Cronkite (46 page)

CBS News vice president Gordon Manning, in charge of all hard-news stories, thought Cronkite was dead right about the moon race being as historically big as the Vietnam War. Bob Wussler, the executive producer of CBS’s space coverage, recalled that the successful
Gemini 3
mission of 1965 had been the turning point for CBS. Corporate resources were now devoted to whipping NBC and ABC on all things moon-related. But before the glory of
Apollo 11
, the first lunar landing, Cronkite had to deal with the ghastly tragedy of
Apollo 1
. Its crew was Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, Edward H. White, and Roger B. Chaffee. On January 27, 1967, while they were sitting in the command service module atop a Saturn 1B
rocket, a flash fire occurred. All three astronauts were asphyxiated within a few seconds. This was during a countdown for a simulated launch. “It was a great shock to Cronkite,” Robert Pierpoint recalled. “Walter had befriended the crew. His real worry was that this would cause NASA to delay the push for the moon.”

The
Apollo 1
mission hadn’t been scheduled for launch until February 21, so Cronkite wasn’t on the scene to report on the fire. In fact, he couldn’t be found the night it happened. He was dining at the Stork Club, but CBS didn’t know that. CBS ran
Special Reports
bulletins with Bill Martin and Mike Wallace anchoring. Whiz kid Bob Wussler went on the air for the first time ever with NASA models to educate the public visually about what had happened on
Apollo 1
. Eventually, Cronkite made his way to the West Fifty-seventh Street broadcast center and went on the air. Already two CBS employees—producer Joan F. Richman and correspondent David Schumacher—were on their way to Florida to set up remote interviews about the tragedy.

That evening, back at his Manhattan home, Cronkite wept as never before. He had befriended Grissom, White, and Chaffee, considering them the white knights of an America being torn apart by Vietnam and civil rights unrest, and now they were gone.

CBS News called the fatal fire the “Cape Kennedy Disaster” and ran regular
Special Reports
, even showing photos of the burned-out “white room” where the astronauts had perished. On January 30, 1967, Cronkite anchored a half-hour
Special Report
of the astronauts’ flag-draped coffins leaving Cape Kennedy. It was gut-wrenching television. But Cronkite, full of what the British call phlegm, assumed the job of telling America to keep its chin up. From that disaster onward, Cronkite became an oracle of space exploration, describing NASA as the “glue” holding America together “at a time when we seemed to be coming apart.”

The disaster temporarily dampened the morale of NASA and much of the public alike. The space program was in flux. Was it really worth taxpayer dollars to go to the Moon? Was it too high-risk a venture? A tidal wave of self-doubt swept the country. The “Cape Kennedy Disaster” only made Cronkite more of a bullhorn promoting the Apollo program. While NASA called a twenty-month halt on U.S. human space flights, putting the Apollo program on hold, CBS—at Cronkite’s urging—ran a documentary titled
To the Moon
. The documentary’s resident expert was Isaac Asimov, author of dozens of science fiction books, of which Cronkite was a huge fan. What Cronkite drove home on the broadcast was that going to the Moon required a huge amount of cooperation between whole industries and economies.

For the
CBS News Special Report
, Cronkite went to Huntsville, Alabama, to interview the German rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun, who became a pliant collaborator. What made
To the Moon
such a vintage Cronkite special was the way space exploration was treated with a kind of
You Are There
aura. Journeys were made to Langley Field, Virginia, to experience firsthand the gravity of the Moon in a simulator. Of America’s space commentators, only Cronkite incessantly compared the Apollo astronauts to Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and Ponce de Leon. “From the Moon we will truly step out into space,” Cronkite said, “launching first instruments and then men to land on the other planets of the solar system.”

To observers, Cronkite was so filled with adrenaline about the challenge of going to the Moon that he seemed to be having his second childhood. At dinner parties, he’d recount standing in the snake-infested weeds of central Florida to watch Alan Shepard’s fifteen-minute up-and-down suborbital on a Redstone rocket, explaining that it was only one-fifth the size of the escape rocket carried on the nose of an Apollo spacecraft. He would describe tasting the prepacked nutrition bars the Gemini astronauts ate in zero gravity. It was clear in 1968 that Cronkite didn’t want to cover space as much as he wanted to
be
a NASA astronaut.

