action, however, about which I’m sorry I can’t tell you just yet. I’ve got a pretty good story on my hands when and if I can fight it through censorship.”

Three days later, the censors cleared the
Wakefield
article. When Cronkite’s editors dispatched it over the wire, they included a special biographical introduction about their talented twenty-five-year-old reporter. It was his first real exposure to a large national audience. “Walter Cronkite,” the description ran, “United Press correspondent assigned to the Atlantic fleet, witnessed the burning of the big naval transport
Wakefield
and the rescue at sea of her crew and 840 passengers. His dispatch of this thrilling sea episode follows.” Cronkite was happy to put himself in the story à la Murrow, since his bosses wanted to stress that this account of the burning seven-hundred-foot-long ship, all of whose passengers were rescued, was a UP exclusive. “I could see the rescue vessels crowd so close to the burning ship that, as we later learned,” Cronkite recalled, “their paint was scorched and their hulls bruised as they bounced against the
Wakefield
to take off the passengers by means of rope ladders and improvised gangways.” A week later, UP was printing unrelated Cronkite-bylined articles with the rather breathless reminder that he was the only reporter who had seen the
Wakefield
burn. The UP was overtly building Cronkite’s brand name and reputation. His career was taking off.

After continuing to cover the convoys through late October, Cronkite was instructed to report to Norfolk, Virginia (the East Coast headquarters of the navy). No longer would he be assigned to a convoy. It turned out to be a hurry-up-and-wait a few weeks in a dockside Norfolk holding tank. “Once I entered the base, I was not permitted to leave, which meant that something was going on,” he recalled. “I was told to report to the battleship
Texas
right away and that I’d be aboard the
Texas
until such time as the operation was completed.”

Although the United States had been at war for almost a year, the army had yet to recapture so much as an acre from the Axis powers in Europe. Americans, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the young pipsqueak Walter Cronkite, were eager to start a ground offensive against Germany and Italy. The question was where to strike. Nazi fortifications in North Africa were the chosen target. In November 1942 the goal of the Allied fleet, of which the battleship
Texas
was a part, was to clear the Axis powers from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia; gain Allied control of the Mediterranean Sea; and prepare an invasion of Sicily, planned for the next year.

Cronkite was one of six UP correspondents covering the North African invasion. He watched the thunderous initial action from aboard the U.S.S.
Texas
. Fourteen-inch naval guns blasted away, their recoils rocking the vessel, sending anvil-shaped towers of black smoke 500 feetin the air. This bombardment was perhaps the best war news for the Allies since the pivotal Battle of Midway began on June 4, 1942. By reporting on the U.S. Navy assault on Vichy forces at Port Lyautey and by writing about Operation Torch (the invasion’s code name), he could forever claim to have participated in the D-day of North Africa, a giant plume in any correspondent’s cap.

The UP that prided itself on “the world’s best coverage of the world’s biggest news” put its faith in a half-dozen no-nonsense reporters in North Africa like Cronkite. It couldn’t help but gloat that the AP and the INS had been given only four berths each with the expeditionary force. The amount of pettiness in journalism made college professors, by contrast, seem open-palmed generous. Five of the Unipressers—Philip Ault, Walter Logan, Chris Cunningham, John Parris, and Leo Disher—had all been toughened by years of experience covering the war; Cronkite was the new kid on the block. His principal instinct was hesitation.