Cronkite (86 page)

By late 2007, ninety-one-year-old Cronkite started contributing weekly editorials to Retirement Living TV, the Columbia, Maryland���based start-up channel where his son Chip worked. An awkward moment occurred at an anti–Iraq War convocation in Chicago in early 2008. With former
Times
(London) editor Harold Evans as moderator, a smart-persons panel was set up. While Cronkite couldn’t be in Chicago, he was going to be beamed in from New York via satellite to pronounce his antiwar sentiments. What happened instead was that Cronkite appeared on a big screen furrowing and unfurrowing his brow, unable to hear a thing, desperately trying to get his hearing aid to cooperate. “It turned into a ghastly moment,” Caroline Graham, organizer of the event, recalled. “Harry had to just cut him off and move on.” Cronkite understood that his days were numbered. Working with his friend Mike Ashford to establish a National Sailing Hall of Fame in Annapolis, he got testy about groundbreaking delays. “Let’s get this thing going,” he snapped, “so I can be at the opening.”

Cronkite enjoyed staying in his UN Plaza apartment, reading newspapers and surfing the Internet, which offered him a world of information only a mouse click away. People started whispering about his forgetfulness, saying, “I told you so” when they heard he had been diagnosed with a variation of Alzheimer’s disease. One afternoon, on a stroll in New York, a woman tapped him and politely said, “Did anyone ever tell you that you look just like Walter Cronkite before he died?”

Cronkite spent the Christmas season of 2008 with Simon, singing carols with her family. In the early winter of 2009, they escaped the New York cold and headed to Palm Beach for sunshine; he used a wheelchair or cane to get around. Back in New York, he and Simon were having dinner with Nick and Nina Clooney one evening. When their son, actor George Clooney, found out, he called the restaurant and surprised them all by picking up the bill. While the patrons at the restaurant recognized Cronkite, none bothered him. But as he left, everybody stood up. “They didn’t applaud,” George Clooney said, “they just stood up, because that’s what you do when a gentleman is leaving the room.”

Simon recalled that Cronkite had a real blast in London while making the World War II documentary
Legacy of War
for PBS. From the backseat of his limo, he would call out all his special sights: “That’s where I first met Andy. . . . There is where Murrow used to eat. . . . There is the Park Lane Hotel.” To Simon, there was a wistful lust in Cronkite wanting to remember the days when, as “Dean of the Air War,” he wore the uniform of a United Press war correspondent. Somehow, Cronkite’s working on that documentary rejuvenated his flagging memory. At night, Cronkite and Simon would read aloud from a book of extremely X-rated jokes they had purchased during a trip to the British Virgin Islands. “It was hysterical,” Simon recalled, “because Walter read them with that serious Voice of the Century of his, as if he were reporting the news.”

That April 2009, Tom Shales of
The
Washington Post
wrote a wonderful review of Cronkite’s
Legacy of War
. Cronkite had teamed up with British TV newsman Alastair Stewart to revisit places he had been from 1941 to 1945. At Nuremberg, TV viewers first saw an old picture of a young Cronkite as Unipresser back in 1945, with heavy earphones, receiving multiple translations of the Nazi war crimes trials. The camera then flashed to the ninety-two-year-old Cronkite, face swollen and teary-eyed. Shales, in his review, tellingly wrote, “It’s Uncle no more, he’s Grandpa Walter now.” When Cronkite discussed the despicable Nazis put on trial in Nuremberg, a wave of anger suddenly flashed out of him. “I wanted to spit on them,” he said, telling the viewers that Holocaust denial was a “dangerous crackpot venture.” Horrific concentration camp film footage rolled on viewers’ TV screens as Cronkite spoke about the extermination camps.

At one point in the hourlong documentary, Cronkite brought the British crew with him to the Cambridge American Cemetery in England, where 3,812 GIs rested in peace. Cronkite wandered respectfully among the Christian crosses and Jewish Stars of David in a scene reminiscent of the close in director Steven Spielberg’s film
Saving Private Ryan
. His commentary was crisp as he made his way through the cemetery’s white grave markers. But when Cronkite stood and studied a wall where the names of 5,127 GIs missing in action had been inscribed in memoriam, he broke into a gentle weep. “I’m thinking,” he said, voice quivering, “my God, my God, my God. It’s too damn much.”