Cronkite framed NASA’s Gemini and Apollo missions in terms of old-fashioned American triumphalism. Astronauts like L. Gordon Cooper and Frank Borman seemed to have jumped out of a starry sky fairy tale. The Apollo program was the biggest peacetime project the U.S. government had ever undertaken (depending on how you analyze the cost of the Eisenhower interstate highway system) and perhaps the most ambitious technical endeavor in world history. Ever since President Kennedy had delivered his “Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs” on May 25, 1961, arguing that America would put a man on the Moon before the decade was over, CBS and Cronkite had been on board for duty. Lynn Sherr of ABC carped that Cronkite had become “much more of a cheerleader than a reporter.” During the Gemini years, as NASA developed and tested the Saturn 1B
launch vehicle and then the giant Saturn 5 (the launch vehicle used for the moon missions), Cronkite enthused, with a snatch of prayer for good measure, that the history of mankind was about to change. “We proved we could do it,” Cronkite boasted to
American Heritage
about the American space effort of the 1960s. “We timed it dramatically. We set the pattern for man escaping his earthly environment.”

To Cronkite the most frightening space mission was
Apollo 4
, in 1967, the first (unmanned) test flight of the powerful Saturn V launch vehicle—the largest ever to fly. It was designed by von Braun in Huntsville. Liftoff took place at 7:00 a.m. EST on November 9. The rocket blast jolted the CBS Broadcast Center, with Cronkite and producer Jeff Gralnick in it, to its foundation. Desperately, Cronkite tried to hold the big glass window—which looked out at Launch Complex 39—to keep it from shattering. Ceiling tiles came tumbling down. Everything was vibrating madly. But Cronkite, broadcasting, sounded like a thrilled kid at an amusement park. He was Murrow in London during the blitz, unafraid to allow a little emotion to enter his TV broadcast. “My God, our building’s shaking here,” Cronkite told viewers. “Our building’s shaking! The roar is terrific! The building’s shaking! This big glass window is shaking. We’re holding it with our hands! Look at that rocket go! Into the clouds at 3,000 feet! The roar is terrific! Look at it going! You can see it. Part of our roof has come in here.”

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-
O
NE

What to Do About Vietnam?

AT ODDS WITH HIS KIDS—U.S. INVOLVEMENT IN VIETNAM THICKENS—SMILE OF THE COBRA?—VIETNAM TREK OF 1965—STUCK IN THE MIDDLE—MORLEY SAFER AT CAM NE—THE LIVING ROOM WAR—FRIENDLY BRINKSMANSHIP—TOO MUCH BAD NEWS—AFTRA STRIKE—ZENKER FILLS IN—CHET HUNTLEY AS SCAB—A MEGA-CELEBRITY—MIDGLEY GRAPPLES WITH VIETNAM—SALANT SAYS SPEND WHATEVER IT TAKES—ON THE ROAD WITH KURALT—VIETNAM WOES—GEARING UP FOR THE 1968 ELECTION

N
ancy Cronkite remembered a fierce argument with her father one Thanksgiving in the mid-1960s, over the Johnson administration’s Vietnam War policy. Her cousin, Douglas Caldwell, a U.S. Army engineer assigned to plant land mines around the demilitarized zone (DMZ)—the border between North and South Vietnam—was visiting for the holiday. A seventeen-year-old with liberal instincts, Nancy challenged Douglas at the Thanksgiving table over the ethics of the Johnson administration’s war policy. “Boy, did I get it from Dad,” she recalled, as if still feeling his gaze. “We kids were radicalized against Vietnam. Dad wasn’t. For all his liberalism, he was a traditionalist. He defended Doug as doing noble work. . . . I had gotten him really mad.”

