Cronkite (49 page)

Cronkite gracefully ended his hiatus from CBS. Taking back his old position at the anchor desk, he looked into the camera with a little grin and said, “Good evening, this is Walter Cronkite, filling in for Arnold Zenker. It’s good to be back.” With a twinkle in his eye and a sandwich board on his back, Cronkite had played the strike the right way. Zenker received more than three thousand fan letters, with one faction marketing “Bring Back Zenker” buttons, but everyone knew Cronkite was safe in the chair.

At NBC, the situation was the opposite. After Brinkley returned, longtime observers sensed something was amiss. Not that the co-anchors held any animosity toward each other—they didn’t—but audiences were less comfortable with the partnership. And CBS was in a good position to take advantage of the chink in the National Biscuit Company’s armor.

CBS News began relentlessly promoting Cronkite in print advertising, to the extent that Eric Sevareid complained, reminding the company that he was a bona fide star, too. But Cronkite was
the
star at CBS News, and that was the way the network wanted it. Somehow he had succeeded in being both au courant and old school simultaneously. He might not have been the new Murrow, but he had the respect of reporters everywhere. Plus, Cronkite filled another role for his employer: he was a consummate ambassador for the company, making regular appearances at meetings large and small across the country, either to speak or simply to be present. At the annual convention for CBS affiliates in New York City in 1967, the network introduced its lineup of familiar faces. Audience members were surprised when Cronkite received louder, longer applause than Ed Sullivan, veteran star of a top entertainment show.

Cronkite, Huntley, Brinkley, Reasoner, Howard K. Smith, and a few others were at the forefront during the ascendancy of the TV news anchor into celebrity. Even while producers, correspondents, and writers worked hard to gather and communicate the news, polls found that TV viewers mainly judged network news by whether they liked, understood, and respected the anchor. Star quality was what counted. In the fickle world of TV journalism, only Cronkite was able to lure viewers to fix on his every word. If Cronkite made a little smile or half-raised an eyebrow, viewers noticed. “It’s not as though Walter were a movie star,” Betsy Cronkite explained of her husband’s allure. “People watch him when they are in pajamas in their bedrooms. They feel they know him.”

David Brinkley drew headlines when he decried celebrity newscasters. “It must be all right for a program like Danny Kaye’s or Lucille Ball’s to have stars—famous personalities who are discussed and admired in fan magazines and asked for autographs, but when this system is carried over into television coverage of news, as it is, it is absurd,” Brinkley complained. “It is also irrelevant and inappropriate.” James Reston, writing in
The New York Times
, noted that David Brinkley railing against star anchormen “was a little like Lyndon Johnson attacking Texas.” To Cronkite’s secret amusement, he was more comfortable with star status than Brinkley, but he was as adamant as anyone that anchors be
journalists
, trained in investigating, reporting, editing, and writing, before ever uttering a word for the microphone. He had come of age in the 1920s, when great reporters such as Lowell Thomas had a rough-and-ready glamour akin to Arctic explorers or aviation pioneers. Cronkite also admitted that he enjoyed walking into any New York restaurant, anywhere, anytime—such as La Côte Basque and Le Cirque—and receiving a good table with A-plus service. If he wasn’t recognized, he grew depressed.

In June 1967, Salant decided to amp up CBS News’ coverage of the Vietnam War. No heavy speculation or long-range analysis. Just more GI grunts from Ohio and Texas shown carrying M-16s on the
CBS
Evening News
. Ed Fouhy, a former U.S. Marine who started working the civil rights beat out of New Orleans and Atlanta for Mike Wallace’s
CBS Morning News
, was named the new bureau chief in Saigon. Fouhy had a meeting with Cronkite at the broadcast center before his departure. “It was really a pep talk,” Fouhy recalled. “Walter was a very competitive guy. He was worried that NBC was starting to outperform us in Vietnam. He didn’t ask any foreign policy questions. It was about beating our rivals.”