E
PILOGUE

Electronic Uncle Sam

We have been present at the birth of the nuclear age, the computer age, the space age, the petrochemical age, the telecommunications age, the DNA age. Together at their confluence flows a great river of change, unlike anything history has encountered before.

—WALTER CRONKITE,
A Reporter’s Life

O
n July 17, 2009, Walter Cronkite died. He was ninety-two years old. His health had been slipping for weeks. His children, Kathy, Nancy, and Chip, were at his side. Lying next to him were his beloved cats, Blackie and Kisa. “Everybody who loved Dad just surrounded him,” Kathy recalled. “He was at peace with everything.” During Cronkite’s last days, Jimmy Buffett serenaded him at his bedside, strumming his favorite pirate songs on the ukulele like he’d done when Ed Bradley passed. Sometimes a weary and listless Cronkite would hum along, his throat rattling softly. “When we heard that Walter was dying, Mickey Hart and I would go visit him to cheer him up,” Buffett recalled. “The music seemed to soothe his soul. He’d smile . . . at peace with the world.”

That evening actress Deborah Rush was performing in the Noel Coward play
Blithe Spirit
at the Shubert Theater. A family friend, Angela Lansbury, was the star of the show. As Rush exited the stage, she learned from the security guard that her father-in-law had died. It was all over television. Out of the entire cast, only Lansbury knew she was married to Chip Cronkite.

“Are you all right?” Lansbury asked a numb Rush. “Can you go on?” Rush replied, “Yes, I’ll be okay.”

At that juncture, actress Jayne Atkinson came over to ask why both women were so downcast.

“Her father-in-law just died,” Lansbury said.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Atkinson said. “Did you know that Walter Cronkite just died, too?”

Everyone, journalists, politicians, astronauts, the Hollywood crowd, all called Cronkite the Most Trusted Man in America, as if he never had a surname. Basking in the warmth of public affection for most of his adult life, he was eulogized as a patriarchal figure, an honored constant at a time when television had come to epitomize the disposability of American culture. Entertainment television shows came and went while Cronkite remained as durable as Plymouth Rock. Thousands of ham radio operators saluted KB2GSD on the airwaves; their tribe’s chain had lost an important link. “Cronkite Lives,” one operator broadcast in pre-Twitter fashion upon hearing the news.

The public voted through ratings, but the real authority in TV was the scope of corporate executives. If film was a director’s medium and theater a writer’s medium, TV spawned business-suited managers with highfalutin titles such as executive producer, vice president, president, and chairman. It was these corporate capitalists like Dr. Frank Stanton and Robert Kintner who set the tempo and taste of the post–World War II times; their profit-seeking decision making defined eras in television history.

But in the end, most Americans never heard of these industry visionaries. Only Cronkite, Uncle Walter, along with Murrow, earned a respect that surpassed even that of some U.S. presidents. The Cronkite brand, to the very end, stood for Straight News truthfulness against the septic corruption of Vietnam and Watergate. From his CBS anchor chair in New York, one Everyman from St. Joe’s, the Western plains, ably summed up a difficult world in a smart thirty minutes at suppertime. Although his trade was objective journalism, his product was fair-mindedness, judicial wisdom, and a moral compass that knew how to decipher right from wrong. “For an entire era,” David Shribman insightfully wrote in
The
Washington Star
, “Cronkite was—and this is what psychologists say is the greatest tribute to a parent—
there
.” He was, as the
Los Angeles Times
and, later, the
Huffington Post
said,
paterfamilias.
“What can you say about him?” Ted Turner shrugged. “The one guy in TV history nobody ever got sick of.”

Cronkite’s death was a national embarrassment because of how badly TV journalism had fared in his absence. Back in 1978, a reporter for
The New York Times
questioned Cronkite about whether what he did was
really
journalism. Wasn’t the essence of TV news
presentation
, not substance? Cronkite, usually jocular, turned defensive. He had helped invent TV news and wanted the medium considered worthy of comparison to Murrow’s radio work. “We used to panic over bad notices in the newspapers,” he said. “What’s changed is that TV news is now respectable in the eyes of news people. We’ve built our own traditions, our own staffs. We have a self-confidence we didn’t have in the beginning.”

