Cronkite (36 page)

The entire CBS interview with JFK ran thirty minutes, but it was edited down to twelve minutes for the 6:30 p.m. broadcast. This proved to be a problem for the White House. Salinger complained vehemently to CBS News that the way Cronkite and Hewitt edited the video made Kennedy seem more dovish than the reality. But in truth, the blockbuster interview illuminated that the Kennedy administration was distancing U.S. policy from the South Vietnamese president, Ngo Dinh Diem.

Because Diem would be assassinated on November 2, 1963, the theory that JFK had thrown Diem overboard in the Cronkite interview gained credence. Salinger later published the book
With Kennedy
, in which he accused CBS News of “partial distortion.” Cronkite was forced to admit that CBS had indeed edited out the JFK line “I admire what the president [Diem] has done.” But Cronkite charged that Salinger was overstating the whole Hyannis episode to protect the New Frontier from seeming culpable in the assassination of Diem. “My assumption,” Cronkite wrote in his own defense, “is that Salinger was preparing a preemptive defense should history, as it has since, uncover the American part in the anti-Diem coup.”

Minus the controversial backstory and editing flap with Salinger, Cronkite’s first thirty-minute
CBS Evening News
broadcast was a ratings winner by any standard. (It caused CBS to end the
Eyewitness
show so that more resources could be put into the Cronkite show.) The features unfolded like articles in a glossy magazine: the interview with President Kennedy; a report on racial violence in Louisiana; a tour of Saigon with Henry Cabot Lodge (then the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam); and a segment on the musical
My Fair Lady
, as produced by a theater troupe in Japan. But the initial excitement over the thirty-minute news format died down in a hurry. Media critics were disappointed, though not surprised, to see that both CBS News and NBC News petered out of fresh ideas rather quickly. After the first few weeks, the shows didn’t seem to offer anything more, in terms of substance, than the fifteen-minute editions had. However, the long-term impact of the expanded news shows would prove integral to the pace and texture of the rest of the 1960s and beyond. Segments about civil rights and Vietnam got much more airtime because of the extended broadcast.

Besides the Kennedy exclusive and a chrome-spangled newsroom set, Cronkite received a lot of hype for what became his signature sign-off statement at the end of the half-hour broadcast. Lowell Thomas had “So long until tomorrow,” and Edward R. Murrow had “Good night and good luck.” Cronkite thought it appropriate that he have a tagline as well. At the end of each thirty-minute broadcast, the
CBS Evening News
was now closing with what Cronkite called a “quirk of fate” segment. It could be as sad as a cancer death or as happy as spring wildflowers. Either way, Cronkite needed a sign-off, and one that, depending on inflection, could work for both circumstances. After a great deal of thought, he came up with “That’s the way it is,” a modified poach of Murrow’s “That’s the way it was,” said during his famous C-47 bombing mission over Germany during World War II.

When Salant heard Cronkite deliver that line of schmaltz ending the first historic thirty-minute CBS broadcast—derived from an evergreen Murrowism, no less—he was ticked off. He immediately called Cronkite and told him that his sign-off was ridiculous. To the literal-minded Salant, it seemed as if Cronkite was bragging that CBS News never got stories wrong; they did, weekly. The next day at work, Salant pulled Cronkite aside, instructing him to come up with something more suitable. But as fate would have it, the critics loved “That’s the way it is.” The CBS switchboard was bombarded with supportive telephone calls. Within about forty-eight hours, Salant recognized that he was the odd man out; Cronkite had prevailed. As Cronkite later boasted in an Archive of American Television interview, his nightly catchphrase “caught on instantly.”

C
HAPTER
S
EVENTEEN

The Kennedy Assassination

STAR OF
NEWSWEEK
—EATING COTTAGE CHEESE AND PINEAPPLE—WIRE-REPORTING FROM DALLAS—MERRIMAN SMITH OF UPI—FLASH HORROR—STAYING CALM—NATIONAL PASTOR—IRON PANTS—BLOWING HIS COOL OFF THE AIR—FOLLOWING THE FUNERAL—THE BROADCASTING PERFORMANCE OF A LIFETIME—TRYING TO SOLVE THE MYSTERY—BACKING THE WARREN COMMISSION—PERHAPS IT WAS A CONSPIRACY—STILL NUMBER TWO