Fouhy arrived at the Caravelle Hotel in Saigon, where CBS News had taken over the third floor. His stable of reporters—Nelson Benton, Bill Plante, Don Webster, and Bert Quint among them—were told that Cronkite wanted more breaking-news coverage. The custom at both CBS and NBC was that correspondents served in Vietnam for three to six months, the majority of it in Saigon or Da Nang, with time off every six weeks for out-of-country R&R. Truth be told, the CBS correspondents did not often leave the comforts of Saigon and go into the field to cover the troops (as Safer had done). Most reporters spent nights in a Saigon bed with clean sheets, not stuck in the jungle with American soldiers flushing out Vietcong guerrillas. The excuse back then was that the technology necessary to film at night had not yet been developed. Why, therefore, go to the great discomfort of carrying a sleeping bag, poncho, and liner, not to mention all that extra water and film stock, when you could be warm, dry, and snug in your own bed in Saigon or Da Nang? “This practice changed in 1967,” correspondent John “Jack” Laurence recalled, “as a few correspondents discovered the rewards of getting to know the troops and winning their respect by living with them for days at a time and reporting what they had to say.”

Salant wrote a highly confidential memo in the late summer of 1967 instructing correspondents to explain what their stories from Vietnam meant in the larger context of the war.
Tell us what it all means
, Salant implored. This, it seemed to Laurence, was an order to draw conclusions from what he witnessed in the war, to provide personal impressions at the end of his reports, to do commentary for the first time. The extent to which this memo from Salant to manager of news Ralph Paskman was circulated, however, remains unclear. Perhaps few others besides Cronkite, Midgley, and Manning saw it. But by then everyone at CBS News knew that Marvin Kalb, the CBS News diplomatic correspondent who covered the 1964 Senate debate of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, had found out that “contingent drafts” of the Tonkin Resolution were drafted long before the incident supposedly occurred.

But just before Laurence left for Saigon in August 1967 (his second tour), Paskman called his foreign correspondent into the office and closed the door. He told Laurence the meeting was confidential, not to be repeated to anyone. “I agreed,” Laurence recalled. “Then he took the memo out of the drawer in his desk and showed it to me. He allowed me to read it briefly, as if it were secret, and then took it away and put it back in the drawer and closed it.” Paskman reiterated not to mention the memo to
anybody
. Once again Laurence reassured him that mum was the word. “His expression was one of worry,” Laurence recalled, “as if he were opening the door to an unknown, possibly dangerous new policy.”

When Fouhy had visited with Salant just before leaving New York, he had one question: What is our Vietnam budget? “Spend,” Salant snapped, “whatever it takes.” The bureau grew to more than thirty-five employees (some of them South Vietnamese). The bureau chief, cameramen, and correspondents were American, French, Japanese, German, and Australian (the exception was Safer’s photographer at Cam Ne, Ha Thuc Can). Duong Van Ri, a Vietnamese soundman, got promoted to camera work in 1968. “We all knew,” Plante recalled, “that Salant and Cronkite, by 1967, didn’t think the war was going to end well.” WCBS-AM in New York, the second CBS radio station to adopt an all-news format, regularly ran cutting-edge reports from South Vietnam that differed wildly from what the Johnson administration claimed had taken place. Cronkite was its most devoted listener.

All this Vietnam angst had some CBS News folks going buggy. Midgley wanted to balance the grim news from the Saigon bureau with some relief for
Evening News
viewers. In 1967, Charles Kuralt, a CBS correspondent originally from Wilmington, North Carolina, who had been considered for the anchor position in 1962, suggested a new Americana feature for the show. He was tired of covering wars and revolutions in South America and Vietnam. Midgley was not at first receptive. The thirty-minute program needed, if anything, more news spots. He was reluctant to hand two or three minutes over to anyone—and to Kuralt in particular.

Slightly overweight, prematurely balding, with eyes that seemed to case every room he entered, Kuralt didn’t look like a Nielsen ratings winner. He looked like an innocuous man—a dead ringer for the hot dog–vending Ignatius J. Reilly from John Kennedy Toole’s novel
A Confederacy of Dunces
—who was easy to lose in a crowd. Furthermore, everyone at CBS knew that Cronkite bristled at the very word
feature
. And Kuralt’s travelogue idea was at the opposite end of the spectrum from hard-hitting news, for which Cronkite and CBS were known. It involved no investigation, no battlefield bravura, no blunt reporting on the injustices of American society. Kuralt wanted to take a camera and find stories about everyday Americans. Cronkite was adamantly opposed. He couldn’t bear the thought of filling the
Evening News
—his
Evening News
—with anything soft, fluffy, or deserving of the worst insult of the 1960s: irrelevant. But this was a rare instance in which he failed to have the last say on the
Evening News
’ content; he lost the battle. Midgley agreed to a compromise by which Kuralt’s “On the Road” feature would run on a trial basis for three months, starting in October 1967.

