Cronkite (19 page)

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

Mr. CBS Utility Man

YOU ARE THERE
—BACKING BLACKLISTED WRITERS—EXPLOSION IN YUCCA FLATS—MICKELSON RUNS THE TABLE—MURROW TAKES ON MCCARTHY—KEEP FASCISTS OFF THE AIRWAVES—THE MORNING SHOW BLUES—CRONKITE EMBRACES CHARLEMAGNE—JACK OF ALL TRADES—SPEED RACER—COMPETING WITH JACK PAAR—MINNESOTA CALLING—WATCH OUT FOR HUNTLEY-BRINKLEY

D
ressed in a standard dark suit, Walter Cronkite, a thoroughly modern man, looked out of place interviewing a Benedict Arnold reenactor in a powdered wig or a Louis Pasteur impersonator in a white laboratory coat. But that’s precisely what he did on the popular weekly CBS TV show
You Are There
. Each half-hour episode—which aired at 6:30 p.m. on Sundays from 1953 to 1957—began with time lines and charts explaining a key moment or person in world history. Then Cronkite would calmly set the stage for the upcoming reenactment. Pick the topic—the Boston Tea Party, Battle of Waterloo, or Lincoln at Gettysburg—Cronkite served as lantern-carrier. No historical topic was out of bounds in the series, which re-created seminal moments of the past and reported on them as if they had just happened. No period costume detail was overlooked by the wardrobe department. Following the Cronkite send-off, in a jarring fashion, an announcer would almost shout out, “You are there!” as if grabbing the viewer by the collar.

Charles Russell, the show’s ambitious producer, boasted that every line uttered in the kitschy
You Are There
was historically accurate. And so it was. CBS fact-checkers for radio shows met the very highest
New Yorker
standard. Russell, refusing “dramatic license” in re-creating the past, had started the CBS program on radio and now moved the teleplay to TV with Cronkite as host and Sidney Lumet, the future Academy Award–winning Hollywood filmmaker, as director. Lumet chose Cronkite because “the premise of the series was so silly, so outrageous, that we needed somebody with the most American, homespun, warm ease about him.” When asked why Cronkite was chosen to host
You Are There
, the show’s executive producer, William Dozier, explained the CBS management rationale. “He’s good,” Dozier said, “he’s effective, and since the national political conventions, he’s a household name.” It seemed like an odd fit at first. But Cronkite’s “serious demeanor and unpretentious style” made even interviews with figures such as Sigmund Freud and George Washington believable.

You Are There
was strange live television for cold war America. Cronkite would play himself, a modern CBS News anchorman, hands clasped behind his back, full of intriguing questions. While Cronkite was under no illusion that the
You Are There
gig would help his journalism career, he hoped the program would raise awareness of his personal brand. Some teachers and educators took to dubbing Cronkite “the history teacher” of America. “I was brought on as an actor to trade in on my newly acquired fame and authority as a convention anchor,” he explained to NPR in 2003. He later bragged to
American Heritage
magazine about all the great “players”
You Are There
showcased, including Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Kim Stanley, Yul Brynner, Canada Lee, Martin Gabel, Shepperd Strudwick, and E. G. Marshall. “We called them,” Cronkite recalled, “Sidney Lumet’s stock company.”

Besides being a buoyant way to pique interest in history,
You Are There
served as a useful disinfecting agent for Cronkite in the age of McCarthyism; only a dyed-in-the-wool patriot, it was presumed, a real flag waver, could possibly host this kind of ma-and-apple-pie schmaltz devoid of contemporary controversy. What McCarthyites didn’t know, however, was that Cronkite’s
You Are There
producer, Charlie Russell, had surreptitiously hired three talented blacklisted New York writers—Walter Bernstein, Arnold Manoff, and Abraham Polonsky—to write the
You Are There
teleplays. At CBS script meetings, Russell hired “fronts” to fill in for the real troika, to protect their identities. As Cronkite explained to NPR in 2003, Russell wasn’t willing to “play the blacklist game” just to placate CBS censors. Russell’s writers cleverly produced
You Are There
sketches illuminating the tribulations of Joan of Arc, the Salem witch trials, the death of Socrates, and the Dreyfus Affair to draw subconscious parallels to the malevolence of McCarthyism. It was Cronkite’s own kind of small-
p
political statement. “History,” Cronkite noted, “offered no shortage of ways to deal obliquely with matters of deception and intellectual freedom.” By 1955, the original blacklisted
You Are There
writers had been replaced. The show shuttered for good in 1957.