That was the year Cronkite brought Sadat and Begin together. By the time of his death, television news had been driven into Swamp Hollow because of its abandonment of public service values. With the exception of
60 Minutes
,
The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour
, and anything Christiane Amanpour did, there was a diminished return from watching TV news. What had once been just Cronkite making a cameo on
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
had descended into broadcast journalists thinking they were Hollywood celebrities. A cheesy and moronic boom industry, where entertainment imperatives and revenue streams had grown exponentially at the expense of educational television, had eroded the possible role of TV as teacher. More often than not, TV news rang the bells of the least common denominator. The marvel of Telstar in 1962 had turned into an orgy of Colosseum gladiators out for blood in 2009, broadcasters cheering on violence, pestilence, hurricanes, and gotcha moments because they were good for ratings.

In death, Cronkite stood as a defiant monument of what happened when a great news broadcaster had the sound, centrist judgment of the nation at heart. Cronkite wasn’t like ordinary TV narcissists and braggarts. He didn’t broadcast what the folks wanted. Cronkite instead wanted what the people wanted to be considered serious news. The difference was subtle, but sharp. With an inborn optimistic faith in America’s constitutional principles, Cronkite ended up
mattering
in the annals of history. Being the CBS News anchorman wasn’t a sacred calling, but a public service. When the Vietnam War and Watergate threatened to tar and feather us all, Cronkite walked the plank for our nation. There was about him,
Texas Monthly
said, “a kind of innate, Calvinist honesty that can’t be manufactured or affected, and certainly not perverted.” He had become, in the summation of novelist Kurt Vonnegut, “our electronic Uncle Sam.”

The Cronkite children held their father’s funeral service at St. Bartholomew’s Church in Manhattan, where their mother’s service had been four years earlier. Cremation and a low-key ceremony followed at Kansas City’s Mount Moriah Cemetery, attended by Walter and Betsy’s surviving relatives and the Barhydt family. Any donations were directed by the family to the Walter and Betsy Cronkite Foundation (with contributions distributed to charities they both had supported). Marlene Adler, Cronkite’s chief of staff, began planning his memorial service while handling hundreds of media requests. All the major TV networks streamed in-depth stories of Cronkite as an eyewitness to history from the D-day landings to the election of Barack Obama. People from every walk of life offered the Cronkite family condolences. “He was the most important voice in our lives for thirty years,” said the actor George Clooney. “And that voice made people reach for the stars. I hate the world without Walter Cronkite.”

CBS News had properly prepared for the inevitable day of Cronkite’s passing, filling the airwaves with well-edited obituaries and sound-bite remembrances for the better part of a week. All Cronkite’s old colleagues offered tributes of unextinguishable devotion. From the
60 Minutes
crew, Mike Wallace said on CNN, “It’s hard to imagine a man for whom I had more admiration.” Morley Safer, noting Cronkite’s reliable ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, dubbed him “truly the father of television news.” Echoing this sentiment was Don Hewitt, Cronkite’s first executive producer on the
CBS Evening News
back in 1962. “How many news organizations get the chance,” he asked, “to bask in the sunshine of a half century of Edward R. Murrow followed by a half century of Walter Cronkite?”

Katie Couric, who held Cronkite’s old dual jobs of
CBS Evening News
anchor and managing editor, spoke movingly about his extraordinary sense of “purpose and compassion,” how he never committed a malevolent act. Couric had used Cronkite’s recorded voice to introduce her
CBS Evening News
broadcast as an homage to her storied predecessor. (Cronkite’s voiceover was not used by Couric’s show when broadcasting his funeral.) On her first night as anchor on September 5, 2006, she humbly told viewers that she couldn’t come up with a phrase close to match Cronkite’s “And that’s the way it is.” In the end, she didn’t dare try to compete with Cronkite, but simply closed with “Thanks for watching.”

