Cronkite (23 page)

When Brinkley and Huntley burst onto the national scene at the 1956 conventions, they were largely unknown broadcasters. When Cronkite and Murrow were paired in 1960, they were two of the most famous newsmen in America. Murrow, who had risen like a rocket in the late 1930s, was descending just as steeply twenty years later. At times, he was openly critical of CBS as a company, casting the same cold eye on it as he had on other institutions through the years. “One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising, and news,” he scolded colleagues in his brilliant 1958 speech to the Radio and Television News Directors Association (RTNDA). “Each of the three is a rather bizarre and demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles. The top management of the networks, with a few notable exceptions, has been trained in advertising, research, sales or show business. By the nature of the corporate structure, they also make the final and crucial decisions having to do with news and public affairs.”

Paley was no longer impressed with Murrow’s high-handed opinions. They were the antithesis of TV populism in the extreme, where ratings mattered most. Through the long, lively years of their friendship, Paley had always been Murrow’s boss—and he had never had to remind Murrow of that fact. But as the relationship unraveled, there was little left for Paley to do except make clear to Murrow who was in charge of CBS. “Murrow thought he was a larger historical personage than rich old Paley,” Hewitt explained. “Paley had all the wealth and corporate power. But Murrow had the thoroughbred fame. They were both alpha males. But Paley was the hare while Murrow the tortoise. Ed knew he would win the history game.” Cronkite, even though he wasn’t a Murrow booster, thought his colleague’s 1958 RTNDA speech was brave. “I applauded it wildly, like all of us did in the news department,” Cronkite recalled. “I admired his courage for saying it. I said, oh boy, there’s our leader. Glad it was done. I was obviously sorry it got him in trouble with Paley, but I didn’t consider that entirely unexpected.”

Not long after the RTNDA speech, Murrow left CBS for a one-year sabbatical, a year of global travel that would allow him to try life without the network, and vice versa. Murrow ended his sabbatical early and immediately received job offers from academia and nonprofit organizations, but instead returned to CBS, going to work as a regular reporter—not a producer—at the documentary program
CBS Reports
. The most notable Murrow documentary became “Harvest of Shame,” a gut-wrenching, Peabody Award–winning look at the miasma of Mexican migrant farm labor in America.

Hoping once again to excel at CBS, Murrow was on the scene as a reporter at the Democratic Convention in 1960 when he was suddenly reassigned to co-anchor the coverage with Cronkite. That’s where Rather encountered Murrow—his coming-of-age hero. Rather was an up-and-comer who had journalism in his blood. As such, he had been scheduled by the network to have a picture taken that morning with Murrow (his idol) and, rather indifferently, with Cronkite (a fellow Houstonian). “Walter was big,” Rather said. “But Murrow was like a god.”

If Rather was surprised to hear that Murrow was to start co-anchoring with Cronkite, he wasn’t the only one. At the appointed morning hour for the photo session, well before the Democratic Convention went into session, Murrow and the network’s publicists appeared in a smoky anteroom outside the CBS anchor booth. “Murrow came and sat,” Rather said. “We waited a very long time and then Walter didn’t come.” The heavy atmosphere was flammable, and Rather half expected the grim-faced Murrow to throw a tantrum, the anger was so evident on his face. It was painful for Rather to see his hero being denigrated. Eventually, the photo session was canceled, and Murrow huffed out. “What had turned out,” Rather said, “is that Walter had locked himself in the anchor booth. Walter didn’t want to anchor with Murrow. He just locked himself in the booth and said, ‘To hell with it.’ ”

Decades later, historian Don Carleton of the University of Texas at Austin interviewed Cronkite about his feud with Murrow at the Los Angeles convention, and Cronkite admitted that the two didn’t really click. But he blamed much of the friction on CBS management’s foolhardiness. “Who’s supposed to do what?” Cronkite explained. “What’s Murrow supposed to do? I don’t think they said anything about him doing analysis. They just said that he was supposed to help me. They just wanted Murrow on camera to cash in on his popularity. . . . I think Murrow and I might have had chemistry that worked under different circumstances, but the management at the convention in 1960 was not one to create great chemistry.”

