Cronkite (2 page)

PART I

The Making of a Reporter

C
HAPTER
O
NE

Missouri Boy

FIRST FLIGHT—DUTCH HERITAGE—SON OF THE SON OF A DENTIST—GREY LYING-IN HOSPITAL—A PONY EXPRESS TOWN—THE DOUGHBOYS—CITY OF FOUNTAINS—STREETCARS, MILKSHAKES, AND THE DEATH OF HARDING—KAYCEE BLUES—GOOD-BYE, CITY OF FOUNTAINS—APPLES DON’T GROW IN TEXAS

O
f all Walter Cronkite’s boyhood adventures, the one that was seared in his memory clearest was his first airplane flight, in 1923. For the seven-year-old Cronkite the near-death episode ironically engendered a compulsion toward risky endeavors. He liked having his adrenal gland working in overdrive. In this pre-Lindbergh era, prop airplanes had been flown recreationally for only a decade. “My father and I went up in an old Curtiss-Wright bi-plane with an OX-5 engine in it off of a grass field in Kansas City,” Cronkite told David Friend, a reporter for
Life
magazine. “The engine failed just on take-off and the pilot put it down in a nearby field, running through a fence. Scared the devil outta Dad. I thought it was a great experience. Didn’t know any better.”

For Cronkite, the spectacular bird’s-eye view of the Show-Me State’s topography was an unforgettable thrill. In later years he enthusiastically recalled the flight over his birthplace of St. Joseph, perched along the Missouri River, and the clock tower at Union Station in downtown Kansas City jutting upward on the horizon like Oz. The perilous Curtiss-Wright flight was emblematic to Cronkite; it foreshadowed his intrepid career as a military aviation beat reporter for the United Press and CBS News. After admiring little Walter’s contained bravery on the near-disastrous flight, Walter Cronkite Sr.—his father—proudly called his only child “The Flying Dutchman.”

In
The Story of My Life
, Clarence Darrow bemoaned the fact that so many autobiographers and biographers “begin with ancestors” for the “purpose of linking themselves by blood and birth to some well-known family or personage.” But in Cronkite’s case, lineage mattered, for he
always
wanted to be associated with his Dutch (more so than his German) heritage. To the imaginative Cronkite, Dutch seafarers—libertarian, democratic, and worldly—were unflappable ocean explorers worthy of a Rijksmuseum full of Old Master oil portraits. One of the first educational documentaries Cronkite narrated after stepping down as CBS News anchorman in 1981 commemorated the bicentennial of America’s friendship and unbroken diplomatic relations with the Netherlands. Cronkite filmed the documentary at the regal Van Cortlandt Manor in suburban Croton-on-Hudson, New York. “We Dutch are a very pragmatic people,” Cronkite said at the film’s outset, “quick to seize on things that will benefit us. Yes, I did say
we
Dutch. You see, back in 1642, when this town of New York was called New Amsterdam, there was a fetching young maiden named Wyntje Theunis. In the pragmatic Dutch manner she was courted by a gallant lad named Hercks. Now Hercks knew a good thing when he saw it. He married Wyntje and bestowed on her his family name: Krankheidt.”

The future CBS newsman’s pride in his Dutch heritage, an inheritance from his father, was profound. On Thanksgiving Day, Cronkite Sr. would talk at length about how the Pilgrims sailed from Holland to Cape Cod looking for a place to worship God without religious persecution. While young Cronkite wasn’t taught to memorize all of America’s state capitals or the chronological order of the U.S. presidents by his parents, he proudly knew that the Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and Roosevelt families were of noble Dutch stock. His daughter Kathy remembered, “It took many years and a great deal of mixing of other ethnic influences to evolve the modern-day Cronkite family, but our Dutch ancestry is a valued legacy.”

During his decades at CBS News, Cronkite would tell stories about his maternal grandparents, Edward and Matilda Fritsche—how they were part owners of the Continental Hotel in Leavenworth, Kansas, and had worked in the Kansas City pharmaceutical business during the days of Theodore Roosevelt. An engrossing chronicle could be written, he believed, about how his mother’s grandparents both left Bavaria in the mid-nineteenth century for the green pastures of America. But his genealogical memory was tilted toward the Cronkite clan. Being of German descent—like the Fritsches—was frowned upon when you were born during World War I in the American Midwest.

