Cronkite (26 page)

On May 5, 1961, Shepard suited up to be shot into space on a Redstone rocket. Unlike Gagarin, Shepard had some control over
Freedom 7
. All America was watching on television; the possibility of a fireball disaster was very real. The entire mission was a game of blind man’s bluff. Shepard himself mumbled to the Lord to make sure he didn’t “fuck up.” According to fellow Mercury astronaut John Glenn, when reporters asked Shepard what he thought about while he was sitting on top of the Mercury Redstone rocket, waiting for liftoff, he had replied, “I wasn’t scared, but I was up there looking around, and suddenly I realized I was sitting on top of a rocket built by the lowest bidder.”

What worried Cronkite about the
Freedom 7
mission was that it seemed rushed. He felt that NASA (post-Gagarin) was hell-bent on launching Shepard ASAP, putting his life at unnecessary jeopardy, anything to avoid further embarrassment. “We feared that Shepard’s flight was premature and that NASA was taking a terrible risk,” Cronkite recalled. “I watched that launch with greater trepidation than any of the many space flights I would see in the years to come.” Rocketry was so uncertain in 1961 that it wasn’t an exaggeration to think that Shepard was going on a possible suicide mission. “We had been watching failure after failure—rockets blowing up on the pad, tumbling from the air a few hundred feet up,” Cronkite explained to
The
Christian Science Monitor
. “And now, suddenly, a man was going to sit on top of all the fireworks.”

CBS News’ studio consisted of Cronkite and Socolow in a station wagon parked in Cape Canaveral. Wussler was ensconced in a nearby control trailer. As launch day approached, adrenaline coursed through Cronkite. Some competitors thought he must have been hopped up on amphetamines. When Shepard was blasted 116 miles up (in a flight that lasted only fifteen minutes) Cronkite, broadcasting from the car, was the aerospace version of Murrow reporting from an in-flight C-47 during World War II. By the time Shepard’s capsule was recovered at sea, he was the national hero. Cronkite, full of aw-shucks expressions, was beside himself with patriotic joy, saying excitedly to CBS colleagues, “We did it! We did it!”

As was prearranged, Cronkite nabbed the big Shepard exclusive interview for
Eyewitness
later that very afternoon. Cronkite had trumped NBC, beaten them badly on all accounts. Overnight, Cronkite found his own name attached to Shepard’s on wire service stories. One could argue that Shepard had made Cronkite a mega TV star. The Kennedy administration treated Shepard as the modern American paragon in the tradition of Audie Murphy, the highly decorated soldier-turned-actor of World War II. Besides a grand postflight ticker tape parade down Fifth Avenue in New York, Shepard actually accompanied Kennedy to the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) meeting in Washington, D.C., just three days after splashdown and the day before FCC chairman Newton Minow delivered his excoriating critique of TV as a “vast wasteland” to the same NAB attendees. After ripping into TV executives for running pablum such as rigged game shows and idiotic comedies on the airwaves, Minow singled out the excellence of the Shepard coverage by CBS as the grand exception to the rule. When he praised the “depth of broadcast’s contribution to public understanding” of the Mercury program, he was patting Cronkite on the back.

With the excitement of President Kennedy’s pledge to put a man on the Moon by decade’s end, Cronkite’s next major CBS News assignment was the suborbital space flight of
Liberty Bell 7
, on Friday, July 21, 1961, with astronaut Virgil “Gus” Grissom aboard the MR-4 capsule. The flight’s purpose was to acclimate man to each stage of a complete space flight and study human physiological reactions to flying in space. NASA wouldn’t allow CBS to air live Grissom broadcasting from space. Instead, Cronkite set up shop at Cape Canaveral with a clear view of the Mercury-Redstone booster spacecraft. He was relegated to conversing on air with John “Shorty” Powers of NASA Command and Control. Cronkite didn’t care. The important thing was that Stanton, as promised, had chosen him over Harry Reasoner to be the CBS voice of NASA’s launch. Cronkite, a nervous wreck, sounded—for fifteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds that evening—like a play-by-play horserace announcer, describing moments with controlled angst.

Cronkite
: You just saw the umbilical cord come away now.

Powers
: Thirty seconds and counting.

Cronkite
: That means that all ground contact with the capsule, with the rocket, has now ended.

Powers
: Periscope has retracted—15 seconds and counting. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 . . . Ignition. Liftoff! Liftoff! Control by pilot.

Cronkite (joyfully)
: It looks good, it looks like a good launch! Go, baby, go! Straight as an arrow. Should be a little pitch over here, to go into the trajectory. It looks like a good launch!