For all the sleek corporate culture of CBS, for all the fast-cash TV boom profits, the network was essentially a herd, and in that respect, Murrow was a wounded animal. The younger bison were leaving him out to pasture. Paley and the other CBS executives in charge had hobbled Murrow, taking away his executive status and keeping him out of planning meetings. The Murrow Boys—including Collingwood, Schoenbrun, Sevareid, and Pierpoint—were still loyal to him, as far as their powers at CBS would allow. Youngsters such as Rather looked up to him with unadulterated reverence. But for Cronkite, never sycophantic toward Murrow, the situation was quite different. He didn’t feel compelled to suddenly start kowtowing at the 1960 convention.

When Cronkite was abruptly informed that he would, indeed, not be an anchor but a co-anchor with Murrow in Los Angeles, he gasped. Cronkite believed that Murrow blossomed when he composed his on-air material carefully in advance. That was how Murrow had exposed McCarthy as being nothing more than a disingenuous paper tiger. Burrowing into mounds of documents, devouring information, Murrow liked to memorize his high-powered words or read them off a TelePrompTer. Cronkite was just the opposite. He crammed his mind with vetted facts about the cold war, inflation, government spending, the space race, sports, and integration, then let his preternatural ability to ad-lib take over the show. Cronkite and Murrow did not mesh professionally, possibly because they lacked a basic attribute of nearly any kind of professional partnership, especially one involving communication: neither appeared to care what the other was saying.

At times in Los Angeles, the rival CBS broadcasters didn’t even seem to be
listening
to each other. Dan Rather recalled the teaming as the epitome of everything to be avoided in broadcasting: “long pauses, awkward things, battle for the microphone.” Jack Gould,
The
New York Times
television critic whose praise for Huntley and Brinkley continued to be generous, declared that “the pre-eminence of CBS in news coverage, which has been something of a tradition in broadcasting, no longer exists.”

Don Hewitt, who paired them in the first place, admitted in retrospect that it had been “a terrible idea, a complete disaster.” He recalled, “I mean, if there were two chemistries, two personalities, that didn’t blend, it was Murrow and Cronkite.”

For the network news departments, the political conventions arose every four years as a showcase, an Olympiad in gathering and delivering news. For CBS, the 1960 season was a turning point of the most disheartening kind. Not only did the network come in second that August, but it was a distant second, with NBC pulling 51 percent of viewers to CBS’s 36 percent. The internal numbers showed, moreover, that over the course of the Republican convention, CBS lost viewers to ABC—then a flyweight in the bruising sport of televised politics. Everyone in CBS’s news department was touched by the sense of failure afterward—or, nearly everyone. “Strangely,” wrote CBS correspondent David Schoenbrun, “Cronkite was not blamed at all. Paley felt he had done his usual good job, but the chemistry in the CBS coverage was not good, and that must be the fault of the news director.”

Stanton had wanted Cronkite to conduct breaking-news interviews with John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in the spring of 1960, giving CBS News momentum leading into the summer conventions. Kennedy was the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party when Cronkite caused a ruckus. On the evening of the Wisconsin primary—on April 5—CBS persuaded Kennedy to appear as a commentator from Milwaukee. Unbeknownst to Cronkite, though, JFK’s brother, Robert F. Kennedy, had cut a deal with some producer at CBS with the precondition that no discussion of Catholicism be allowed. Nobody informed Cronkite of this deal (if there really was one). “In the course of the interview [with JFK], I naturally asked his opinion of how the Catholic and non-Catholic vote was going,” Cronkite recalled. “He was obviously upset by the question.”

After the CBS broadcast a brouhaha ensued between the Kennedy campaign and CBS News. The sheer intensity of it was astonishing. Cronkite, for his part, grew indignant at JFK for insinuating he would ever play the quid pro quo game. There were rumors that Kennedy was going to denounce CBS publicly; instead, he called Stanton, full of fury at Cronkite’s intransigence. What a hardball player Kennedy could be, Stanton realized, when he felt double-crossed. Feeling betrayed by CBS, the presumptive Democratic nominee reminded Stanton that if elected to the White House, he would be selecting leaders of the FCC, the governmental regulatory agency to which radio stations and television networks were beholden. “Dr. Stanton courageously stood up to the threat,” Cronkite recalled of his brush-up with Kennedy, “as he did on so many other occasions in defending television’s free press rights.”

