Cronkite (44 page)

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY

Civil Rights and Project Gemini

COLOR TV—RAISKY’S TOUCH—THE GOLDEN HOUR—TRUST OF SOCOLOW—PALEY WANTS RESULTS—COVERING CIVIL RIGHTS—EQUAL RIGHTS AT CBS—TAKING ON BULL CONNOR AND SHERIFF CLARK—GIVE AIRTIME TO MLK—HUGHES RUDD GOES SOUTH—ONWARD TO CAPE KENNEDY—LOVING GEMINI—THE GEE-WHIZ FACTOR—DEATH AND DESTRUCTION AND
APOLLO II
—BOMBINGHAM—DEATH OF MURROW—BEFRIENDING VON BRAUN—RATTLING AND ROLLING AT CAPE KENNEDY

T
he
CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite
ran its first color broadcast on August 19, 1965, and switched to color permanently on January 31, 1966. “No one has a larger stake in going into color than I have,” Cronkite told a New York
Daily News
media critic with a smile. “I’m much slenderer in tints than in black and white.”

A huge effort was undertaken at CBS News to make the Cronkite set appealing to the viewer for both special events and the
Evening News
. The talented set designer Hugh Raisky, who started out in the mailroom in the late 1950s, was hired to give CBS’s space coverage a “solar system” look. He even took astronomy courses that taught him how to pioneer in space art. More than any other person, Raisky was the visual guru at CBS who gave Cronkite the modern set design that proved so durable and fetching. “A lot of New York designers steered clear of the newsrooms,” Raisky recalled. “But I had wanted to be a political cartoonist, so getting to be in the Cronkite newsroom, designing sets for everything from the 1964 political conventions to the 1992 debates, became my calling.”

All day long Cronkite’s
Evening News
team careened around him like moths to a flame. Whatever Cronkite’s top five stories were, right down the pecking order, become America’s top five stories of each and every weekday. “There are no back pages,” Cronkite explained to
Time
magazine, “for our type of journalism.” And there was zero tolerance for error. The young
Twentieth Century
series writer Jon Wilkman recalled what a grueling taskmaster Cronkite could be. He’d make Wilkman cough up his research, making him
prove
that Atlanta was in Georgia and Rome was in Italy. “You better have it right,” Cronkite snapped one afternoon, “because it’s my face hanging out there.”

The CBS workplace was notably small—the newsroom just paces away from Cronkite’s own glassed-in, venetian-blind-covered cubicle. The pipe-puffing Cronkite liked feeling in control of the news organization, typing copy, scribbling notes, working the phones, cracking lighthearted jokes through a haze of smoke. As the day advanced, the tension became palpable, and a NASA-like countdown ensued. Moments before airtime, Cronkite would take a quick glance in a handheld mirror, making sure his hair was slicked back properly. While getting a dab of powder on his face, he slipped on his suit jacket with just ten seconds left on the clock. Order miraculously emerged from broadcast center chaos. A lockdown now occurred. Nobody would make a peep. Cronkite would move his chair an inch, sit up straight, and glance down at his notes. At first gander, he looked like a well-intentioned midwestern newspaper editor preparing to inform out-of-town visitors about that day’s local happenings. The camera zeroed in on him.

“Good evening,” Cronkite said, and the broadcast began.

Along with Cronkite and Hewitt, the other essential facilitator of the
Evening News
was thirty-five-year-old Sandy Socolow, who knew the anchorman’s likes and dislikes better than anybody at CBS. The buoyant, round-faced Socolow, who was raised in rural Connecticut but spent his teenage years in New York City, was an odd mix of small-town reporter and big-city editor. While attending the City College of New York and editing
The Campus
student newspaper, Socolow moonlighted as a copy boy at
The New York Times
, alongside soon-to-be legendary journalist extraordinaire Gay Talese. Drafted into the U.S. Army during the Korean War, Socolow ended up serving with the Voice of the UN Command, working to dissuade Asian listeners from the lures of Communist totalitarianism. “We tried beaming propaganda into North Korea and China from Tokyo,” Socolow recalled.

After the war, he worked all over the Far East for the International News Service (the Hearst wire service that later became the “I” in UPI). Then, in 1957, his résumé impressed CBS, and the network hired him as a stringer. It was while working as a studio producer with Cronkite on the 11:00 p.m.
Sunday News Special
that their lifelong friendship blossomed. By 1962, Socolow (or “Soc” as his nickname went) was Cronkite’s all-purpose alter ego. He would remain Cronkite’s right-hand man until 1974, when he took over CBS News’ Washington bureau.