Being Dutch was nobly different. What distinguished F. P. Cronkite (his paternal grandfather) from other Kansas dentists in the early twentieth century, he believed, was his passion that dentistry, as a medical profession, was of the
utmost
importance to the modern world. Restoration dentistry was all the rage in the early twentieth century. Medicine shows that sold potions, cure-alls, and great remedies were by then regulated by the federal government, and practitioners of dentistry required accreditation. The age of patent medicines and quack cures was drawing to an end with the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Even Coca-Cola had to stop putting cocaine in its soft drink; some said quite tragically. Grandfather Cronkite made all the gold inlays, molds, and dentures his patients needed. The future CBS News anchorman insisted that his grandpa judged character by the shine of a person’s teeth.

A national dental periodical called
Items of Interest: A Monthly Magazine of Dental Art, Science and Literature
featured Dr. F.P. Cronkite’s practice in a glowing article in 1899. It even ran a photo spread of his seven-room office under the banner “Office and Cabatory of Dr. F. P. Cronkite, St. Joseph, Mo.” The story suggested a meticulous Kansan who had definite opinions about modern dentistry and no faint pride in its bright future. A resourceful F. P. Cronkite not only owned the best dental equipment then available in the Midwest, but he also designed drill chairs himself. Convinced that dentists needed to cater to patients with come-ons such as waiting room magazines and alphabet blocks for kids, he was consciously concerned with the image his office projected. “The impressions we make upon our patrons,” he advised in
Items of Interest
, “are powerful factors in our professional lives, and it behooves us to take advantage of this fact.” He offered many tips on creating a good impression with patients. A famous F. P. Cronkite admonishment to his colleagues was that a dentist should never be caught reading the magazines in his own waiting room. A dentist needed to always be at the ready.

Apart from being lifetime boosters of their respective hometowns—St. Joseph and Leavenworth—the Cronkites and the Fritsches were similar in other ways. Despite heavily Dutch and Germanic surnames, both were thoroughly and even provincially Midwesterners, unwilling ever to criticize the U.S. government. All F. P. Cronkite wanted was to excel in the dental arts. He and his wife, Anna, enjoyed a spacious home in St. Joseph and a summer cottage on Lac Courte Oreilles (near Hayward, Wisconsin). If both sets of Cronkite’s grandparents lived without variety or risk, they also lived without pretension, earning the right to be comfortably middle class (a term social scientists bandied about).

F. P. and Anna Cronkite had six children together. The oldest was Walter Leland Cronkite, who followed in his father’s professional footsteps and graduated from Kansas City Dental College in 1914. His classmates there assumed Walter would go far, having a toehold in the family business and an inherited work ethic. Walter L. Cronkite—father of the future CBS News anchorman—was simultaneously gregarious and opaque, with piercing light blue eyes and a blond mustache. The two Walters shared a genuine intellectual curiosity as well as a fascination with Dickens and Balzac. By the time he turned eighteen, Cronkite Sr.’s bright future was seemingly guaranteed by his mastery of dental surgery techniques. He recognized that no matter how rotten the economy got, people would presumably still fix a decayed tooth. Sidestepping the chance to work alongside his father, he accepted a job as a staff dentist at the Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary.

As Cronkite Sr. settled into his new life in Leavenworth, he met Helen Fritsche, a Kansas girl who had spent time at college in Pennsylvania but never graduated. The two made a good match: they enjoyed dancing and nightlife and welcomed adult commitments. Both were twenty-two when they married in 1915, and soon moved in with the bride’s family (the Fritsches) in the old cavalry town of Leavenworth.

In the fall of 1916, Helen was admitted to the Grey Lying-In Hospital in St. Joseph, a modest two-story clapboard residence at the corner of Fifteenth St. and Edmond St. that was later converted into medical offices. On November 4, she gave birth to Walter Leland Cronkite Jr. Helen boasted that her boy couldn’t be more winning in appearance and personality. Like all mothers, Helen thought little Walter—“a warm berry”—was enshrined in a bell of sunshine. She remembered every tiny freckle on his skin with alert merriment. “It is unlikely that my parents pictured me with a mustache at that exultant moment at Dr. Grey’s,” Cronkite joked in his memoir,
A Reporter’s Life
. “Much more likely they were thinking of the immediate bliss ahead as, now a threesome, they began a new life together.”

Cronkite was proud of being born where the Pony Express had been founded in 1860. From St. Joseph, messengers once relayed news to more than 150 far-flung Pony Express stations scattered across the Great Plains through the Rocky Mountains and all the way to Sacramento. Cronkite liked to think of the Pony Express as the precursor to the wire services, TV news, and Federal Express. To Cronkite, who loved the 1939 film
Frontier Pony Express
starring Roy Rogers, the Pony Express was the romantic epitome of American can-do-ism.

