Cronkite (21 page)

Somewhat ironically, Mudd developed an easy friendship with Cronkite. The Murrow Boys were attracted to Europe and New York. Cronkite and Mudd, political junkies, liked the official Washington beat. In his fine memoir,
The Place to Be
, Mudd told how the younger men at CBS News used to scoff at how awful Cronkite’s pop culture knowledge was. Mudd laughed when Walter confessed that he didn’t know who balladeer Woody Guthrie was (when hosting an episode of
The Twentieth Century
called “The Dust Bowl”). “Although we all snorted about his gaffes behind his back,” Mudd explained, “what mattered to us was that Cronkite believed that almost everything that happened in Washington was important.”

What Cronkite and Mudd had—since they both came out of the print media world—was an always-rigid determination of what constituted
real
news. But they weren’t in charge. In 1957, CBS Entertainment division was rather inexplicably given the right to decide what was news. To Cronkite, this power was an abasement of sorts. Yet Cronkite played along. On October 17, CBS broadcast remotely from Madison Square Garden a party thrown by Hollywood producer Mike Todd for eighteen thousand guests. Cronkite was assigned to report on Todd’s promotional extravaganza—choreographed to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the release of his Academy Award–winning film
Around the World in Eighty Days
—for CBS’s
Playhouse 90
. The promo literature claimed that music from Boston Pops conductor Arthur Fielder and a procession of one hundred elephants (there were only ten elephants deceptively re-costumed and marched out again to the unsuspecting crowd) would launch the party-to-end-all-parties.

On air Cronkite gamely commented on the excess and inanity for the full ninety minutes, holding CBS’s lame coverage together. Todd’s wife was actress Elizabeth Taylor, and she played the grand dame hostess at the party; Cronkite suffered from star-struck distraction. He later felt he had “breached the shallow wall” between entertainment and news, and squandered “a bit of journalistic authority” for the sake of Mike Todd. It can’t be said that Cronkite lent the occasion any dignity—that would be asking too much of any mortal. True to the job description of reporter, though, he spouted off statistics and the names of products in what he later recalled as the world’s first and most well disguised ninety-minute infomercial. It was
Entertainment Tonight
meeting reality TV before the advent of either. “Even the smooth-as-silk Walter Cronkite,” wrote critic Fred Brooks, “lost his aplomb. Halfway through the show, he sensibly gave up trying to describe the hodgepodge.”

Cronkite might have wriggled free of such silly
Playhouse 90
assignments, even without going so far as to refuse them—although that would also have been understandable. He didn’t refuse, though. As if in explanation, he was later quick to point out that just one week after Todd’s garish stunt, CBS News broadcast the first episode of
The Twentieth Century
, a program of modern history narrated by Cronkite that replaced
You Are There
.
The Twentieth Century
—which aired from October 1957 to May 1961 and was sponsored by the Prudential Insurance Company of America—concentrated on recent topics and presented them in a straight documentary format. The first show, airing on October 20 and titled “Man of the Century,” was a video biography of Sir Winston Churchill that had a heavy emphasis on his World War II leadership. After that success the episodes immediately took a turn toward the futuristic.
The Twentieth Century
, produced by Burton Benjamin, became a kind of primer on cold war technology. The next six shows after “Man of the Century” were “Guided Missile” (the development of Nazi Germany’s V-1s and V-2s at Peenemunde during the 1930s and 1940s), “The Story of the FBI” (law enforcement under J. Edgar Hoover), “The Flight of the X-2” (rocket technology), “Mach Busters” (the air force’s supersonic pilots), “Brainwashing,” and “Vertijets” (experimental aircraft). During its first three years on the air,
The Twentieth Century
was the
sole
regularly scheduled fifty-two-weeks-a-year news and public affairs documentary on network television (twenty-six weeks of new shows, twenty-six weeks of reruns of the previous season).