W
alter Cronkite was at his desk in the CBS broadcast newsroom at a little after 1:00 p.m. on November 22, 1963, eating a low-calorie cottage cheese and pineapple salad—a meal he never finished; Betsy had brown-bagged it for him. Most of his colleagues were enjoying the Friday Manhattan ritual of white-collar lunch at a decent restaurant to close a humdrum news week. Cronkite was in shirtsleeves with his tie loose, reading some incoming dispatches from Europe and Southeast Asia. Hewitt was floating around the building, plotting the 6:30 p.m. broadcast. Just down the hall from Cronkite’s desk, the
CBS Evening News
news editor, Ed Bliss Jr., a
New York Herald Tribune
veteran, was at the Teletype machines, glancing through stories about President Kennedy speaking at a breakfast in Fort Worth, Texas. Afterward, Kennedy was due to fly to nearby Dallas in Air Force One before a downtown motorcade took him to the Trade Mart for an international affairs speech.

Piled high on Cronkite’s desk were recent
Newsweek
issues, one with his photographic profile on the cover; the image conveyed reportorial suaveness and an all-encompassing decency. When, in 1961, the chairman of the FCC, Newton N. Minow, declared television a “vast wasteland,” he clearly did not have this forty-six-year-old
Newsweek
cover star in mind. Cronkite’s “Golden Throat” act, as
Newsweek
put it, carried a steadily growing heft as the year wound down. Americans liked rooting for the underdog. Cronkite was perfectly positioned: he was the suppertime staple on 169 TV stations across America; Huntley-Brinkley aired on 183. The photograph’s accompanying cover line read, “The TV News Battle” (an allusion to the wildly competitive audience-share ratings dance between CBS and NBC). CBS News was poised to win the ratings war over NBC’s
Huntley-Brinkley Report
(which Cronkite later called “H-B”). “Hell, yes, there’s a battle,” Cronkite was quoted as saying. “I don’t feel at a disadvantage with two against one. Let ’em put up four in there if they want to. I’ve taken on two. I can take on four.”

That Friday afternoon, everything was also calm at the Washington bureau on M Street. Bill Small had CBS News White House correspondent Robert Pierpoint following Kennedy on his November 21–23 swing through four Texas cities: Houston, San Antonio, Fort Worth, and Dallas. When Kennedy had hopscotched around Florida a few days earlier—making stops in Miami, Palm Beach, Tampa, and Cape Canaveral all in one day—Lew Wood of CBS News’ southern bureau (based at WWL in New Orleans) found it impossible to keep up with the off-and-up Air Force One. Flummoxed by his Florida experience, Wood recommended to Bliss, who agreed, that for the Texas trip three CBS crews—those of Dan Rather, Nelson Benton, and himself—be dispatched. A fourth crew from Chicago was even added. “We were,” Wood recalled, “loaded for bear.”

With Rather, Pierpoint, Benton, and Wood broadcasting from Texas, CBS News had the president’s whirlwind trip well covered. Pool reporting would also enhance the coverage. Wood was assigned to report on a Kennedy fund-raising dinner for a Texas congressman at Houston’s Rice Hotel. As Air Force One whisked POTUS away to Fort Worth, the Wood crew drove the 250 prairie miles to catch up with him. Wood caught up with Kennedy on the morning of November 22 at the Texas Star Hotel in Fort Worth. As the president shook hands with his adoring fans, his wife, Jackie, was dressing in their oversized suite with original Picassos and Monets hanging in all five rooms. Wood then followed Kennedy to nearby Carswell Air Force Base, where the president worked an appreciative receiving line of military families before flying to Love Field in Dallas. “We drove back to Love Field for our next assignment after Kennedy’s Dallas motorcade and speech at the Trade Mart,” Wood recalled. “Dan Rather was downtown to cover the motorcade itself, and remained at KRLD, monitoring the event.”

Wood now had a little time to kill, so he took the crew to lunch at the Ramada Inn at Love Field. It would be a while before Kennedy finished his Trade Mart speech, so why not stop for a burger? With a little free time finally, Wood decided to check in with Rather at KRLD-TV, the Dallas CBS affiliate where he was stationed. Covering a presidential motorcade was tough for TV crews (and everyone else involved). The Kennedys had throngs of people goggling at them, full of cheers, questions, and the occasional boos. For Rather and Wood, fear that CBS wouldn’t shoot the best motorcade film footage, that NBC or ABC would one-up them, fueled their aggressiveness.

