Cronkite (18 page)

The 1952 conventions proved that watching special events on the Tube in your own living room was indeed the new postwar rage. Most Americans had never been to a political convention; now they were watching one in their own
homes
. Just as Murrow had linked Great Britain to America with his voice during the Second World War, Cronkite brought the Chicago conventions into the living rooms of America. The power of TV was truly astonishing. Besides Eisenhower himself, the two real celebrities of the 1952 conventions were Cronkite and Betty Furness, then a Westinghouse spokeswoman and
What’s My Line?
panelist. Hewitt, a Douglas Edwards loyalist, recalled that post-Chicago, Cronkite had become “not just ‘an anchorman,’ but ‘
the
anchorman.’ ” “Well, Walter,” Mickelson said after the broadcasts, “you’re famous now. And you are going to want a lot more money. You better get an agent.” (At the time, Cronkite was making less than $200 a week; down the road he would become a million-dollar-a-year man.)

Cronkite didn’t realize, as he relocated from Washington, D.C., to New York, that the goldfish bowl was also a shark tank. The word around CBS was that Murrow was dismissive of Cronkite’s quick ascendancy at the network. “On the air Murrow treated Cronkite with collegiality,” radio broadcaster Bob Edwards explained, “but off the air, with condescension.”

Following up on Chicago, CBS News was determined to slaughter NBC News in its 1952 Election Night coverage. When Mickelson asked Cronkite to anchor CBS News’ Eisenhower-versus-Stevenson contest coverage on November 4, 1952, the answer was: “y-e-s, s-i-r!!” On September 25, CBS News issued a press release naming him “anchor-man.” There was only one catch. UNIVAC, a computer manufactured in Philadelphia that was deemed the “electronic brains” of CBS, would be a principal sidekick.

The decision to team Cronkite up with a computer was made in the early fall of 1952. Mickelson, looking to make a bigger splash on Election Night, had found a futuristic gimmick: UNIVAC, the smartest machine in the world, able to project election results from returns better than humans. “The novelty value of using UNIVAC,” Mickelson recalled, “was certain to attract attention from both viewers and the print media.”

In the weeks before November 4, CBS heavily promoted its forthcoming Election Night coverage, featuring UNIVAC prominently. UNIVAC was portrayed as an electronic giant straight from
Buck Rogers
. To counter UNIVAC, NBC ended up getting its own computer, named Monrobot. This left ABC news director John Madigan to lampoon the new electronic gadget as a “gimmick,” telling
Time
magazine that his network preferred its sterling
human
contributors, such as Elmer Davis and John Daly. Cronkite agreed, but wasn’t in a position to squawk. And he wasn’t going to be left alone with UNIVAC. Cronkite’s posse included Murrow, Collingwood, Edwards, and Lowell Thomas. Hewitt would be the Election Night director. What privately concerned Cronkite was the man-versus-machine narrative that CBS was trying to spin. To Cronkite, the eight-foot-long “mechanical brain” was an expensive experiment costing the network $600,000 that could have been spent covering the Korean War. As November 4 neared, Cronkite bought himself some distance from UNIVAC. “Actually we’re not depending too much on this machine,” he said. “It may turn out to be just a sideshow.”

On Election Night, CBS began its coverage at 8:00 p.m. EST, a full hour before NBC. Cronkite anchored the special event from Grand Central Terminal in New York. As the cameras panned around the cavernous studio, correspondents, tabulators, and engineers buzzed around what Cronkite called a “teeming beehive.” Teletype machines hummed in the background. Cronkite was trying to gin up excitement, having assistants hand him copy, bells ringing in the background. According to early reports, 61 million voters had gone to the polls to choose between Eisenhower and Stevenson.

CBS had pegged up popular and electoral vote count boards. Some states were declared early for Eisenhower and others for Stevenson. But Cronkite warned, as would become a network news tradition, that these were very preliminary results. Hedging bets, in fact, became a Cronkite trademark—reporting news laden with qualifiers. Just as he had positioned himself as both a supporter and critic of UNIVAC, Cronkite now tried to break news while leaving himself an out if it proved wrong. Around 8:40 p.m., the Jolly Electronic Giant, as some CBS technicians called UNIVAC, made its first much-ballyhooed appearance.