The narrow focus of
The Twentieth Century
’s early broadcasts wasn’t an accident. On the contrary, the show’s content was a direct response to the opening of the space age with the Soviet Union’s
Sputnik 1
launch on October 4, 1957. With this successful satellite mission, the Soviets appeared to have an edge in missile technology over the United States. How did the Kremlin pull off such a feat?
The Twentieth Century
was determined to provide answers to post-
Sputnik
angst. Cronkite later called
Sputnik 1
“a surprise attack against something believed invulnerable: American confidence. . . . We had lost the space race before we knew we were in it,” he reflected years later. “It hurt badly.”
The Twentieth Century
—which was sold in twenty foreign markets by 1960—was almost an informercial for the U.S. Air Force, the CIA, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

There was about the Cronkite of
The Twentieth Century
a lot of Lowell Thomas–style reporting. The TV viewer never knew which exotic location Cronkite would visit next. In the 1959–1960 Emmy Award–winning season, for example, Cronkite and Benjamin journeyed down the Atlantic Shooting Range to Ascension Island, reporting at a handful of the Caribbean tracking stations en route, for the episode “Down Range.” For the first shoot of “Minuteman at Cape Canaveral,” Cronkite was on hand with breathless space reporting that predated his historic Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo broadcasts. Taken collectively,
The Twentieth Century
was like a novel, showcasing the newest weaponry the United States had contracted from Boeing and McDonnell Douglas to
win
the cold war. Although
You Are There
ended up being remembered as Cronkite’s signature show of the 1950s,
The Twentieth Century
really represented his best work. What
The Twentieth Century
did was remind people that Cronkite, no matter what the goofy Huntley-Brinkley boys were doing, was winning every award imaginable (including Emmys and Peabodys) and becoming, along with Murrow, one of the premier action journalists and eyewitnesses of modern times. Considered the finest half hour in television, the series foreshadowed the plethora of weekly compilation documentaries that would eventually populate both network and cable TV.

Cronkite discovered clever ways to stay ahead of NBC News on space and missile technology. A space nut, he started collecting missile information in a CIA-like fashion from U.S. government sources. It was easier than it sounded. He would neatly type out a request to the Martin Company or McDonnell Aircraft or the Department of Defense, usually to someone in public relations, and a week later reams of information would arrive. He also frequently went to Cape Canaveral on reconnaissance missions. Space exploration combined Cronkite’s love of military aviation with cold war politics. It also gave him a rare chance to distinguish himself at CBS. Frequenting the Gotham Book Mart on Forty-seventh Street, he purchased the visionary science fiction novels of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. In early 1958 he journeyed to Los Angeles to cover the unveiling of the X-15, an aircraft that was part plane and part missile. Having read an astounding amount of technical jargon about ICBMs, he was knowledgeable about the stunning capabilities of America’s cold war defense system. “From the beginning [Wernher] von Braun’s team dreamed of sending men into space,” Cronkite recalled, “I began to dream with them.”

The key to
The Twentieth Century
was producer Bud Benjamin, who became Cronkite’s Svengali. An Ohio native with movie star looks and a sense of adventure, Benjamin earned a BA at the University of Michigan in 1939. Like an arrow, he was ready to make his mark on journalism. Calm, always organized and methodical, never known to curse or lose his temper, Benjamin started in journalism at United Press’s Cleveland bureau. A lot of UP reporters knew how to gather solid facts for a story, but Benjamin was the quickest story
closer
Cronkite had ever encountered. He joined the U.S. Coast Guard during World War II, rising to the rank of lieutenant. After the war, he joined TV news because it paid more than radio. To Benjamin, classic television documentaries like
The Plow That Broke the Plains
(1939) and
A Diary for Timothy
(1945) were high-art endeavors as valuable as the realist photography of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. Cronkite, who later wrote a foreword to Benjamin’s self-effacing memoir,
Fair Play
, considered his
The Twentieth Century
producer the “finest” documentarian he was “ever privileged to work” with.

Besides being a real gentleman, Benjamin also had a good sense of TV news as business. If he hadn’t joined CBS News, one could have easily imagined him as CEO of a medium-sized company in Ann Arbor or president of a small New England college. He knew how to spend money, but he also knew how to raise it.
The Twentieth Century
wasn’t a moneymaker for CBS per se, but it was brilliant educational television of an unprecedented kind. Benjamin found ways—international rights, classroom distribution, movie house showings—to make the show profitable. It was Benjamin who helped Cronkite realize that his armchair appreciation of aerospace technology could become a huge asset.

