Cronkite (48 page)

While Cronkite was slow to seize the idea of a credibility gap between the Pentagon version of events in Southeast Asia and that of CBS News’ Saigon bureau reporters, he was unafraid to show gruesome war images on the
Evening News
as troop levels topped two hundred thousand. Burning villages . . . mortar rounds . . . bomb craters . . . poisonous defoliants . . . screaming children . . . desecrated wetlands . . . wounded soldiers . . . casualties. The sheer barbarity of it all was beamed into Main Street America, giving the Vietnam conflict the nickname “the living room war.” Color television only made the violence more memorable (and horrible). A three- to six-month rotation was implemented so that CBS News correspondents could serve a tour of duty in the Saigon bureau without being away from their homes for too long. Almost everyone went. There was an unspoken awareness that if you refused assignment to Saigon—as Roger Mudd did for family reasons—it would cost you career-wise with Dr. Stanton down the road. Others who refused to go were Terry Drinkwater (whose wife threatened to divorce him if he went), Robert Pierpoint (who had covered enough combat in Korea), and Eric Sevareid (who said he had seen enough of war during World War II in the 1940s and in 1965 in the Dominican Republic).

Unlike his NASA boosterism, as a golden rule, Cronkite never glamorized war in a broadcast. CBS News executive producer Russ Bensley used to spend hours every day in a screening room dedicated to putting together Vietnam segments using raw footage shipped to New York from Saigon via Los Angeles or San Francisco. (Satellite hookups didn’t become available until late 1967.) Both Cronkite and Bensley were careful not to show the most sordid war atrocities on the air (such as cutting the ears off enemy corpses). Still, both men believed TV viewers needed to see the harsh reality of war in their living rooms. It wasn’t ethical to play ostrich as American soldiers died overseas. “In a war situation,” Cronkite insisted, “every American ought to suffer as much as the guy on the front lines. We ought to see this. We ought to be
forced
to see it.”

Throughout late 1965 and early 1966, the
CBS Evening News
ran stories about Operation Rolling Thunder pounding North Vietnam and antiwar rallies taking place in U.S. cities alike. CBS News president Fred Friendly also planned a series of debates to continue the “Vietnam Perspective” broadcasts under the new heading “Congress and the War.” On February 15, 1966, John Schneider, vice president of broadcast activities, decided that Friendly was broadcasting too many hours of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s hearings on the escalating U.S. commitment in Vietnam during the advertising-rich afternoons. It wasn’t good for the soap opera business. Schneider suspended CBS’s special coverage of the hearings, reverting to
I Love Lucy
reruns and other standard daytime fare. While NBC continued its live coverage, Schneider decided that CBS would be best served by distilling the Senate committee testimony on Cronkite’s
CBS Evening News
.

A livid Friendly deemed the Schneider move a “blackout” in favor of crapola programming that made a “mockery” of TV’s aspirations as a news medium. It sickened Friendly that something as important as George Kennan, the father of cold war containment policy, dissenting about U.S. intervention in Vietnam was nixed by Schneider for the sake of a couple of quick advertising bucks. In the fracas that followed, most true reporters sided with Friendly—renowned as co-editor (with Murrow) of the
See It Now
documentaries—against Schneider, who became an opportune symbol of corporate greed.

Friendly threatened to quit. Actually, he was often enraged and frequently threatened to defect from commercial TV. But this time he followed through. Dick Salant, former president of CBS News from February 1961 to March 1964, was tapped by Paley to replace him. Friendly’s resignation vexed the correspondent corps at CBS. Not Cronkite. While he admired Friendly, and appreciated that under his aegis the
CBS Evening News
ratings had grown, he didn’t lose sleep over the tussle. He encouraged CBS writers and producers to sign a petition demanding Friendly’s reinstatement, but he didn’t sign it himself. Perhaps remembering what had happened when he warred with Paley back in 1964, Cronkite stayed publicly mum. From Cronkite’s perspective, the Friendly-Schneider argument took place on CBS’s daytime program stopwatch. It had nothing to do with his
Evening News
broadcast. (Cronkite, knowing his loyalties would be scrutinized by
The New York Times
, did eventually release a careful statement praising Friendly’s “brilliant, imaginative, and hard-hitting guidance,” without criticizing Stanton.)