In the early morning of February 7, 1965, Vietcong guerrillas attacked the U.S. Army helicopter base known as Camp Holloway in Pleiku, killing 8 American soldiers and wounding 126. The Johnson administration quickly retaliated, commencing another cycle of lightning reprisals and military escalations. Suddenly U.S. “advisors” in Vietnam were recognized as combat troops; twenty-three thousand U.S. personnel grew to nearly two hundred thousand by the year’s end. On March 8, CBS News broadcast an hourlong showdown between pro-war Senator Gale McGee (D-Wyo.) and antiwar Senator George McGovern (D-S.Dak.). “Vietnam: the Hawks and the Doves,” hosted by Charles Collingwood, became a divide as symbolic as the DMZ as many Americans chose sides. Cronkite didn’t—or couldn’t—choose publicly. Like a majority of Americans, he supported Johnson administration policies in Southeast Asia after the Gulf of Tonkin incident and championed America’s maintaining a huge military presence around the world. “Our foreign policy, simply stated, is to preserve and foster an environment in which free societies may exist and flourish,” Cronkite said in a major 1965 speech to editors. “We cannot commit ourselves to less—and to achieve these goals patently requires not less involvement, as the weak of heart now urge, but great involvement and renewed destruction.”

Cronkite thought the U.S. military could defeat the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and the Vietcong (the communist military group committed to fighting the American and South Vietnamese governments) and then turn military operations over to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN; the South Vietnamese army). Remembering how the whole “limited” war gambit on the Korean Peninsula had cost Harry Truman his presidency (“We are trying to prevent a Third World War”), Cronkite hoped the Pentagon would find a quick victory formula in Vietnam and get out. He wasn’t interested in criticizing President Johnson, whom he regarded as a “master politician” surrounded by cut-rate political pygmies. During the 1964 presidential election, Johnson had ridiculed Goldwater’s “trigger happy” desire to send U.S. troops to South Vietnam (“We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing to protect themselves”). Given such rhetoric, Cronkite didn’t suspect that Americans would get mired down in Southeast Asia for long.

“Cronkite gave great coverage and support to us,” Joseph Califano, the president’s deputy for domestic affairs, recalled. “We saw Cronkite as an invaluable partner in promoting civil rights. As for Vietnam? In 1964, 1965, and 1966 CBS News didn’t question the president’s policies much, if at all.”

The Vietnam conflict began with widespread public support, but became ever more controversial as the war sucked up larger numbers of troops and materiel. For U.S. soldiers, it meant vicious combat—in impenetrable jungles, rice paddies, built-up areas, hillsides, and fortified positions—as brutal as any in the history of warfare. For antiwar protesters, particularly on college campuses, it reeked of imperialism and warmongering. For most American conservatives and many Americans of moderate political beliefs, it represented a crucial battlefield in the cold war confrontation with the Soviet Union and China. For blacks, Hispanics, American Indians, and poor whites, it stood for class hypocrisy as their children were sent to Southeast Asia while many rich youths received special deferments or cushy stateside assignments in the National Guard. For Cronkite, it meant catching up with NBC News, which started airing “Vietnam Weekly Review” (a series dedicated solely to Johnson’s war).

Almost a month after the Vietcong attack at Pleiku, a small city in the central highlands, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy recommended a three-stage escalation of the bombing in North Vietnam. The U.S. Air Force began Operation Rolling Thunder to strike targets in North Vietnam and interdict supply flows to the south. A few days later, the first American combat troops landed on the ground in Vietnam. By April President Johnson had authorized the use of U.S. ground combat troops for offensive operations in South Vietnam. This escalation triggered a Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) antiwar rally in Washington that Cronkite covered on the
CBS Evening News
. Cronkite was so consumed with Project Gemini and Winston Churchill’s death that he barely had time to think about Vietnam. But a
New York Times
article quoting Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara saying that he thought the war effort would cost U.S. taxpayers about $1.5 billion caught his attention. Cronkite wanted to know whether Vietnam was worth the steep price tag. That July, curious about U.S. strategic goals in Vietnam, he plotted a research trip to Southeast Asia. He was encouraged to go by Gordon Manning, the former
Newsweek
editor and CBS News executive in charge of Southeast Asia coverage.

