Cronkite (40 page)

TV, Cronkite understood, was a cutthroat business. Millions of Americans in 1963 were grateful to him for gracefully announcing Kennedy’s death to the world. But Paley saw the deficiencies in Cronkite’s act: young people, an all-important demographic, thought he was too starchy. Nielsen said so. At the beginning of the 1964 election year, the pressure for high ratings was intensifying at CBS. The company had poured money into the broadcast center studio set and hiring new personnel. The dictates of business now demanded results from Cronkite, Hewitt, Salant, and the rest of the news division gang. For a decade CBS had been—and would remain for years to come—the biggest advertising medium in the world, employing over 13,500 people. Its boom was comparable to General Motors or General Electric. If Cronkite had purchased one hundred shares of CBS stock in 1929 and kept them through 1964, through stock dividends and splits he would own thirteen thousand shares, worth $520,000.

The key question was how to spike the
CBS Evening News
ratings share upward. What Cronkite, Stanton, and Paley all understood was that presidential elections boosted public interest in political news. Over the first three decades of television, the importance of the Democratic and Republican conventions cannot be overestimated. When NBC newsman David Brinkley published his memoir in 1995, he organized chapters by conventions, not elections. That was the way television journalists looked at the political world: in terms of two conventions, on-screen epics neatly scheduled a month apart every four years. A network’s coverage, as Jack Gould pointed out in
The New York Times
, set the tone “of its public relations image for the four years that follow.” With the Republican primary in New Hampshire approaching on March 10, 1964, the process was set to begin. Then, on the very eve of the ’64 season, CBS suffered a crisis of confidence. The team, it was determined, had to be made stronger. Paley’s ax was drawn and someone had to go.

On March 2, Dick Salant was removed as head of CBS News by his boss and friend, Frank Stanton. (He was “promoted” to special assistant to the president of CBS and vice president of Corporate Affairs.) Stanton claimed full responsibility, only much later acknowledging that Paley, who regarded dominance in the news as a “CBS birthright,” had dictated the move. Everyone knew that the true culprit was, in fact, a numbers-obsessed Illinois market analyst named Nielsen. The
Newsweek
cover publicity of September 1963 and the JFK assassination coverage hadn’t translated into increased viewership for the
CBS Evening News
. Salant had to pay the price. “If Paley could fire Aubrey and demote Salant with the snap of a finger,” Andy Rooney recalled, “Walter was only a bad ratings week away from the unemployment row.”

Fred Friendly was named the new president of CBS News. Friendly, whose specialty was news documentary production, made few changes to the Cronkite show at first, instead asserting that “getting Ed back here is my first order of business.” Friendly had partnered with Murrow for the launch of
See It Now
and also worked with him on its replacement,
CBS Reports
. Contrary to his name, Friendly was not especially popular around CBS. A workhorse whose red-rimmed eyes betrayed his long hours burning the midnight oil, he was resented for the viciousness of his tantrums, but no one doubted his integrity or the high standard of the programs he produced. Nonetheless, when his champion, Ed Murrow, left CBS in 1961 to assume the USIA directorship, the assumption was that Friendly, too, would soon be gone. Defying expectations, he remained as the executive producer of
CBS Reports
, a prestigious documentary program that aired Sundays at 7:00 p.m., but one that drew light audiences. According to the prevailing theory, the size of the audience didn’t matter, since the program was so well respected with the Emmy Award folks. Not that everyone at CBS agreed with that type of thinking. Even on slow-mo Sundays.

Murrow, the Babe Ruth of broadcasting, had been separated, if not exiled, from the company for three years. Friendly believed that bringing back the home run king from USIA would be a grand gesture. Sadly, though, because of his cancer, Murrow couldn’t return to broadcasting. He didn’t want to, anyway. The Murrow era was over, but the next time frame at CBS was just lurching forward—without a name. It could not rightly be called the “Cronkite Era,” not with his mediocre Nielsen ratings. The verdict was still out on Cronkite. The news division desperately needed a whoppingly successful ratings season over NBC. Then it would recognize its next in-house broadcasting hero.