Approving of
You Are There
, influential TV critic John Crosby called Cronkite CBS News’ “man of all work.” One day Cronkite was interviewing Paul Revere or Confucius and the next he was in Yucca Flats, Nevada (for real), where the U.S. Army had invited the press to witness an atomic bomb detonation. Instead of scrambling to the front of the pack on March 17, 1953, Cronkite and Morgan Beatty (for ABC News) cautiously positioned themselves about seven miles away from ground zero. There were limits, Cronkite believed, to earning a scoop—contracting radiation sickness from a multimegaton thermonuclear detonation was one of them. Chet Huntley of NBC News was one of two journalists who braved the Yucca Flats explosion from a closer proximity, unafraid of fallout. About 5:20 a.m. Pacific time, the bomb detonated into a raging ball of fire. Television viewers didn’t see the ghastly flash on their screens because the camera lens was momentarily covered to protect it from heat-warp. But they
did
see the mushroom cloud form in the aftermath. A fiery gloom streaked across the dry desert basin. Cronkite did a masterful job of explaining everything to viewers about the atomic age, from fallout shelters to emergency duck-and-cover drills to radio warning sirens.

In the fall of 1953, CBS News beat NBC News in overall audience share on television. Cronkite and Murrow were major reasons why. By 1956, CBS’s
Douglas Edwards with the News
sailed ahead of NBC’s fifteen-minute
Camel News Caravan
, which meant a lot more advertising dollars for the “Tiffany Network” (a reference to the high-quality shine of the company’s news product). Besides having an R. J. Reynolds cigarette product actually sponsor a news show,
The
Camel News Caravan
broke other ground. Its host, John Cameron Swayze—always a suave dandy—created signature sign-off lines such as “A good good-evening to you,” or “Hopscotching the globe” or “Glad we could be together.” Long ago, back in Kaycee, Cronkite had taken notice of the well-groomed Swayze-style wardrobe, realizing that appearance mattered when communicating truths. Nobody wanted to be told about the Soviets testing a hydrogen bomb or China invading a country by Freedie the Freeloader.

When in early 1954 Sig Mickelson became CBS News vice president, Cronkite was comforted. Mickelson, a one-man organizing vortex, didn’t get along with Ed Murrow (or producer Fred Friendly, for that matter), so he was always looking to give Cronkite breaks. As CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr noted, Murrow simply wasn’t Mickelson’s “cup of tea.” Cronkite, on the other hand, was exactly what Mickelson thought TV news needed. If Friendly was Murrow’s alter ego in the 1940s and ’50s, then Mickelson was Cronkite’s sponsor in the 1950s and early ’60s. Whenever the opportunity arose, Mickelson, sounding like Colonel Parker promoting Elvis Presley, rattled off Cronkite’s impressive résumé, from the New London, Texas, fire of 1937 (covered for UP) to the Yucca Flats, Nevada, blast of 1953 (covered for CBS News).

What differentiated Cronkite from the pack, Mickelson believed, was that he was preternaturally encyclopedic about U.S. political history. Who else had been at both the Houston and Kansas City nominating conventions back in 1928? Yet Murrow was the one regarded as a hero by New Deal liberals in New York media circles. While Cronkite was re-creating history on
You Are There
, Murrow had undeniably
made
history with his “Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy,” which harshly criticized the senator’s alarmist methods, for
See It Now
. The public only had a hint of the keen insight Cronkite had accumulated about how the Electoral College functioned. “The name which most viewers immediately identify with political coverage,” Mickelson insisted, “is that of Walter Cronkite.”

What worried Cronkite was that if television news could be used for good (as with
See It Now
), then it could also be used to further malicious ends—and who was to judge the difference? World War II was less than ten years distant, and the memory of the Third Reich’s infamous radio and newspaper propaganda machine was fresh in the minds of many. Murrow might be trusted with the potential to turn news into opinion at CBS, and he was. But the disturbing thought to Cronkite was that an American-fried Joseph Goebbels type—somebody even worse than McCarthy—might take to the U.S. airwaves espousing hatred. To Cronkite, journalism had a mandate to challenge totalitarianism in any guise
everywhere
in the world. “I think newsmen are inclined to side with humanity rather than with authority and institutions,” he explained to
Playboy
. “And this sort of pushes them to the left. But I don’t think there are many who are far left.”