Collingwood was standing with UNIVAC behind him, describing how his computer friend was “one of a family of electronic brains.” Both Cronkite and Collingwood were pathetically following Mickelson’s order to “humanize” UNIVAC, to “treat it gently and semi-humorously but at the same time give full attention to the data it would produce.” Cronkite and Collingwood were instructed to spoonfeed the data provided by UNIVAC to the American public because viewers weren’t ready for “overly rich doses of high technology.” By treating UNIVAC as human, Cronkite dumbed down the broadcast. Only his cutaways to Murrow and Thomas that evening prevented him from being a national laughingstock. And Collingwood didn’t fare as well. Was this the same Collingwood who, during World War II, bravely broadcast from North Africa? “Can you say something, UNIVAC?” Collingwood asked like a horse’s ass. “Have you got anything to say to the television audience?”

UNIVAC, ignoring its big cue, stayed embarrassingly silent. “You’re a very impolite machine, I must say” was all a ruffled Collingwood could muster.

After a few minutes of blather, Collingwood handed the broadcast back to Cronkite, who didn’t acknowledge the awkward minutes that had just passed. He simply hung Collingwood out to dry and continued to be anchorman. With a touch of irritation, he moved on to talk about South Carolina ballots and New England weather. No mention of UNIVAC at all. Like a puff of smoke from a genie’s bottle, Cronkite had Lowell Thomas, his all-seasons hero since circa 1934 Houston, at his side. Thomas praised CBS News’ television studio in New York, showing the audience the Teletype machines, revolving cameras, and switchboard operations. The net effect was to make Cronkite, not UNIVAC, the star of the evening.

With Thomas backing his action, Cronkite blazed like a meteor. Brushing off a technical glitch, he interviewed former GOP presidential candidate Harold Stassen, tossed out poll numbers, and offered a series of projections stating that Eisenhower was leading in twenty-two states. He was in the zone. The momentum he was establishing as a performer was almost tangible.

When forced to turn to Collingwood again, Cronkite did so with reluctance. Once again, Collingwood was awful. When Cronkite regained the broadcast again, he turned to Murrow for analysis of the election. The legendary radio broadcaster came across as agitated; he had been reduced to the role of Cronkite’s roving correspondent, and he subtly let it be known. “As Walter Cronkite just suggested,” Murrow archly started, “it may be possible for men and machines to draw some sweeping conclusions from the returns so far, but I am not able to do it.”

Cronkite suffered through Murrow’s self-serving analysis, then offered some fine state-by-state analysis of his own. In actuality, by 9:00 p.m., he was leading listeners to believe that Eisenhower would win. Newspapers such as
The
Baltimore Sun
and
The Boston Post
, Cronkite told viewers, had already announced victory by Ike. Just after 10:00 p.m., Cronkite, with as much cheer as he could muster, turned to Collingwood for a third time. “Well,” Collingwood said, “as a great believer in the machine, I hesitate to say that we’re having a little bit of trouble . . . with UNIVAC. It seems that he’s rebelling against the human element.” Behind Collingwood were a bunch of Keystone Kops repairmen trying to get UNIVAC to cough out election data. Collingwood eventually extracted an electoral vote prediction from UNIVAC: Eisenhower 314 to Stevenson 217.

If Cronkite had been more powerful at CBS, he simply would have cut UNIVAC off for the rest of the evening. But Hewitt and Mickelson had spent a lot of Mr. Paley’s money on the computer and they insisted that Cronkite check in with Collingwood from time to time. Hard as it was to imagine, UNIVAC only grew into worse and worse television. Trying to sound authoritative, Collingwood read a UNIVAC printout suggesting that Stevenson had the popular vote lead. This was patently false and in contradiction to what Cronkite had been correctly telling his CBS audience for the past two hours: Eisenhower was far ahead. This was embarrassing television. Cronkite knew the jig was up.

It was one thing for Collingwood to bomb, but Cronkite wasn’t going to be challenged by a malfunctioning robot. “Charlie, very interesting indeed on the UNIVAC prediction,” Cronkite said, shaking his head in disbelief, smirking so the viewers knew he wasn’t part of the Brave New World boondoggle. “We who are only human and have to operate with flesh and blood instead of electronic gadgets still think this thing looks like it’s pretty much on the Eisenhower side at the moment.” All night long Cronkite had given accurate reports for a singular reason: he relied on UP wire service reports. As anchorman, he had expertly managed to keep UNIVAC somehow apart from his core broadcast. By constantly putting qualifiers on the election returns, Cronkite quashed the opportunity to be the big honcho who broke the news definitively for CBS. He was, in fact, outfoxed in this regard by Murrow. After UNIVAC malfunctioned, Cronkite turned to Murrow for analysis, and he stole the night from the anchorman. “I think it is reasonably certain that the election is over,” Murrow said. “Traditionally, the Democratic strength comes from big cities and they have failed to deliver in this election.”