Having just finished narrating “Abortion and the Law” for
CBS Reports
, a pioneering program that grappled with the taboo subject of a woman’s right to choose, Cronkite started preparing for his first trip to Southeast Asia. He read Joseph Buttinger’s
The Smaller Dragon
. He also met Homer Bigart, his colleague from the Writing Sixty-Ninth who already had a tour of Vietnam under his belt, for dinner to get a briefing. What astonished Cronkite from the briefing books he read in New York was the geographical smallness of Vietnam. With a total land area of 127,207 square miles, Vietnam—North and South combined—was smaller than East and West Germany. Cronkite, at Bud Benjamin’s suggestion, decided to film a report about the helicopter para-rescue teams who recovered downed pilots in the dense jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam.

With Cronkite on the trip were producer Ron Bonn, cameraman Walter Dombrow, and a sound engineer. The basic field equipment was the Mitchell 16-mm movie camera—with a film magazine on top that looked something like Mickey Mouse’s ears—which held a four-hundred-foot-long roll of sound film (ten minutes’ worth). The Mitchell was adapted from a Hollywood 35-mm production camera; it was big and bulky, weighing over forty pounds. “It was a bitch in the field,” Bonn recalled. “Because of those two ‘ears,’ a cameraman had to make himself visible in order to get a shot. And being visible frequently meant being shot at.”

Cronkite first comprehended how surreal Vietnam was when he boarded a Vietnamese airliner in Hong Kong. The stewardess was a “beauty” with the smile of an angel. She brought Cronkite a beer and a copy of Saigon’s English-language newspaper, the
Daily News
. Cronkite was in heaven. The interior of the plane was white and clean. He had a pipe packed for a relaxing smoke. Wasn’t it wonderful not to think about the Congo, taxation, Mao, Castro, and de Gaulle while settling into a flight? But then he read the stark headline in the paper: “Air Vietnam Stewardess Held in Airplane Bombing.” An uneasiness swept over him. He wondered, “Was my stewardess’s smile the smile of the cobra?” At that minute, no longer relaxed, Cronkite learned the fundamental truth about Vietnam in the 1960s: “One could not depend on things being what they seemed to be.”

The CBSers arrived at the U.S. air base at Da Nang in early July. This coastal city was the headquarters for the South Vietnamese army’s I Corps and its Third Division. Cronkite was in awe of the twelve-thousand-foot concrete runway and brand-new airstrips, which relegated the ones at Chicago’s O’Hare to second-class status. Although Cronkite knew that Da Nang—the scene of the first landing of Marines in 1965—was an important port for U.S. troops, he was surprised to land on such a jet-capable airfield. Both sides of the runway were lined with blastproof revetments, and inside each stood an expensive spit-polish-new warplane. Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex at work; Cronkite, long familiar with military aviation, was delighted when he saw the F-102, F-106, B-57, F-4, F-104, and F-105 bombers lined up in Willow Run assembly line fashion. “I remember turning to Walter somewhat stunned,” Ron Bonn recalled, “and saying, ‘How can we lose?’ ”

Cronkite and crew spent three weeks touring the Vietnamese countryside, where they were treated to a velvet-trimmed version of the war, with private briefings and excellent seafood meals. They were filming segments for the
CBS Evening News
,
The Twentieth Century
, and
Face the Nation
. Cronkite got to fire an M-16, the lightweight rifle that became standard issue to U.S. troops. He met privately with U.S. Army officers and grunts alike to take their pulse on the war. They called the Vietcong enemy “Charlie,” while Cronkite, to Dombrow’s amusement, insisted on “Mr. Charlie.” Because of his long familiarity with air combat, Cronkite was invited to accompany fixed-wing aircraft on bombing sorties. The French cameraman Alex Brauer, one of the best combat shooters who had “balls of steel,” took Cronkite into the boondocks, where artillery fire could be heard. On July 18, Cronkite scored an exclusive interview with South Vietnam’s new premier, Air Vice Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky. At first he found Ky charismatic. But then, with a peculiar look on his face, the premier started praising Adolf Hitler’s greatness as an air power strategist. “Then I kind of lost the thread,” Cronkite recalled. Speaking in English to Cronkite, Ky said, “If really a U.S. Government wants to help us or give us everything we need, and if really in the next few months or in the future we have a good, frank coordination between the two Governments, U.S. and Vietnam, and without intervention of Red China or North Vietnam, I think within one year the situation will be better.” But Cronkite, pushing for more, got Ky to admit that to rid South Vietnam of the Vietcong guerrillas, there was still a “long, long, way yet to go—three, four years.” The edited version of the important Cronkite-Ky interview aired on
Face the Nation
.