Building on a following he had developed as the first anchor of
CBS News Sunday Magazine
, Kuralt reported good news about big accomplishments in the small worlds of innovative Americans around the country. Starting with a segment on New England autumnal leaf color-changing, Kuralt soon profiled an old black man in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, who made bricks; a train engineer who maintained working steam locomotives in Wisconsin; a Vermonter who marketed a nineteenth-century treatment for chapped cow udders; and a Southerner who fixed bicycles so that no child in the neighborhood would be without one. Kuralt’s homespun two-minute stories were not the stuff normally regarded as national news.
Time
magazine succinctly described Kuralt’s “On the Road” features as “two-minute cease-fires” from the tumultuous era. The gentle-hearted segments, for which Kuralt won two Peabody Awards and an Emmy, proved essential to the
Evening News
, allowing it to cover troubled times in stark terms by also celebrating the basic values upon which even a splintered country could agree: American generosity, humor, nonconformity, and dignity. As Midgley noted, Kuralt liked to talk with “oldsters,” as if they were the only rational voices left in an America obsessed with Vietnam.

Cronkite soon came around to embrace the value of “On the Road” on the
Evening News
, ultimately befriending its host. Just as Murrow had developed a tag team of smart guys in the 1940s and 1950s, Cronkite was doing the same in the late 1960s. Kuralt became one of his favorite sidekicks. Together they toyed with the idea of buying a string of radio stations, with Kuralt eventually acquiring WELY in Ely, Minnesota.

At the end of 1967, the
CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite
finally passed
The
Huntley-Brinkley Report
in the ratings. Kuralt was a winning factor. It had been a tough slog since 1962. The excellence of the Vietnam correspondent corps was a major part of the broadcast’s success. The likable Kuralt and the lofty Sevareid contributed to the appeal of the mannered Cronkite broadcast. The network’s unceasing promotion of Cronkite as the
best
anchor helped, too.

It was becoming clear by Christmas 1967 that the Vietnam War was going to be
the
big issue in the 1968 presidential election. The entire
CBS Evening News
program was now in technicolor: the blood of Vietnam was now deep red in people’s living rooms. President Johnson no longer trusted Cronkite and his CBS ilk. At a March 1967 dinner party, he told reporters that CBS and NBC were “controlled by the Vietcong.”

Cronkite tried to differentiate Johnson’s policy from the grunts who were fighting in Vietnam, young draftees whose main objective was to survive. None of the officers Cronkite interviewed in Vietnam below the rank of lieutenant colonel said they were fighting for the flag; they were fighting to protect their band of brothers. By 1967, Johnson’s entire Vietnam enterprise was falling apart. Heroin use by troops was steadily increasing, as was NSU (non-specific urethritis, what the military called gonorrhea). There was a rash of “fragging”—tossing grenades into the tents and barracks of unpopular officers and NCOs. “No one had a clear idea of why they were fighting this war,” recalled Safer.

With the promise of a close election in 1968, Cronkite knew in late 1967 that CBS News was in for a tumultuous year. President Johnson, with his overworked Texas mannerisms, was by now so roundly distrusted regarding Vietnam that Democrats were breaking ranks. As early as 1966, Salant expected Senator Robert Kennedy of New York to challenge Johnson for the Democratic nomination, and CBS News began covering him closely. Cronkite used to joke that his two newest hobbies were “bird and Bobby watching.” At just forty years of age, Robert, the brother of John F. Kennedy, had written a book in 1967—
To Make a Newer World
—calling for the U.S. to withdraw from Vietnam. Eugene McCarthy, Minnesota’s poet-intellectual senator, a dove on Vietnam, declared his candidacy in November 1967 as the antiwar choice; former CBS News vice president Blair Clark served as his campaign manager. Realizing that the Vietnam War was growing more and more unpopular, that November General Westmoreland delivered a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, claiming U.S. troops had reached a point “where the end begins to come into view.”