Friendly began almost immediately to meet with Cronkite in early 1964 to plan convention coverage. The first idea in the new Friendly regime to affect the
CBS Evening News
was a good one. Friendly, seizing a suggestion from Bill Small, talent-tapped one of the younger CBS correspondents on the company roster, Roger Mudd, based in the Washington bureau. Mudd had gotten his journalism start working for
The Richmond News Leader
in the 1950s. His sponsor at CBS had been Howard K. Smith. “Friendly proposed that I cover every day of the coming Senate filibuster on an omnibus civil rights bill not only on the
Evening News
with Walter Cronkite
but also on each of the network’s four other TV newscasts and on seven of the network’s hourly radio newscasts,” Mudd recalled. “No story had ever gotten such coverage.”

Mudd was aware that Cronkite protected every one of his twenty-two minutes (minus the Sevareid commentary) on the
CBS Evening News
and he suspected Cronkite would be wary of committing to a nightly segment on a Senate filibuster, which is by definition a stalling tactic designed to bore and frustrate the opposition into compromise. It oughtn’t to have been good television. Senators such as James Eastland of Mississippi and Richard Russell of Georgia, old-school segregationists who opposed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, babbled their way through more than two months—fifty-seven congressional working days.

But Mudd reported it as if from ringside, standing on the steps of the Capitol in all weather and updating viewers on the action (or lack of it) as if he were describing a fifty-seven-round boxing match. It got hard to imagine Mudd without a CBS microphone clutched in his hand, standing on the Capitol steps. Friendly had learned from the McCarthy era that the longer a politician spoke, the more rope there was with which to hang him. He unleashed Mudd on the bigoted Washington, D.C., politicians as surely as Bull Connor had loosed police attack dogs upon peaceful civil rights marchers in Birmingham. “We’re going to cover this civil rights story every day,” Friendly told Mudd. “Yes, sir,” was Mudd’s pleased response, “yes sir.”

An enthusiastic Cronkite, as managing editor of the
CBS Evening News
, directed Mudd to provide short profiles of such filibustering senators as Strom Thurmond and Robert C. Byrd. Mudd complied, and the story grew dramatically to one with its own narrative drive. From March 30 to June 19, Mudd delivered an astounding 867 reports on various CBS outlets, television and radio. The word
ubiquitous
doesn’t do his act justice. Americans were intrinsically interested in the fate of the civil rights bill, but with the CBS coverage, they became riveted by the deliberations on it as well. Friendly even considered having Mudd grow a beard to emphasize the length of the filibuster; both Small and Cronkite thought such a stunt was too much hokum. As the filibuster continued into June, public protests encouraged the Senate majority to end the filibuster through the use of cloture (the first time a cloture vote had ever prevailed in a civil rights debate). Soon afterward, Congress passed a version of the bill that was closer to the original than political veterans might ever have predicted. The long filibuster had failed—on television and to some extent
by
television. “Friendly deserved a lot of credit,” Mudd recalled. “He was a volcanic man of great enthusiasms. You couldn’t help but get to work on his ideas. Covering the filibusters was novel. And, from a news perspective it worked. Friendly next wanted me to go to Vietnam. I had a family and said ‘NO.’ ”

In Friendly’s schema, the civil rights struggle was a chance for Cronkite’s
CBS Evening News
to beat
Huntley-Brinkley
in the Nielsen ratings. CBS had the technical and financial resources to dispatch correspondents to follow the gallant Martin Luther King Jr. on every protest march, from Montgomery to Selma to Memphis. Like NASA’s space race with the Soviets, it was a reliable story full of drama. Dan Rather continued to work the Deep South beat for CBS with verve and commitment. Southern CBS affiliates were livid at the way Cronkite, Mudd, Rather, and Co. were backing the “negro action.” South of the Mason-Dixon Line, CBS was mocked as the “Colored Broadcasting System.” The insular CBS affiliates in New Orleans and Atlanta threatened Paley to cool his jets, to stop giving the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) so much free nightly news time for their radical street antics. “But we never felt that pressure on the news desk itself,” Cronkite recalled. “We had a marvelous management that kept it off our backs on the
Evening News
.”