Powers
: Trajectory is A-OK. Flight surgeon reports the pilot is in excellent physical condition. Gus reports he is picking up a little bit of the noise and vibration. The fuel is GO. One and a half Gs. The cabin pressure has settled down to 5. Trajectory reported GO. Cabin pressure holding 5.5. Fuel is GO; two and a half Gs. Oxygen is GO. All systems are GO. And Gus Grissom sounds like a very confident test pilot today.

It’s apparent that Powers was the real reporter that evening. Cronkite was only his rah-rah color man. But this arrangement turned out to work in Cronkite’s favor. By letting Powers be the dominant voice Cronkite, with a three-dimensional map tracing the path of the space capsule as aid, became deeply trusted at NASA; he was uplifting, controllable, willingly submissive, part of the cold war team, the facile voice of a fellow player. Fate had made them allies. From the Shepard-Grissom missions forward, NASA brought Cronkite into the family fold, giving him national security information no one else received. He was Mr. Full Access Pass.

Cronkite, hitching his wagon to NASA astronauts, was undoubtedly rising in public stature. Space allowed him to reconfigure his career up from puppetry on
The Morning Show
with grace. Fashioning himself as elder statesman of World War II, he scored a coup in late 1961 with an eleven-hour oral history interview with Dwight Eisenhower at his farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Producer Ed Jones cut it down so CBS could run three hourlong
CBS Reports
prime-time shows. It was Eisenhower’s first extended TV appearance since leaving the White House. Cronkite gave the ex-president a lead-in question and let him reminisce. In a
New York Times
review, Jack Gould wrote that Cronkite—and executive producer Fred Friendly, who had received a pro-Cronkite letter from Ike—had brilliantly “captured the phenomenon of Eisenhower like never before.” Jack O’Brian of the
New York Journal American
likewise credited Cronkite with conducting a “brilliant historical interview.”

Although the forty-six-year-old Cronkite was receiving kudos for his NASA reports and the Eisenhower interview, they were hardly serious investigative journalism. Getting spoon-fed press releases from the U.S. government wasn’t Pulitzer-worthy stuff. So Cronkite organized a team at CBS News to look into the dark world of police corruption. Ever since he had worked as a bookie joint announcer in Austin to make extra cash as a University of Texas student, he’d been fascinated by police turning a blind eye to criminal activity. Were cops across America being bought off? How much money was being pocketed by police in collaboration with gambling rings?

Cronkite’s CBS News team focused on Boston’s police and infiltrated a bookmaking parlor undetected. CBS set up a hidden camera across the street from the joint and was able to show uniformed police officers coming and going but never shutting down the operation. One thousand Bostonians a day visited this illegal establishment. CBS producer Jay McMullen, under the direction of Friendly and Cronkite, smuggled an 8mm camera into the gambling den by concealing it in his lunch box. Hours of footage were shot of customers placing off-track bets. The
CBS Reports
segment, “Biography of a Bookie Joint,” aired on November 30, 1961, with Cronkite as host-narrator. (The show was not broadcast in Boston because of pending prosecutions.) The CBS investigation threw the Boston police into disarray. As Cronkite noted to close the program, “At this point, you may be inclined to say, ���Well, those people in Boston certainly have their problems.’ Don’t deceive yourself. The chances are very great that you have the same problem in your community.”

If there was a downside to Cronkite’s busy schedule, it was that he was away from home a lot. In the fall of 1961, when the CBS season began, Cronkite’s three children—Nancy, twelve; Kathy, eleven; and Chip, four—had to vie for Dad’s time with the world of journalism. Betsy had learned that her husband would cancel dinner at the last minute because he needed to be in Scotland to report on a U.S. nuclear base at Holy Loch, or in Camp Century, Greenland, headed toward the North Pole. When at home, Cronkite—according to Lewis H. Lapham of
The
Saturday Evening Post
—was competitive beyond belief; he was a “relentless adversary,” even when playing Monopoly with the kids. And that was only if spare hours away from CBS could be found. “There’s no physical exhaustion,” Cronkite said, “because my adrenaline pumps faster the more I do.”

