Cronkite (37 page)

Cronkite was nothing if not rivalrous. Years later, he shamelessly bragged about CBS’s scoop over NBC and ABC, a boast that, if written by anybody else, would have seemed ghoulish. (“We beat NBC onto the air by almost a minute,” he proudly recalled in his memoir.) Taken without an understanding of the TV news industry, such statements were callous. But hypercompetitiveness, especially in the realm of historic breaking news like the JFK assassination, remains a powerful reality in the TV news world. In American journalism, being first, and right, has always brought the critics’ accolades. After that, you
own
the story for days to come. Smith had beaten Bell by the luck of sitting near the pool car phone. It was also Smith who first used the term
grassy knoll
in a dispatch; the label has become part of the American lexicon when discussing the Kennedy assassination.

After returning to the soap opera broadcast, for about ten minutes CBS started regularly interrupting
As the World
turns with updates from Cronkite about President Kennedy and Governor Connally. By now some CBS staffer was handing him an update every minute. As the crisis deepened, Eddie Barker, news director of KRLD-TV, the CBS affiliate in Dallas, offered the best on-the-ground reporting, for he spoke directly to a Parkland Memorial Hospital doctor. A mass of ominous details, such as the arrival of two priests at the hospital, kept dribbling in from Dallas. As a commercial for Friskies puppy food ran, Cronkite assembled the puzzle of the Dallas story in the CBS radio studio. Friskies would be the last commercial CBS would run for many hours. When the broadcast returned, Cronkite again took over the microphone, and he was the CBS network incarnate from that point on for the next five hours. CBS News stayed on the air under direct instruction from Bill Paley. Cronkite wasn’t allowed to return to regular programming, a decision that obviously pleased the anchor. “Because of Barker and Rather,” Cronkite asserted, “we were on top of the story throughout.”

Perhaps because Cronkite had spent time in the 1930s working out of Dallas’s UP office, he felt ideally suited to discuss that city’s downtown grid. He knew the bus lines. Because the Dallas tragedy came without a warning flare, the coverage of the Kennedy assassination on November 22 was entirely different from any major story that Cronkite, Hewitt, or even Bliss had ever grappled with. More than 175 million traumatized Americans tuned in to the three major networks for updates—the largest audience in TV history until then. CBS stayed live for fifty-five hours (with Cronkite carrying the bulk of the burden), ABC-TV for sixty hours, and NBC-TV for seventy-one hours and thirty-six minutes.

Like a trapeze artist without a net, Cronkite was on his own that November 22, anchoring only by his wit. He had the ability to smoothly amalgamate three or even more jobs at once with ease. He had a teacher’s desire to share knowledge with an audience. Just like any other emergency worker, when a crisis occurred, “the adrenaline pumps,” Cronkite said; a professional has a “job to do and you do the job.” He was a sort of multidimensional synthesizer, spinning order out of chaos, doing his editing, producing, and announcing while on air that Friday. What the CBS audience heard was not a series of dispatches but a dramatic story of remarkable roundness and clarity unfolding in real time. He was communicating to viewers that they were now
witnesses
—secondary ones, for sure—but witnesses nevertheless to an epoch-defining event. “The details would come in and it would build up in me,” Cronkite later reminisced. “I don’t even recall the spots.”

Cronkite had help from loyal lieutenants in Dallas, New York, and Washington, to be sure. CBS was the largest news organization in television, yet in the Kennedy assassination drama, Cronkite’s raw ability to communicate would make or break the network’s coverage. At first, he struggled to find the right words, as if cautiously making his way through a thicket of brambles. But before long, he had created a modulated rhythm for the broadcast that remained poignant for days. The grotesque surrealism of the Dallas chaos brought out his professional best. Never putting on his suit jacket, remaining in shirtsleeves for the duration of the epic broadcast, Cronkite brilliantly balanced his composure with skillful interludes of raw emotion. He was memorable without swamping the story. “Walter ate all of this up,” Socolow recalled. “He loved the excitement of the Dallas story. Don’t get me wrong, he didn’t like the president being shot. But he loved the frenetic newsroom utility.”