What made
The Twentieth Century
such important television was the commingling of rare film footage and amazing scripting. Cronkite and Benjamin hired a knot of brilliant writers, including Hanson Baldwin (military editor of
The New York Times
), Emmet John Hughes (chief of foreign correspondents and editor for
Time
), Merriman Smith (former United Nations correspondent), and John Toland (historian) among them. Benjamin’s assistants—particularly Bob Asman and Isaac Kleinerman—were like safecrackers when it came to unearthing rare, previously unseen historical footage of everyone from Buffalo Bill to Hitler to Gandhi.

Cronkite wasn’t the only newsman hoping to dominate the TV space franchise. Two days after
Sputnik 1
was launched, Douglas Edwards hosted a half-hour special (produced by Don Hewitt):
Sputnik One: The Soviet Space Satellite
. The CBS documentary included commentary from Howard K. Smith in Washington, D.C., Daniel Schorr in Moscow, Alexander Kendrick in London, and Richard C. Hottelet in New York City’s Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. But no Cronkite. Just two months later, the U.S. Air Force scheduled the launching of the
Vanguard
satellite from Cape Canaveral, and CBS gave the plum assignment of covering it to Harry Reasoner. Cronkite was miffed. “In those days . . . I was temporarily one of the chief CBS authorities on the space program,” Reasoner wrote in
Before the Colors Fade
. “We worked out an elaborate plan to ensure that, while Russia may have beaten the United States, no one was going to beat CBS News.”

Usually distinguished-looking, with a calm voice, Reasoner blared out, “There she goes!” at the
Vanguard
liftoff on December 6, 1957. Cronkite took notice of his informal style. Then the rocket blew up into tens of thousands of pieces of fiery debris. If the Vanguard hadn’t exploded on takeoff, it’s reasonable to surmise that Reasoner would have become CBS News’ go-to space reporter; it wouldn’t have been Cronkite’s beat. In the late 1950s the U.S. government was very secretive about launches, but Reasoner—like Cronkite—had been embraced by the government as a trustworthy correspondent. From a ratings point of view, along with technical production, CBS was beating ABC and NBC. But the Vanguard flop caused CBS to time-delay its coverage of
Explorer 1
(the first successful U.S. satellite) a few months later. “It’s difficult to remember now how impossibly dangerous space flight seemed,” Cronkite recalled to
Newsweek
in a 1998 cover story. “The stakes couldn’t have been higher, nor the risks greater; we were in a Cold War space race, we thought then, for the heavens.”

One of the most beneficial things about
Sputnik 1
, from Cronkite’s perspective, was that it motivated Democrats like Senators John F. Kennedy and Stuart Symington to warn against a missile gap with the Soviets. By the late 1950s, Cronkite had become an anti-Soviet cheerleader, helping lead a national charge to win the space race. In January 1958 he hosted a ninety-minute edition of
The Twentieth Century
devoted to explaining exactly the situation vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, “Where We Stand,” comparing the military might of the United States with that of its main cold war opponent. The Soviets had argued convincingly that
Sputnik
was a scientific program, not a military one. Cronkite rejected that stand and warned Americans not to be naïve.

Cronkite’s outstanding work on “Where We Stand” was a far cry from his
Playhouse 90
gig describing the melee of Mike Todd’s Madison Square Garden party four months prior. This stark contrast became known as High Cronkite and Low Cronkite. He not only liked the role of space reporter, he also needed it. Whether it was almost crashing in a Curtiss-Wright plane with his father in the 1920s, breaking the “Lochinvar of the Air” story in the 1930s, or embedding with the Eighth Air Force in the 1940s, aviation was Cronkite’s bailiwick. His relationship with military aviation was a comfortable beat, the one that came most naturally to him. As the once-forlorn Cape Canaveral was being developed as a rocket launch center, “Walter saw
The Twentieth Century
as a sly way to build the best space Rolodex in the business,” Andy Rooney recalled. “He simply out glad-handed Harry Reasoner at the Cape to keep the space beat away from him.”