Cronkite, Bonn, and Dombrow—eager to outhustle NBC News—chatted with taxi drivers, street vendors, and waiters as if they were conducting mini Gallup polls on whether U.S. military intervention was a good thing. They also went to Bien Hoa, about an hour south of Saigon, to visit the U.S. Army 173rd Airborne Brigade. Using his trusty Mitchell camera, Dombrow—a loud, funny, roly-poly, and extremely talented documentary cameraman—had set up an interview in a moving Jeep between Cronkite and a brigadier general. In the era before handheld movie cameras, Cronkite’s interview, filmed brilliantly by Dombrow as they traveled down a bumpy dirt road, was cutting-edge TV work—take that, NBC News’ “Vietnam Week in Review.” When Cronkite raised the subject of the Vietcong as a fierce fighting force, the general growled, “They’re cowards!” How so? asked Cronkite “They’re cowards!” he continued. “They won’t come out and fight. Cowards!”

Cowards . . . cowards . . . cowards . . . the word rang in Cronkite’s ears for the rest of the day. That night Cronkite, Bonn, and Dombrow discussed the hotheaded general over beer. If the Vietcong and/or the North Vietnamese army were to “come out and fight,” as the general suggested, all those U.S. warplanes in Bien Hoa and Da Nang would annihilate them. In a pitched battle, the well-armed 173rd Airborne Brigade would probably whip the Vietcong. But Ho Chi Minh’s guerrilla fighters could definitely score points by hovering just inside the tree line and killing U.S. troops with sniper fire, one man at a time. And that’s what Cronkite—and Ky—saw the enemy doing all over South Vietnam. “Walter, with his World War II experience, understood that,” Bonn recalled. “So that night we all agreed: [that] was the dumbest general any of us had ever encountered. Yes, Walter was still gung-ho in ’65. But the dumbest general really shook him.”

Morley Safer of CBS News, a Canadian reporter who had been working the Vietnam beat for a few months, was among those who closely interacted with Cronkite on that 1965 trip. He had joined CBS News as a London-based correspondent in 1964, but after Pleiku he was told to open the CBS News bureau in Saigon. Cronkite also consulted former Unipresser Peter Kalischer, who, after winning an Overseas Press Club Award for his 1963 CBS coverage of the overthrow of South Vietnam’s president Ngo Dinh Diem, killed in a coup, was working out of CBS News’ bare-bones Saigon operation. “Walter was too skeptical, too savvy and had too sensitive a shit-detector to be taken in, but Walter could be diverted by machinery, by things with wheels and wings, and especially by things that float, and the military saw to it that he had a chance to see and use everything, go on air strikes, be made to feel an insider,” Safer perceptively explained . “His itinerary was designed to keep him away, as much as possible, from correspondents and others permanently based in Vietnam who were considered to be naysayers.”

Indeed, the Department of Defense and the State Department rolled out the red carpet for Cronkite in South Vietnam that July. The junket was hardly a baptism by fire. The U.S. Army let him shoot guns, fly planes, detonate mines, and throw grenades; they would do the same thing for novelist John Steinbeck in 1967 (the Nobel laureate ended up not only supporting Johnson’s war, but also writing a series of pro-serviceman columns for
Newsday
as a result of his trip). All of the soldiers Cronkite met at USARV (U.S. Army Vietnam) headquarters in Long Binh (near Saigon) were impressive. A couple of GIs he met from Fort Riley, Kansas, regularly wrote him at the
CBS Evening News
; they became pen pals.