No one handled his TV duties during the Kennedy assassination ordeal with the high grace notes of Cronkite. NBC was on the air as the local WNBC-TV (New York) anchorman, Bill Ryan, broadcast the Dallas news. He was soon joined by Chet Huntley and Frank McGee, that network’s first-string anchor for live events (including space reporting). ABC started its coverage with reporter Jim Hagerty, former president Eisenhower’s press secretary, who was then replaced by the regular anchor, Ron Cochran, and reporter Ed Silverman. Howard K. Smith, then on a jet returning from Europe, became a mainstay on ABC almost as soon as the plane landed in New York. All the networks reported details of the shooting as they came in, but the key was Kennedy’s condition. Was he dead or alive? CBS News’ Robert Pierpoint was at Parkland when he made a call to Barker of KRLD-TV, who had spoken to a doctor who knew (for sure) that Kennedy was dead. Barker announced the death on KRLD at 1:18 p.m. EST, before anyone else, later regretting he omitted the detail of Jackie Kennedy’s pink Chanel suit being saturated with blood. “I was in shock,” Barker said. A few well-intentioned people suggested that Jackie change out of the suit. “No,” she replied, “let them see what they’ve done.”

CBS Radio went with Barker’s KRLD-TV story and announced nationally that the president was dead, but CBS Television wouldn’t follow suit. Cronkite urged caution. He felt a “chill” when he heard Kennedy’s death had been reported on CBS Radio. What if Kennedy weren’t dead? What if Barker had reported bum information from a Dallas doctor?

At 12:40 p.m. CST, Merriman Smith sent a lede on the UPI wire that quoted a Secret Service agent confirming that the president was indeed deceased. A correspondent for KRLD-TV made reference to such reports while the affiliate was on a feed into CBS, but Cronkite still refrained from airing it. NBC was also cautious, awaiting firm confirmation from Parkland Memorial Hospital. No one was certain who had killed the president or whether it was part of a larger attack on America. A hell’s stew of conspiracy theories would eventually bubble forth, blaming the murder on Fidel Castro, Lee Harvey Oswald, LBJ, the Mafia, the CIA, the Dallas Police Department, and the Kremlin. Television was the fastest way to deliver news—words and pictures—and likewise, the fastest way to spread mere conjecture. As the afternoon spun forward, even the most aggressive television veterans were daunted by the task at hand: making sure they didn’t accidentally feed the conspiracy.

From CBS News headquarters in New York, Hewitt anxiously called Rather and Pierpoint down in Dallas. Who were Barker’s sources for the report that Kennedy was dead? Rather told Hewitt about a priest and a doctor, but Cronkite wanted more specifics before he could break the news definitively. “Even if you are right (and God help you if you are wrong),” Rather later explained of Hewitt’s wise hesitation, “you are not going to go with a story of that proportion as confidently on television as you would on radio. It’s just the different intensity of the two mediums, the size of the audience, the weight of the news.”

Hewitt handed his conversation notes with Rather to Cronkite, who was talking on the air. Although Cronkite had been more cautious regarding false starts and piecemeal reconstructions, he now chose to use the Rather ledes from Dallas. “We just have a report from our correspondent Dan Rather in Dallas,” Cronkite said, “that he has confirmed that President Kennedy is dead. We still have no official confirmation of this, however. It’s a report from our correspondent Dan Rather in Dallas, Texas.” Cronkite’s punctuated delivery was bracing. Covering his own back, Cronkite used Rather as his potential fall guy if the Barker report proved false. Cronkite wasn’t yet ready to attach his own mint
Newsweek
cover name to a possibly untrue announcement of Kennedy’s passing. Hesitation was his ally of the moment. Confirmation from Parkland—not Rather—was the ultimate best source from Cronkite’s cautious perspective. If Kennedy had survived, then Rather would have gotten thrown under the bus.

On NBC, McGee took the lead, while Huntley and Ryan were on hand to add to the discussion. ABC’s coverage was in the able hands of Cochran and Silverman, though ABC also used one or two feeds from Barker of KRLD-TV. However, even as Cochran emphasized that all reports regarding Kennedy’s condition were unconfirmed, the president’s name and “1917–1963” appeared on-screen. That tombstone-like R.I.P. graphic drove home the reality of Kennedy’s death in a visually visceral way.

Missing from CBS News’ coverage of the Kennedy assassination that November 22 was Edward R. Murrow. Rumor had it that Murrow, unhappy at USIA, might return to CBS in early 1963 to do documentaries. But in fact he had undergone emergency cancer surgery to remove his left lung. The three-hour operation left him weak and feeble, horizontal in bed throughout the autumn, mired in depression. The radiation he had endured discolored his chest to a coarse leathery brown shade. “Whoever said talk is cheap,” Murrow quipped, “had two lungs.” When Murrow’s wife, Janet, told him Kennedy had been shot, he felt nauseous. He watched Cronkite’s commentary that dark day, calling it one long, flawless note.