Schneider, who remained a corporate force at CBS until 1978, held firm, resenting the print media’s complimentary portrayal of Friendly while the rest of CBS executives were cast as “money changers in the temple.”
The New York Times
even ran Friendly’s resignation letter in full. Although Cronkite would never have admitted it, the Friendly resignation liberated him. Until 1966, he felt he was living in the House of Murrow. After Murrow died in 1965 and Friendly quit in 1966 for employment at Columbia University, where William Paley was a lifetime trustee, and the Ford Foundation, where McGeorge Bundy was sponsor, CBS News became a decidedly Cronkite enterprise. Although he didn’t mention it much in
A Reporter’s Life
, Cronkite usually got along well with corporate executive types. He was a company man. He wasn’t sycophantic, but he valued the reasoned analysis of Stanton more than the showstopping histrionics of Fred Friendly, who was always waving his arms around and perspiring over a programming issue.

During his sixteen years at CBS News, Friendly had done a lot of things right. There wasn’t much to be ashamed of. It was impossible to discuss
See It Now
,
CBS News Reports
, or the pioneering Vietnam War and civil rights coverage on the network without invoking his name. He was an industry legend. But Friendly was always the boss man in the newsroom, intimidating even Cronkite by his kinetic presence. Now he was gone. Former president Dwight Eisenhower telephoned Friendly from Indio, California, to find out what had happened, saying he was “shocked” and “distressed.” Upon hanging up, Eisenhower wrote Friendly a letter of support. “I have been partial to CBS because of my friendship with Bill Paley and later with Frank Stanton,” Eisenhower said. “Then when I came to know, and work with, you and Walter Cronkite my partiality became truly pronounced. For a long time you have known that I found my association with you and Walter to be particularly pleasant; so much so that I almost lost all interest in any working arrangements with another. Now I have to review my own situation. But this is nothing compared to my feeling of regret that you felt it necessary to resign from CBS.”

Cronkite welcomed Salant’s steady manner after enduring that of the turbulent Friendly. Many media observers, especially those outside CBS News, were concerned that Salant, a lawyer and nonjournalist, would lock the newsroom into a conservative corporate environment. No more controversial Morley Safer at Cam Ne reporting on Zippo lighters or Nelson Benton in Birmingham, Alabama, bemoaning barking dogs. Those inside CBS like Cronkite knew better. Referring to the one quality Friendly and Salant had in common, Bill Leonard recalled that “serious journalism,” as practiced by CBS News at its best, “ranked with God and Country in their scheme of things.” At any rate, Salant didn’t add pressure to an industry already soaked in it. “Salant,” Les Midgley recalled, “always preached that the news department was interested only in facts, not ratings.”

After “A CBS News Inquiry: The Warren Report” aired in June 1967, with Cronkite reporting front and center, Ernie Leiser retired as executive producer of the
CBS Evening News
. The pressures of TV were too much. His replacement was the soft-spoken Leslie Midgley. Under Midgley’s auspices, CBS News carried Vietnam stories nightly. Midgley, executive producer of the
Evening News
from 1967 to 1972, was himself an old newspaperman of
Tribune
vintage. It was Midgley who understood that Cronkite was hell-bent on outpacing NBC on all things Southeast Asia. “If he saw some story on NBC which he deemed superior to the CBS version,” Midgley recalled about Vietnam coverage, “he was quick to conclude that we were falling down on the job. ‘Let’s do it better—and beat them!’ he would cry.”

Before long, Les Midgley, tired of playing it down the middle, regularly tried to get Russ Bensley to edit segments of the
Evening News
to make the Johnson administration’s Southeast Asia policies look bad. CBS News vice president Blair Clark, a confirmed liberal, found the U.S. military intervention in Southeast Asia morally repugnant. Like Midgley, he couldn’t play the objectivity game. By 1964, Clark’s pronounced antiwar views had led him to quit CBS News. He ended up as editor of
The Nation
and campaign manager to Eugene McCarthy in his unsuccessful bid for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination. “Walter thought that Clark was too antiwar,” Andy Rooney recalled. “We were pure World War II guys. It was unseemly to not be 100 percent behind the troops. Walter thought Clark was a boob for going into politics . . . still, he
liked
him.”