Of all the interviews Cronkite conducted in 1961, the one he enjoyed most was a
CBS Reports
conversation with the seventy-two-year-old Walter Lippmann, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1958 “Today and Tomorrow” columns. Cronkite had been an ardent reader of Lippmann since the 1930s. Appearing with Cronkite just days before Christmas, Lippmann assessed the Kennedy administration on foreign policy as identical to the Eisenhower administration, only “thirty years younger.” The esteemed journalist–political philosopher, a luminary to Cronkite, embraced the European Common Market, denounced Fidel Castro as “a demented man,” and cautioned that the radical right in the United States was becoming fanatically anti-communist. The show was marketed as “Walter Lippmann, Year End.” Cronkite lapped up every minute of the exchange. After the frivolity of Mike Todd’s elephants, pretending to interview Benedict Arnold on
You Are There
, having to hand off to UNIVAC on Election Night, and co-anchoring
The
Morning Show
with Charlemane, Cronkite had earned the honor of getting to talk about the cold war with Mr. Lippmann.

Compared to a two-camera job like the Lippmann interview, covering human spaceflight for television was wildly dramatic and very expensive. But CBS seemed not to be worried about costs now: it had aired the Shepard and Grissom launches without commercials. Even when astronaut John Glenn’s
Friendship 7
mission was scrubbed, or postponed, nearly ten times in early 1962, Cronkite and company didn’t complain. They knew that when the ominous phrase “T-minus zero” was heard, all Americans would be glued to their TV sets.

CBS had pooled its resources at Cape Canaveral with those of the other networks to cover the Mercury program. For the Glenn mission, it had a team of four hundred correspondents, cameramen, producers, directors, and technicians to shoot Glenn from all angles. Cronkite knew that Glenn’s orbit was going to be a hell of a story—especially for CBS, because it had assigned more resources to all-things-NASA than any other news source. When Glenn first met Cronkite in 1959 at Cape Canaveral, he was flabbergasted by how knowledgeable the broadcaster was about the intricacies of Project Mercury. “Space travel was so new that most people didn’t know how to relate to it,” Glenn recalled. “They understood an Indy driver because they knew how to turn a steering wheel right or left. Walter’s gift was helping the public understand the science of space. He was a teacher. His CBS broadcasts were the main factor in the public understanding my mission.”

After seven postponements and what seemed like a trillion difficulties, the big day finally arrived. The clouds cleared and the wind dropped, prompting Mercury Control to at last greenlight the Glenn mission. On February 20, 1962, with over 40 million American homes tuned in at 9:17 a.m. EST, and with Glenn aboard the highly complex, phone booth–sized
Friendship 7
capsule, the rocket lifted off like a heat-seeking missile. Excitement overcame Cronkite, who continued to broadcast for the next ten hours under the banner “Man in Orbit: The Flight of John Glenn.” There weren’t live cameras aboard any of the Mercury spacecraft (as there would be in later Apollo missions), so once the rocket blasted off, Cronkite engaged in what one CBS hand called “a glorified radio broadcast,” appearing on air 140 times. He tied together CBS’s coverage of the event beautifully. At the CBS News control center, only 8,800 feet away from the Mercury launchpad, was the indefatigable Cronkite. As Glenn circled Earth three times during his four-hour, fifty-five-minute, twenty-three-second flight, Cronkite became the voice of what
The New York Times
called the orbit that “united the nation and the world in a common sharing of the excitement, tension, and drama” created by TV’s coverage.

During the marathon coverage, Cronkite alerted CBS viewers to the fact that the capsule’s heat shield had come loose and adjustments would have to be made to the craft’s trajectory on splashdown. When he landed, Glenn, a lieutenant colonel, the so-called Clean Marine, became the biggest exploration hero of the century since Charles Lindbergh in 1927. “The best moment,” Cronkite wrote in a syndicated column, “was when Shorty Powers announced from Mercury Control: ‘We have a hale and hearty astronaut.’ ”

The Glenn orbital flight and safe return was Cronkite’s grandest moment yet in journalism. The broadcast set him free. Basking in the glory, Cronkite packed his pipe and puffed with contentment. Whether it was talking to members of the Glenn family from the astronaut’s hometown of New Concord, Ohio, or to employees of the aircraft company in St. Louis where the capsule was built, Cronkite was a scoop machine. And Bob Wussler was always a step ahead of the press pack with graphics. At one point or another on that historic day, Cronkite spoke with correspondents in London, Paris, and Moscow. For the Glenn coverage, Cronkite was on CBS for nine hours and fifteen minutes. “When President Kennedy comes to pin a medal on the hero,” an amazed Alistair Cooke wrote in
The
Manchester Guardian
, “he might have a ribbon ready for Mr. Cronkite, who made engrossing sense of a miracle otherwise beyond the comprehension of the hundred million Americans who are watching.”