While Wood chatted with Rather about the Texas Star Hotel, Carswell Air Force Base, and Love Field events, there was an abrupt intrusion. “Hold on, Lew . . . don’t go away,” Rather said. Within a minute or two, Rather was back on the phone and said, “The president’s been shot . . . get to Parkland Memorial Hospital as fast as you can!” Hanging up, Wood rushed into the Ramada dining room, shouting
pronto
to his crew. CBS News cameraman Wendell Hoffman undoubtedly pestered Wood about what was happening. Wood whispered to him that Kennedy had been shot en route to the Trade Mart.

“WHAT, the president’s been shot?” Hoffman blurted out in his Kansas farmer’s voice.

Everyone in the Ramada dining room heard Hoffman’s resounding disbelief. A waiter dropped the dishes he was carrying and a woman gasped. Word was that the Secret Service had removed the bubble top on the president’s four-door 1961 Lincoln Continental convertible, which wasn’t bulletproof or even bullet-resistant, so Kennedy could enjoy the fair weather and interact more with the crowds during the ten-mile motorcade into downtown Dallas. “We figured there might be some good footage for Walter to run of Kennedy glad-handing,” Pierpoint recalled. “I thought we had a good chance of leading that Friday’s news.”

NBC News had sent a young reporter, Robert MacNeil, who started his career at ITV in London, to cover the presidential trip; he rode in one of the buses in the motorcade. Four cars behind Kennedy, ABC News’ Bob Clark rode with the two wire service reporters, United Press International’s congenial Merriman Smith and his hard-shelled Associated Press rival, Jack Bell. At fifty-one years of age, Smith was the chief Washington reporter for UPI, a job Cronkite himself had coveted after World War II. Clark and Bell were in the backseat of the limousine; “Smitty,” as Cronkite called Smith, rode up front. AT&T had supplied the car in recognition of the large amount of business the news services transacted over the telephone wires. As AT&T property, it was equipped with a car phone in the front seat. This hotline was how the world first learned that Kennedy had been shot.

About 12:30 (1:30 p.m. EST), those reporters riding in the presidential motorcade, sweating in the seventy-six-degree heat, heard loud, sharp cracks cutting through the din of the procession. They were winding their way through downtown Dallas, about to turn on Elm Street in Dealey Plaza. They couldn’t see what was happening at the front of the motorcade, but Smith was a gun collector and recognized the triple pops of a bolt-action weapon. He ignored the comments around him that a police motorcycle must have backfired. Picking up the car’s telephone, Smith called the local UPI office. All the reporters in Dallas were now operating on reflex. They would need good instincts in the ensuing mayhem and mass confusion. Someone had indeed fired three shots from an upper floor of the redbrick Texas School Book Depository building. A mortal terror was in the air, a gnawing sense of disbelief as the motorcade sped up and raced to the Stemmons Freeway to get to Parkland Memorial Hospital. A Secret Service agent leapt into the rear of the presidential vehicle to prevent the First Lady, who had climbed out of the rear seat, from crawling onto the limo’s trunk deck.

Those bullets Smith heard were very real. The first one missed its intended target. The second bullet hit the president high in his shoulder and exited from his throat—a survivable wound. But the final, third, bullet entered Kennedy’s right ear, blowing out brain tissue and skull fragments. Texas governor John Connally, riding in the same car as Kennedy beside his wife, Nellie, was shot in the chest. The First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, screamed, “My God, they’ve killed Jack. . . . They’ve killed my husband, Jack, Jack!”

At 1:34 p.m. in the CBS newsroom in New York, Bliss, a veteran Murrow writer and editor who started his journalism career at the
Bucyrys Telegraph-Forum
in Ohio, was glancing through the Teletype rolls from the wire services when the bell on the UPI machine rang five times. A bell always attracted an editor’s attention; five signaled an “urgent story.” The only higher designation was a fifteen-bell “flash.” Bliss studied the “BULLETIN” story as it was typed out on the machine ticker tape scroll:

UPI A7N DA

PRECEDE KENNEDY

DALLAS, NOV.22 (UPI)—THREE SHOTS WERE FIRED AT PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S MOTORCADE TODAY IN DOWNTOWN DALLAS.

JT1234PCS.