With his hair slightly tousled and black horn-rimmed glasses on, Cronkite actually looked supremely unpolished during his broadcast. A man somehow in need of a shave, eventually he had no whiskers. At least the air-conditioning system kept him from sweating under the hot lights. “I was really just a disreputable character up there on the air,” he later said, “as far as my appearance went.” That characterization was overdrawn, but Cronkite’s unpowdered face and work-grunt attire indeed added to the urgency of the moment. As he described the unsettled atmosphere in Dallas during the weeks preceding the president’s trip, setting the stage for JFK’s visit, he was interrupted by someone off-camera handing him yet another piece of paper. He quickly absorbed the note’s contents. His eyes became wells of sadness. Removing his glasses, fidgeting with them, he shot an intense look at the camera—at the viewer—as though to warn people to prepare themselves. He put his glasses back on and tried to speak. Pulling himself together, Cronkite read the newest dispatch with pained authority:

“From Dallas, Texas, the flash apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1 o’clock p.m. Central Standard Time, 2 o’clock, Eastern Standard Time, some thirty-eight minutes ago.”

The wall clock now drew Cronkite’s attention. Assuming the role of historian, he wanted to record the exact time of the momentous announcement. “We knew it was coming,” Cronkite recalled of the death flash, “but still it was hard to say.” With eyes affixed to the big-and-little-hands, Cronkite didn’t talk for two or three seconds. He was mute, searching for meaning in a world turned absurd. He pursed his mouth, a recognition of shock and sorrow that nearly every viewer shared simultaneously. “It was touch and go there for a few seconds,” he later explained, “before I could continue.” Decades later, speaking to the Archive of American Television, Cronkite explained that “the psychological trauma didn’t touch him” until he “hit that punch line that he’s dead.”

Unbeknownst to Cronkite, Vice President Johnson had been whisked by the Secret Service to Air Force One, parked at Love Field; he was hungry for accurate information about the extent of the assassination plot. Immediately Johnson ordered the shades drawn. The lack of air circulation made the 707 feel like a swamp. Johnson walked briskly down the aisle to Air Force One’s little communications room where agents, wearing headsets, were actively gathering intelligence. Johnson, demanding answers more quickly, hurried to his private stateroom to watch Cronkite. “Shhh . . . shhh,” Johnson said with his finger to his mouth, hoping to learn new details about Dallas from CBS News. Cronkite—dispatching his roving detectives Rather, Wood, Benton, and Pierpoint—was already ahead of the FBI in finding out biographical information about the bizarre misfit named Lee Harvey Oswald.

To Cronkite’s amazement, Oswald, the alleged assassin, had quietly walked away from the Texas School Book Depository after the shooting and ridden a public bus to the neighborhood where he shared a flat at 1026 North Beckley. There, he grabbed his loaded .38 caliber pistol and walked back out into the bright afternoon. When Dallas police officer James Tippit, who had heard a Wanted Man description of the assassin on the radio, stopped Oswald and asked for his identification, Kennedy’s murderer pulled out his pistol and shot and killed him. Oswald then sought sanctuary in the nearby Texas Theatre without paying, prompting the terrified cashier to call the police. With
War Is Hell
, starring Tony Russel, playing on the big screen, the Dallas cops scuffled with Oswald briefly before arresting him.

The CBS News team grew determined to help Cronkite own the Kennedy assassination coverage. Rather, Pierpoint, Wood, and Benton would shuttle in and out of KRLD-TV all day, catching Cronkite between location shots. Wood went to Oswald’s rooming house to interview his landlady and film its interior. From all over the world, so-called journalists streamed into Dallas to be part of the crime of the century. Everyone wanted a little exclusive about Oswald. Transmission of such information was difficult; back then there were no two-way radios, video cameras, or cell phones. “I think we just kind of intuitively knew what to do,” Barker recalled. “You rise to the occasion.”

Although Wood had all of this great visual material, Cronkite was nervous about airing it. His heart opened toward the Kennedy family. He became impresario of the American post-assassination mourning. CBS News became the meeting hall, the cathedral, the corner bar, and the town square—wherever people went when they wanted the healing comfort of a group. Television became the national grief center, with Cronkite, sipping strong tea throughout the weekend to soothe his sore throat, the philosopher of congruent counsel. Cronkite never pretended to process JFK’s death—his broadcast was a lesson in humility. “When the news is bad, Walter hurts,” explained Fred Friendly. “When the news embarrasses America, Walter is embarrassed. When the news is humorous, Walter smiles with understanding.”