Not long after the Wisconsin primary, Don Hewitt bumped into JFK. “Walter Cronkite’s a Republican, isn’t he?” Kennedy asked. “No,” Hewitt said, “I don’t think so.” Kennedy, not buying it, said, “He’s a Republican. I know he’s a Republican.” Holding his ground, Hewitt again denied it. “He’s always with Eisenhower,” Kennedy insisted. “Always having his picture taken with Eisenhower and going somewhere with him.”

Given the helter-skelter nature of broadcast news, Cronkite couldn’t afford to hold a grudge against the Kennedys for too long (and vice versa). Following the summer conventions—with Kennedy and Nixon becoming the nominees—Cronkite hatched an idea that would involve both politicians. CBS News was promoting a thirteen-week series modeled on
Pick the Winner
titled
Presidential Countdown
, aimed at taking an in-depth look at the presidential and vice presidential candidates through interviews.
Presidential Countdown
’s first telecast would be on September 12. The program would run for nine weeks, in half-hour segments on Mondays at 10:30 p.m. EST, until October 31. While Cronkite had done this in 1952 and 1956 with
Pick the Winner
, the popularity of the show reformatted as
Presidential Countdown
grew with Kennedy and Nixon being in such a tight electoral race. “I came up with the idea that during these interviews I would ask questions deliberately aimed at bringing out their personalities—or that was the idea,” Cronkite explained in the 1990s. “Up to that time, we’d been talking entirely about issues. That seems so strange today because we’ve gotten so far away from talking about issues. The concentration today is far too much about personalities. So I guess I have to admit to some complicity in helping that unfortunate development. But I wanted to find out what makes these people tick.”

All Cronkite’s formidable energies in the fall of 1960 centered on his political interview show catching fire. It would help erase his middling failure at the conventions. CBS had persuaded Westinghouse to be a sponsor of
Presidential Countdown
, which was a financial boon. Cronkite befriended campaign managers and pollsters. His programming vision was based on not leaking questions to the candidates in advance. It was to be a mano a mano exercise. For dramatic effect, Cronkite imagined he would confidently enter from one side of the room, and Kennedy, Nixon, Johnson, or Lodge, depending on the day, from the other side. They would meet in the middle, shake hands, sit down, and the no-holds-barred interview would begin. The candidate would do the Q&A cold turkey. No preparation. No handlers serving as pre-interview interlopers. While in principle Cronkite’s
Presidential Countdown
program sounded good, all the top CBS brass (minus Stanton) scoffed at the idea that any candidate would allow himself to be so vulnerable; Cronkite rose to the challenge of proving management wrong.

To jump-start
Presidential Countdown
, Cronkite went to see JFK at his Senate office. Kennedy was still miffed that Cronkite kept being quoted in the press about the burden of Catholicism for a presidential candidate. Everyone knew that Kennedy was incredibly suave and comfortable around the press. As a young man, he had even longed to be a reporter for a spell after his service in the Navy in the Second World War. Furthermore, because of his youth and inexperience, he needed TV exposure more than a two-term vice president such as Nixon. But the Wisconsin primary incident had left him annoyed with Cronkite. “You must think I’m crazy,” Kennedy told Cronkite when presented with the
Presidential Countdown
scheme. “I’m not going to do that. You can forget it.”

“Well,” Cronkite snapped, “if I got Vice President Nixon, you’d almost have to do it then, wouldn’t you?”

Kennedy just stared fixedly at Cronkite with disdain. “You’re not going to get him,” he said dismissively. “That’s not my problem.”

Refusing to be flummoxed by Kennedy, Cronkite hunted down Nixon, who was at his campaign headquarters at Sixteenth and K streets. Nixon listened intently to Cronkite’s pitch for the new CBS program. He kept nodding his head up and down at all the ground rules. “Sure. I think that’s fine,” Nixon said with good-natured warmth. “That’s a great idea. I’d be glad to participate.”

Cronkite claimed he was “dumbfounded” that Nixon had agreed to go along with the
Presidential Countdown
guidelines while Kennedy had balked. Go figure. Off Cronkite went, flagging down a taxi to shuttle him back to Kennedy’s office at the Russell Senate Office Building. Suddenly he had a panicked thought: Who would go first? Whoever went last on the show had the strategic advantage of studying the interview format. Cronkite asked the taxi driver to swing back to K Street. Up the elevator he went, to be greeted again by a cheerful Nixon. To Cronkite’s astonishment the former vice president was nonchalant about the pecking order. “I don’t care,” Nixon said. “I’ll be glad to go first if it’s any problem.”