On November 3, 1964, Cronkite shelled out state-by-state projections that proved to be accurate. (He had pollster Lou Harris to thank.)
The
Huntley-Brinkley Report
, on the other hand, that beloved Laurel-and-Hardy news act, fumbled over the importance of the many different election numbers they were being fed over the wires. The predominant call, that Johnson would be victorious over Goldwater, was one of the easiest to make in U.S. history (the eventual electoral vote count was 486 to 52), but CBS, at 9:01 p.m. EST, was first to say it on television. In fact, it was the first to announce most of the important races during the evening. Cronkite, adrenaline racing, told a CBS reporter at the Election Night scene in Austin, Texas—where LBJ had voted and was now following the results—to hand his earphones to the president-elect. Lyndon Johnson gladly took the earphones when he was told, “Walter Cronkite wants to say hello.”

Although Johnson’s KCBS-Austin was in trusteeship, Cronkite knew that the president would rather give the big “I won” interview to the Tiffany Network than to either NBC or ABC. Johnson and Cronkite spoke casually with each other, like a couple of ranch hands leaning against a fence. Cronkite’s LBJ interview was a coup for CBS News and an indication that Cronkite, a reporter central to his times, was back full strength. Gossip columnist Walter Winchell, a long-standing Cronkite fan, beamed, “LBJ’s phone chat with CBS News star newsman Walter Cronkite (from Austin) certified the respect Americans have for the commentator.” The headline for Jack Gould’s review of Election Night coverage in
The New York Times
was music to Cronkite’s ears: “CBS by a Landslide: Network’s Coverage of the Election Is Called Far Superior to Its Rival.”

Not all journalists were impressed with Cronkite’s ability to score exclusive interviews with powerful players such as President Johnson by “hale yeah, fine fellow” tactics and various quaint ways. Many CBS reporters—especially Alexander Kendrick in London and Daniel Schorr in Berlin—resented Cronkite’s bigfooting anchorman routine. Robert Pierpoint remained suspicious of his cozy relationship with the Kennedys and the Johnsons. Whenever a colleague intimated that Cronkite was behaving like a sycophant of those in power, the anchorman stared back in surprise. He insisted that his interview style with everyone was the same: “fair play.” If CBS News thought it needed a knockout smear artist to anchor the news, then he’d quit the network. “We used to call Walter ‘Mr. Softball,’ ” Pierpoint explained. “If you were a president or a general, Walter turned submissive.”

Following the LBJ exclusive, the unanimous conclusion in the media world was that Cronkite wasn’t the problem with the
CBS Evening News
. Paley concurred. During the last months of 1964, the always-insistent Don Hewitt was replaced by Ernest Leiser as executive producer–director of the program. Hewitt moved to a newly created position—as executive producer of “developing and innovating a new kind of news broadcast—the ‘live documentary.’ ” In 1968 this “live documentary” premiered as the phenomenally successful
60 Minutes
(airing Sunday evenings). Leiser, who began his career with
Stars and Stripes
during World War II, was a former correspondent with
Collier’s Weekly
and the Overseas News Agency and a longtime executive with CBS. And he was a Cronkite crony. While Dan Rather thought Leiser had a blunt, Broderick Crawford–like manner, Cronkite treasured him as the ultimate foxhole companion with more than twenty years’ experience as a foreign correspondent, editor, and producer.

In the aftermath of the 1964 convention experimentation by Friendly, Leiser was, if anything, anti–show business regarding the
CBS Evening News
. He tended to share Cronkite’s core philosophy that the first obligation of the dinnertime news was to produce a crystal-clear communiqué, neither sanctimonious nor sluggish, more courtly than anything else, ensuring that viewers were aware of the day’s events. Leiser considered Cronkite’s great strength his tone: rigorously unpretentious. Cronkite viewers wanted an unslanted broadcast. “I never pretended that we could do anything more than be a headline service,” he explained. “I felt that the headlines, that is 15 or 20 seconds of information on all the news of the day, were more important than covering some of the news of the day and then an in-depth look at one or another of the story of the day. And that created a tension. This dialogue went on constantly.”