Barbara Walters used Sirius XM Radio to air a marathon tribute to Cronkite’s illustrious broadcast career, based in part on a long interview they recorded around the publication of
A Reporter’s Life
. Nobody, Walters believed, knew how to wrangle an interview like “wily old Walter.” In a strange way, Walters missed her “infuriating” competitor more than anyone. Even Dan Rather, genuinely distraught, offered heartfelt praise to his old nemesis. “Walter had that ability,” Rather told Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, “what we call in television the ability to ‘get through the glass,’ which is to say he could
connect
with people.” Nobody ever felt that Cronkite was reading a TelePrompTer when anchoring. The TV viewer thought of him as a distiller, presenting the strong news reduced to its essence for the home audience. “There was nobody better than him,” Rather said. “We had our differences, but my admiration for his accomplishment never wavered.”

CBS News’
Face the Nation
did a marvelous job of putting Cronkite’s wide-ranging career into focus. Harry Smith guest-hosted the Sunday program, with Bob Schieffer as éminence grise. Together they presented Cronkite as an arranger-editor and maestro of news delivery. He was that rare TV reporter who never tried to put himself over the story. Astronaut John Glenn warmly reminisced on the show about what Cronkite had meant to the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space shots: all cheerleader, all optimism, all ready with the hard-earned facts. “I feel like I’m almost sitting in for Wally Schirra this morning,” Glenn said in eulogy. “Wally and Walter were a real team on those broadcasts, launch after launch after launch. You just expected to see them both.”

Particularly eloquent was Schieffer, who perfectly answered Smith’s question of why Americans trusted Cronkite so much. “Because everybody knew that Walter didn’t get his suntan in the studio lights,” he said. “He got it from being out on the scene, story after story. And that’s why you liked to work for Walter. He knew that the news didn’t come in over the wire-service machine. That some reporter had to go out there, somebody had to climb up to the top of the city hall steeple to see how tall it was, somebody had to do that. Walter knew how hard it was to get news because he had been there.”

Every major TV journalist alive, it seemed, got into the praise-Cronkite action. Just as broadcasters during the Second World War strove to become Murrow Boys on radio, TV broadcasters wanted to be deemed Cronkiters. Tom Brokaw of NBC News, as always, cut to the core of Cronkite adeptly. Pointing out all the awards Cronkite had earned, from an honorary Harvard PhD to the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Brokaw said the accolades never swelled his friend’s head. Cronkite was proud, more than anything else, to be a blue-collar reporter. “I always had the feeling,” Brokaw insightfully wrote in
Time
magazine, “that if late in life somebody had tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Walter, we’re a little short-handed this week. Think you could help us on the police beat for a few mornings?’ He would have responded, ‘Boy oh boy—when and where do you want me?’ ”

Cronkite’s death also prompted stories about the passing of the old guard. His storied rivals at NBC—John Chancellor, Chet Huntley, and David Brinkley—were long gone. Most of his great producers—Bud Benjamin, Ernie Leiser, and Les Midgley—were gone. Roger Mudd’s funny notion of the Old Guy Network (OGN News) wasn’t even remotely possible anymore. It fell upon Sandy Socolow to be keeper of the Cronkite show’s flame. Andy Rooney was still going strong, but when he tried to eulogize Cronkite at St. Bartholomew, he was overcome emotionally. “I feel so terrible about Walter’s death that I can hardly say anything,” Rooney wept. “He’s been such a good friend over the years. Please, excuse me, I can’t.” Rooney died in 2011.

Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead correctly asked people not to pigeonhole his friend as one of the old guard only. “He was the original social media guy,” Hart explained. “Before Facebook or Twitter people depended on him being nice. Cronkite wanted to make a better, kinder world. He was a voice shaman. He had a powerful aura. The voice, glasses, pipe—they were perfect totems.”

It was Cronkite’s close personal sailing friends Mike Ashford and Bill Harbach who captured the freewheeling old sailor side of the famed newsman at the New York church memorial. Ashford said that when people asked him what Cronkite was
really
like, the stock answer was, “He’s just the way you hope he is.” The mourners broke out laughing as Ashford told how free Cronkite was steering the
Wyntje
, shouting, “Sensational!” as waves battered the yawl about.
Vanity Fair
once asked Cronkite what person or thing he’d like to be reincarnated as. Cronkite’s answer was “a seagull—graceful in flight, rapacious in appetite.” The genius of Cronkite, Ashford believed, was his own hurt for other people’s misery. “He had an antenna sensitive to friends’ pain,” he said. “He knew the words to restore the fun, chase the worry and make things good.”