Cronkite’s face hardened, almost as though someone had doused him in quick-setting cement. Cronkite had been big-footed; Murrow beat Cronkite in announcing the night’s victor. It was a comeuppance he’d never forget. Caution had its limits. A true TV broadcaster had to develop the innate instinct about when to call the match. Somehow at the end of Election Night, Murrow was left holding up journalism’s gut instinct in the silly age of UNIVAC.

By Christmas 1952, Cronkite had proven to his CBS bosses that he was perfectly suited to become a national television impresario. On radio interviews, as if selling a product, he had the nerve to promote the virtues of TV news as an enhancer of American democracy. He also wrote an overly optimistic essay for
Theatre Arts
magazine about how TV would weed out the self-serving phonies from the public arena for the benefit of mankind. “Television has an X-ray quality,” he wrote. “Television can detect insincerity as a more orthodox X-ray can detect a broken bone. Television can X-ray the soul; therefore, the future breed of politicians is going to be a much higher, not lower type than we have known in the past.”

As CBS TV grew in popularity, new production talent was hired to beef up the news department, including the erudite, hard-knocks reporter Ernie Leiser. Born on February 26, 1921, in Philadelphia, Leiser made his mark as a journalist during the Second World War, covering D-day and the Bulge. While Ernie Pyle was the best prose writer at
Stars and Stripes
, Leiser had the best geopolitical sense of any print reporter working the Europe beat. From the very moment he was hired by CBS News, he bonded with Cronkite. Leiser soon became CBS’s detective extraordinaire, finding dirt related to the Soviet Union’s iron-fisted Communist rule. When the Hungarian Revolution occurred in October 1956, Leiser went into Budapest and shot the only footage of the anti-Soviet revolt, risking life and limb to get the dramatic film.

With Leiser on hand as producer, Cronkite’s next special-event opportunity occurred seven months after Election Day 1952, when CBS covered the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey. At issue was how quickly world events could be brought to an American audience in the pre-satellite age. The Cronkite-Leiser goal was to whipstitch a film account of the British royal ceremonies together. But CBS’s race against the clock was thought to be miraculous. Once Leiser and Cronkite had developed the film of the royal pomp—a sea of well-groomed aristocrats draped in jeweled, pleated, furred, and embossed clothes—CBS used BBC facilities (a makeshift studio at Westminster Abbey) to prepare a special report for its American audience complete with B-roll footage of the procession and eyewitness raves. Cronkite and Leiser then raced to Heathrow Airport, got on a chartered plane, and flew to Boston. Speed was the governing ethos. On TV, Cronkite seemed to bask in the British gallantry of the crowning and enthronement. Off the air, chain-smoking cigarettes with Leiser, Cronkite was gleeful that CBS had “gutted” NBC by beating it to air by a full hour.

Unblinking as a fish when the camera was on, without a trace of showiness, Cronkite was becoming America’s trusted anchorman. TV viewers, however, couldn’t associate Cronkite with a particular CBS show outside of convention coverage on the network. Filling in for every coworker who was sick or on vacation, Cronkite seized every assignment he could. A broadcastography of Cronkite from 1950 to 1953 has him hosting
Walter Cronkite and the News
,
The News with Walter Cronkite
,
Walter Cronkite’s Esso News Show
,
News of the Night
,
Saturday News and Weather
, and
Your World in Review
(taking over from Edward P. Morgan). One of the keys to success was
never
to turn down face time. He even narrated an episode of the 1953 CBS-TV drama
Suspense
about the death of a newspaper editor in Mussolini’s Italy.

Cronkite was being groomed by Stanton and Paley as Murrow’s TV successor. That was one reason Cronkite and Murrow eyed each other from separate corners in the 1950s, even as they found their own distinctive niches in televised news. A silent competition for being top dog ensued. CBS News was turning into a viper’s nest. There was a labyrinth of different fiefdoms that didn’t congeal. The network’s headquarters on Madison Avenue and the TV studio, then located inside the Grand Central Terminal complex on Vanderbilt Avenue, were only a few blocks away but seemed like miles apart. A huge barrier had been erected between CBS Radio (Murrow) and CBS TV (Cronkite). The challenge for Cronkite was to figure out how to straddle both camps. “Cronkite and Murrow didn’t work well as a team,” Hewitt recalled. “Each of them was too strong to play second fiddle.”