At Stanton’s suggestion, correspondent Bill Plante started working for Cronkite in June 1964 as the junior guy on CBS’s New York City assignment desk. Just two weeks later Plante found himself in the kudzu land of Mississippi covering Freedom Summer. A Chicagoan with a strong Irish-Catholic sense of social justice, Plante had never been farther south than St. Louis. To his virgin eyes, the whole state of Mississippi seemed a war zone with blacks and whites pitted against each other. Federal-versus-states’-rights battles were taking place in Jackson, Oxford, Clarksdale, Hattiesburg, and along the Gulf Coast. “It was like the dark side of the moon,” Plante recalled. “
Terra incognita
. It didn’t take me long to see that these white southerners thought they were defending a way of life. Generally speaking, we were fair at CBS in covering all sides of the freedom struggle. But I knew, back in New York, Don Hewitt and Walter Cronkite were aghast at Jim Crow, wanted to see it smashed.”

On July 1, 1964, Cronkite served as host of the
CBS News Special Report
“The Summer Ahead.” The tease for the prime-time show was “Will passage of the Civil Rights Bill help to avoid what some have predicted will be a summer of violence?” Cronkite worked with a seven-man reporting team on various aspects of the civil rights unrest in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. The protest marches covered weren’t intended as entertainment, but that is what they became. On Cronkite’s
CBS Evening News
, Bull Connor–like villains with barking dogs and water hoses were pitted against the Nobel Peace Prize winner Martin Luther King Jr. and unarmed men, women, and children.

With or without television, the Civil Rights Act—signed by President Johnson on July 2, 1964—was destined to be a big story. In focusing on the filibuster, though, CBS News had demonstrated that special-events coverage could be sustained over the course of weeks or months, perhaps years. Mudd’s excellent broadcasts proved that some viewers craved the sausage-factory reality of congressional legislation.

The next chapter of the civil rights story, as covered by CBS News, offered none of the humor of Strom Thurmond or John Stennis reading the Yellow Pages to kill time. It carried the burden of too much stark reality. Three civil rights volunteers, fresh from a course on registering voters held at the Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio (later part of the Miami University of Ohio), were missing—and presumed dead—in Mississippi. James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were part of the Freedom Summer protests and were in the Mississippi Delta to register African American voters. Their burned-out station wagon was discovered at the edge of the Bogue Chitto Swamp, near Philadelphia, Mississippi. “The Senate action came just before 8 p.m. on a Friday,” Cronkite explained to NPR in 2005. “It still might have been our top story on Monday. But late Sunday night, something happened in the swamps of Mississippi.”

Cronkite led with the somber story of the Mississippi disappearances on Monday night’s edition of the
CBS Evening News
, June 22, 1964. Horror engulfed his face. “Good evening,” he began. “Three young civil rights workers disappeared in Mississippi on Sunday night near the central Mississippi town of Philadelphia, about fifty miles northeast of Jackson. The last report on the trio came from Philadelphia police, who said they were picked up for speeding on Sunday, fined $20, then released.” The circumstances were deeply disturbing. The vanishing of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, Cronkite believed, was a microcosm of the ongoing southern brutality toward blacks. “Where I grew up, in my household in black Sacramento, after the way Walter Cronkite covered the Mississippi murders, we knew he was on our side,” activist Cornel West, a Princeton University professor, recalled. “We appreciated that Cronkite was willing to reveal the anti-democratic hypocrisy of Jim Crow.”

Cronkite called the South in 1964 “a deeply isolated civilization that hadn’t changed its mind in 200 years. You had to live in the South to understand how deeply separate it was, as I had when my family moved to Texas when I was 10. I quickly learned that the Civil War was the ‘War Between the States’ and the Confederate flag could still inspire patriotic fervor. Now, in the 1960s, the time capsule that had been the Old South and had been left alone for so long was being pried open like a rusty tomb. During that week in June, the country would be shocked by the skeletons it began to find.” Of all the American warts, the curious calculation of racism caused Cronkite to flinch with the most anger. Just like his father, who walked out of his boss’s Jim Crow house in Houston during the Great Depression, Cronkite was someone for whom prejudice of any kind was anathema. To Cronkite, segregationist politicians such as George Wallace of Alabama and Lester Maddox of Georgia were thugs. But the CBS corporate mandate insisted on network objectivity. Cronkite often circumvented this rule, not in direct commentary but rather in the airtime accorded to Dr. King’s movement. As managing editor of the
CBS Evening News
, he believed in fair reporting. And he didn’t want to overtly tick off the CBS affiliates in Atlanta, Dallas, and Nashville. But he couldn’t be “objective” about innocents like Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner being murdered in Mississippi by Dixiefied bigots.