The tension existed because the 1960s, more than other decades, presented bullet-holed news stories that couldn’t be explained in a couple of fast paragraphs or even in a couple of minutes. Southeast Asia, most pointedly, was more than a series of military actions that could be defined by battles, casualty counts, and the give-and-take of territory. What to do in Vietnam, which was then covered by Bernard Kalb of CBS in Tokyo, led to confrontations throughout American society—including the Cronkite home. Kathy and Nancy, in their late teens, became involved with the antiwar youth movement, protesting escalating U.S. involvement in Vietnam and lashing out at their parents’ indifference. Cronkite, as CBS’s leading newsman, cautious and watchful, was tardy both at CBS and in his own household in recognizing the depth of the Vietnam story as a reflection of American values and the government’s cohesion with the citizens it served. “Having survived the 1964 convention brush-up, Walter was in the throes of a long, hard slog to overtake Huntley-Brinkley,” Rather recalled. “Because CBS did well with the Kennedy assassination and space—special events—they wanted Cronkite to
own
big stories, to flood the zone with them; that would be our franchise. Only when the Vietnam War became a CBS franchise did Cronkite pay keen attention to the happenings in Southeast Asia.”

As news, the civil rights movement circa 1964 was ideal drama for CBS News to be following raptly. Ernie Leiser had set up CBS bureaus in Dallas, Atlanta, and New Orleans primarily to cover the freedom struggle. For a decade, starting in 1954, television had led the way in presenting the problems of race in the United States and, as Cronkite saw it, in unlocking the closed society of the Old Confederacy. Once the
CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite
and
The Huntley-Brinkley Report
on NBC went to a half hour in the fall of 1963, television covered the civil rights movement with greater intensity. Throughout the segregated South, CBS in particular was denounced by white supremacists, who labeled the network communist. A defiant CBS wanted to
own
the civil rights franchise, to scoop the great NBC reporter John Chancellor, who was on the beat with stories from Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama. The CBS affiliate in Atlanta, WAGA, stoutly refused to feed civil rights stories to New York. Leiser had assigned the strong-willed Rather, to run the southern bureau in New Orleans, twenty-three states (plus Mexico and Central America). A sense of awe welled up in Rather over everything Dr. King did. Rather, serving as a friend to the movement, helped King understand which nonviolent protest stunts would make the
CBS Evening News
broadcast and which wouldn’t; Cronkite never knew about this. “I couldn’t do feeds from Dallas to Atlanta,” Rather explained about the tension. “New Orleans was the only dependable city. WWL took our civil rights feeds. It was owned by the Catholic Church, and they were sympathetic to us.”

The net effect of CBS News—both radio and TV—on the freedom struggle proved immeasurable. Dr. King had a genius for setting up foils such as the brutal Sheriff James G. Clark Jr. of Dallas County, Alabama, who used cattle prods, bullwhips, and clubs on protesters. Ditto for Bull Connor, commissioner of public safety in Birmingham. “If anyone got manipulated by King,” reporter Jack Bass noted, “it wasn’t the media—it was Bull Connor and Sheriff Clark.” CBS News became a powerful agent in conveying to the world the horrors of the Jim Crow South. These CBS segments were excruciating theater, the high drama of frenzied dogs, tear gas, and billy clubs causing viewers to wince in shame and disbelief. To Dr. King, the CBS eye represented the cavalry coming to the rescue. He staged marches, sit-ins, and demonstrations timed to get maximum television coverage. “To the movement,” Julian Bond recalled, “Cronkite was the voice of God on TV. Murrow, Howard K. Smith, Rather, Rudd, Cronkite, and Sevareid helped wake America up to the problems in the South.”

To Bond’s point, John Hendricks, the future founder of the Discovery Channel, grew up in Huntsville, Alabama (a.k.a. Rocket City), in the 1960s. Having hailed from West Virginia, a United Mine Workers stronghold (and where President Kennedy was warmly embraced as the new FDR), Hendricks was startled to encounter a neo-Confederate culture fueled with bigotry toward blacks. His solace from all the local hatemongering he experienced at school was to watch the enlightened
CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite
. “My father was very much a liberal in his thinking,” Hendricks recalled. “We felt totally out of sync with the racism in Alabama. Television was our way to connect with a large national community who clearly knew [that] what George Wallace was doing in Alabama was repugnant. Because of Walter Cronkite, I didn’t feel isolated. Every night, we watched Cronkite, including when he turned to the thirty-minute news format, to follow the civil rights struggle in our own state.”