Conflict seemed to always engulf CBS News in 1967 under Midgley’s leadership. Cronkite tried to referee. But that changed in the last days of March 1967, as news viewers tuned in not knowing who would be sitting in the anchor chairs at CBS, NBC, and ABC. It certainly wouldn’t be Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley, or the twenty-eight-year-old Toronto native Peter Jennings on ABC. All three were on strike as card-carrying members of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA). The union represented about eighteen thousand performers, all of whom walked out in support of local news reporters, whose pay was considered by the union to be unfair. Entertainers such as Lucille Ball, Danny Kaye, and the Smothers Brothers were also on strike to help the cause. Television was a central part of many Americans’ daily lives, serving as news source, babysitter, and mindless entertainer. So the strike was of genuine national concern. Soap operas such as
As the World Turns
and
Guiding Light
closed down production. Network entertainment shows that hadn’t scrambled to finish episodes already in the pipeline simply replayed old ones. In the news divisions, management was recruited to read the text, and comedians had a field day with the results.

At CBS News, Cronkite’s replacement was Arnold Zenker, a twenty-eight-year-old low-level TV manager with thick-framed glasses and some experience as a broadcast announcer. Rough and undoubtedly green, Zenker was just good enough to hold the broadcast together for Cronkite loyalists. But as the AFTRA strike continued into April, a person could spike just about any conversation with Zenker’s name and be assured of a hearty laugh. It’s a mystery why Zenker, of all people, was tapped to replace Cronkite for thirteen days; his specialty was soft-news features, and he had never even met Cronkite. “I still have no idea why they selected me,” Zenker told
The New York Times
in 2006. “No one even offered to buy me a blue shirt.”

An overwhelmed Zenker, nerves jangled, found himself competing for ratings with two network heavyweights as he vigorously tried to keep Cronkite’s millions of nightly viewers from turning the dial. During the strike, Cronkite grew uncomfortable with Zenker’s gleefully talking to the press about sitting in the CBS anchor chair. Cronkite complained nightly about him to Dick Salant. “I was shocked when Salant told me not to do any more interviews,” Zenker recalled. “I couldn’t believe that Cronkite was so insecure. But he was.” (Years later, when Cronkite discussed Zenker in an oral history, he said dismissively, “I did not go to work. And CBS pulled in this guy, Adolf Hitler, or whatever his name was, Adolf Zinger or something . . . .”)

At NBC News no one missed Chet Huntley because he was one of the few broadcasters who stayed on the job, taking a libertarian stance. Another was Huntley’s NBC colleague, Frank McGee. Both expressed outrage that serious journalists were in the same union with entertainers and pointed out that they had been forced to join AFTRA as a condition of employment. Neither felt any obligation to the union. David Brinkley, for his part, was philosophically opposed to the strike, but he stayed away from work anyway, unwilling to break ranks with colleagues and friends in the industry.

Even though Cronkite had a wicked cold, chewing on Halls Mentho-Lyptus cough drops from morning to night, he walked the picket line outside CBS News headquarters in New York City. It was a sight to see: the celebrated anchorman pacing back and forth, a sandwich board draped over his shoulders like an all-one-big-union Wobbly in a Woody Guthrie song. The newspapers loved showing Cronkite on the pavement, contrasting him with Huntley, who went so far as to denounce the strike as nothing but “18,000 singers, dancers and jugglers.” Cronkite told reporters he remembered how hard it was to make ends meet back in the Great Depression while working at
The
Houston Press
. The message was clear: Cronkite hadn’t forgotten his working-class roots.

Cronkite stayed out even though the
CBS
Evening News
was losing ground in the ratings. Arbitron numbers for the initial days of the strike showed CBS losing about a quarter of its audience, while NBC was expanding viewership by the same percentage. CBS was poised to lose millions of dollars in advertising revenue. But then the worm turned. As the strike continued, Huntley began to be seen as antilabor and elitist, concerned only with how much jack he made. “Chet Huntley Slaps at TV Strike” ran the banner headline across the front page of the
El Paso Herald-Post
. Newspapers across the country carried the same story. Unions boycotted NBC News because of Huntley’s corporate toadyism or Rocky Mountain libertarianism (depending on how you looked at the half-filled glass). The thirteen-day strike resulted in a slightly improved contract for the local correspondents. In the long run, the greatest impact might have been the taint Huntley left on NBC. Blue-collar, nine-to-five Americans now had reconfirmed their hunch that Cronkite was a stand-up guy. Huntley was portrayed as a scab. Only a cabal of John Birch types considered Huntley brave in taking on the unions in such an in-your-face way.