The UPI New York bureau immediately forbade other bureaus from filing stories and issued the highly unusual instruction: “DA IT YRS NY” (“Dallas, it’s yours. New York”). Cronkite rushed to the UPI machine at the sound of the bells. He and Bliss together read Smith’s convoluted dispatch, slightly dizzy with disbelief. For just two or three seconds Cronkite was numb with trepidation. “Got a shooting in Dallas!” he shouted authoritatively to the newsroom. Nothing further was coming over the other Teletypes. Had the gunfire been serious or not? Frenzy ensued as CBS News quickly tried to garner more information from Texas. When word of the shooting reached Dan Rather at KRLD-TV, he sprinted toward Dealey Plaza. At 1:36 p.m. EST, ABC News radio reported the shooting of Kennedy. Rather was trying to get the lay of the land. Although Rather’s version of events has changed over the years, with an aim of placing himself nearer the site of the shooting, Lew Wood swears he was actually holed up inside KRLD-TV.

Workaday competition among the news outfits didn’t melt away as the Dallas tragedy took its inevitable course. On the contrary, it intensified. Rather, a native Texan, wanted to own the story. Immediately, he ordered a search for home movies from someone in the crowd—wanting to document the president’s visit—might have taken of the shooting. Dick Salant, up in New York, put together a special unit to investigate the crime ASAP. The AT&T “pool car” broke from the motorcade route, rushing instead to Parkland Memorial Hospital. UPI’s Merriman Smith, dean of the White House correspondents, who had been an Eisenhower favorite, knew the story was only beginning to unfold and kept the car phone in his hands. Jack Bell demanded the phone so he could file a story to AP, but Smith mumbled that he had a bad connection. Bell knew this was a lie. With the car speeding through the Dallas streets at seventy miles an hour (and probably more), Bell pounded on Smith with both fists, determined to get the damn phone. As the car reached Parkland Memorial, Smith, having filed with the Dallas UPI office, finally tossed the phone to his rival and leapt out of the vehicle, sprinting inside the hospital.

The Kennedy assassination was two massive stories rolled into one: the shooting mystery and a larger question of whether the U.S. government was under siege. Smith of UPI, still pushing to outrun Bell of AP, spoke to a Secret Service agent at the hospital, who told him the president was dead. Smith chose not to report it without further confirmation. After hospital employees leaked more bleak information, Smith phoned another dispatch to his office. It was becoming more and more apparent that the president might be dead. Smith’s clumsily written scoop went over the wire, and at 1:39 p.m. in New York, fifteen bells rang on the Teletype at CBS.

FLASH

FLASH

KENNEDY SERIOUSLY WOUNDED PERHAPS SERIOUSLY PERHAPS FATALLY BY ASSASSINS BULLET

JT1239PCS

One UPI man (Smith) was passing the story on to another UP veteran (Cronkite). The wire service bells were ringing worldwide. Cronkite, who was managing editor in addition to being CBS’s on-air anchorman, read Smith’s dispatch and pounced. “Let’s get on the air,” he called out, unfazed. “Let’s get on the air.” The network was then broadcasting a popular soap opera,
As the World Turns
. Cronkite was already in the main studio, the CBS newsroom, but the cameras needed ten or fifteen minutes to warm up. The studio lights just weren’t “hot” for broadcast. Refusing to be derailed by the lighting delay, Cronkite rushed to an empty radio studio adjacent to the TV studio. Hewitt called the network’s master control and arranged for a patch into the television broadcast.
As the World Turns
—with a love-warped family Thanksgiving dinner plot—was replaced with a generic graphic slide reading, “CBS News Bulletin.” Cronkite’s clear and modulated voice, live from the radio booth, went out over the airwaves at 1:40 p.m. EST. Cronkite’s words, “We interrupt this program,” could be heard. But only the CBS eye logo was displayed on-screen:

Here is a bulletin from CBS News. In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas. The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting.

There was an interlude of stillness, then CBS returned to
As the World Turns
, which was taking a commercial break for Nescafé coffee. Cronkite, using the UPI report, had beaten NBC in announcing the Dallas event on the air by nearly a minute. Even as Cronkite was making the announcement, slowly and emphatically filling out the terse phrasing of Smith’s 1:39 p.m. EST report, a staffer slipped into the studio and handed him another wire service dispatch. He scanned it quickly. “More details just arrived,” Cronkite said on-air with grim determination, clearly disturbed by the update. “These details, about the same as previously: President Kennedy shot today just as his motorcade left downtown Dallas. Mrs. Kennedy jumped up and grabbed Mr. Kennedy; she called, ‘Oh, no!’ The motorcade sped on.” Cronkite returned to Smith’s report. “The United Press says that the wounds for President Kennedy, perhaps, could be fatal. Repeating, a bulletin from CBS News: President Kennedy has been shot by a would-be assassin in Dallas, Texas. Stay tuned to CBS News for further details.”