When little Walter was born in 1916, the Great War raged in Europe. The United States desperately clung to its isolationist tradition. As tens of thousands of British soldiers died in the muddy trenches of France and Belgium, American life continued normally. Just three days after Walter’s birth, his father voted at the Frederick Boulevard firehouse in St. Joseph for President Woodrow Wilson’s reelection. Like Wilson, he was for staying out of the bloody conflict. But America wouldn’t be able to play ostrich for long. Although President Wilson had championed “neutrality” with tedious regularity in his successful reelection bid, he was quickly being forced toward intervention. Certainly, the German navy’s sinking of the
Lusitania
the year before, killing more than one hundred American citizens, suggested the gravity of the situation. U.S. entry into the cauldron of war was only a matter of time.

Cronkite Sr., ecstatic to be a father, was biding his time in St. Joseph during the winter of 1916–1917, working out of a small dental office in the same building as his father’s larger seven-room suite. When the well-known auto racer Barney Oldfield came to St. Joseph with a new vehicle called the
Lightning
, Walter Sr. was on the scene with a camera, capturing gasoline-powered modernity in motion. Ever since Henry Ford started punching out Model Ts in 1908, automobile ownership had been exploding around the United States. For the burgeoning middle class, having one’s own car was an opportunity to roam far beyond the provincial environs of one’s hometown. Once Cronkite Sr. bought his first Ford in December 1916 he insisted that the locals call him Dr. Cronkite—the newly minted father of one was at last a community man of standing. Dr. Cronkite now dreamed of opening a dentistry office in Kansas City, the hard-charging metropolis fifty miles south of St. Joseph along the Kansas-Missouri border.

On April 2, 1917, the United States entered the Great War against Germany. President Wilson, abandoning his “neutrality” after winning reelection the previous November, called up the Doughboys (the nickname given to American soldiers during World War I). Although Dr. Cronkite asked the draft board to excuse him from service “on account of dependents”—wife Helen and little Walter—the board refused. The twenty-four-year-old Missourian was a physically fit dental surgeon and the U.S. Army demanded high levels of health and hygiene among the troops. “Report for examination for regular army service,” he was told.

Dr. Cronkite convinced himself that he would be permanently stationed stateside, examining and treating draftees after basic training at Fort Sill. It proved to be a pipe dream. The Cronkites took up residence in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, a little glass-manufacturing town. The hope was that they could all wait out the war in Sapulpa. But by the end of 1917, Dr. Cronkite had become a first lieutenant assigned to the 140th Infantry of the Thirty-fifth Division. He was headed to France to serve behind the lines, as a dental surgeon with the medical corps. A fellow Missouri soldier he befriended was Harry Truman. “To his credit, Dad, as far as I know, never claimed a close battlefield relationship with the thirty-third president of the United States,” his son recalled. “Although, with a modesty probably meant to be becoming, he acknowledged having known the chap.”

There wasn’t much to do in Sapulpa except eat walnut pie—a local delicacy. Unable to communicate with her husband in Europe, Helen decided to move to Kansas City, where her brother Ed Fritsche had become a candy wholesaler in the Hospital Hill section of town. Helen took on odd jobs around Kaycee, from babysitting to bookkeeping, to help pay the household bills. She lived for the occasional Western Union telegram from her husband.

Dr. Cronkite returned from France in 1919, swollen with pride at having served America abroad with distinction. He was pleased that Helen had the gumption to move to Kansas City. When he spoke about the 140th Infantry in Europe fighting the Kaiser, it sounded like current news. Taking a new lease on life, the Great War veteran regaled little Walter with tales of German submarines, torpedo attacks, barbed-wire entanglements, grenades, bayonets, and gas masks. Places such as the Argonne Forest and Hindenburg Line became more historically important in Dr. Cronkite’s house than Gettysburg or Antietam.

Embraced as a heroic returning Doughboy, Dr. Cronkite immediately opened his own dental practice in Kansas City. He made the wooden shingle himself. Like his father, he manufactured dental implants. He was deft with his hands and assiduous in keeping up with medical trends. After seeing the carnage in Europe, he was pleased that Kansas City—the Paris of the Great Plains—was rather insular. He rented a small apartment not far from his practice. He didn’t really harbor any expectations of being part of Kansas City society—and that was all right by him. “I know exactly how they felt about all other walks of society,” Cronkite later said of his parents circa 1920, “the lower classes as well as the upper. Unless you were a 32nd degree Mason living on Benton Boulevard in Kansas City, Missouri, and a white Protestant, there was something a little wrong with you.”