Cronkite had liberal opinions like Murrow’s regarding politics and trends in American society. But he didn’t believe his preference for Adlai Stevenson over Dwight Eisenhower for president should be public knowledge. “I thought he’d gotten the nomination simply because of the hero worship of World War II,” Cronkite explained of Eisenhower, “not by his ability to be president. Ike’s association with a lot of the right-wing Republicans bothered me a great deal.”

But Cronkite also knew that objectivity had its limits. Although he privately toasted the news of Soviet premier Joseph Stalin’s death on March 1, 1953, he didn’t editorialize. When on May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in
Brown v. Topeka Board of Education
that racial segregation was illegal, Cronkite again rejoiced. But he also knew that the South might soon become a tinderbox as the U.S. Department of Justice tried to enforce the landmark ruling. During World War II Cronkite’s UP dispatches lacked objectivity because the Nazis were so heinous. Post-
Brown
, he hoped CBS News would do the same in covering the civil rights movement as it fought for the implementation of the Supreme Court opinion. “CBS executives sensed a more immediate concern,” Cronkite recalled. “Their job was to gather an audience and sell it to advertisers. . . . In the 1950s, CBS chairman William Paley didn’t want to alienate his Southern affiliates whose defection could weaken CBS ratings and revenues. Those of us who would do the reporting would feel caught in a rare dilemma between commerce and journalism.”

Later in life, Cronkite skirted questions about why he didn’t decry Joe McCarthy in the 1950s with tomahawk in hand or become a public advocate for the
Brown
decision like Howard K. Smith and Eric Sevareid. The honest answer was that such audacity would have been a career killer for Cronkite. He was hired by Mr. Paley to be a TV broadcaster, not a crusader. But by working with blacklisted writers on
You Are There
, he nevertheless earned street cred in the broadcasting industry for standing up, by proxy, to the Red Scare.

The same month that Murrow’s “Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy” aired on CBS’s
See It Now
, Cronkite started a new gig, one that the network regarded as paramount. He was to be the network’s morning man, in counterpoint to Dave Garroway on the fabulously popular
Today
show on NBC. CBS longed for an a.m. ratings winner—that is, a reliable morning show of its own. And that was the title Cronkite’s program received:
The Morning Show
, which he hosted for much of 1954 and 1955. Critics noticed a certain similarity between the NBC and CBS shows. They were, in fact, almost identical, combining a gently witty host with a gregarious weathercaster, a sober news announcer, and a nonhuman cohort. Garroway had a chimpanzee (J. Fred Muggs) to chat with, and Cronkite had Charlemagne, a lion puppet manipulated by Bill Baird. “A puppet,” Cronkite said in defense of his cohost, “can render opinions on people and things that a human commentator would not feel free to utter. It was one of the highlights of the show.”

Oddly, Cronkite was the perfect straight man for Charlemagne. While Murrow Boys such as Sevareid and Collingwood belittled Cronkite for goofing around with a puppet on
The Morning Show
, CBS was right to take advantage of how Cronkite combined, as one syndicated columnist put it, a “whimsical and frequently off-beat sense of humor.” Cronkite, in person, had a delightful sense of humor and was extremely good with little kids. His mother, Helen, was bitingly funny, a lively conversationalist and sometime late-night card player, and so was her son. Walter was sprung of people, and an era, that valued parlor room wit and canned laughter. Instead of seeming like a doofus for being a serious newsman with a puppet, Cronkite came off—as critic John Crosby wrote—as nerdy
cool
. He just didn’t look cool; therein lay the comic element.

At first
The Morning Show
aired Monday to Friday from 7:00 to 9:00 a.m. But David Garroway, host of NBC’s
Today
, kept trouncing Dick Van Dyke and Cronkite in the ratings. As an interviewer, Cronkite was solid but didn’t sparkle in that chipper, wake-up-everybody-it’s-a-brand-new-day format. Before long, Paley cut
The Morning Show
in half, giving the second hour to
Captain Kangaroo
. Mickelson pulled Cronkite for a few weeks from
The Morning Show
, but ultimately put him back into the mix. But the verdict was in. Cronkite, even with the ace assistance of Barbara Walters (writer), Dick Van Dyke (slapstick), and Merv Griffin (music), simply wasn’t well suited for the breakfast spot. There was a knifepoint to Cronkite’s banter with guests that was more Drew Pearson or Walter Winchell than Captain Kangaroo.