Cronkite (57 page)

When Cronkite officially heard the words, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The
Eagle
has landed,” at 4:17 p.m. EST he became emotional. Tears filled his eyes. Also Schirra’s. They were struck dumb with admiration for America. Clarke, sitting beside Cronkite and Schirra, later said it felt like “time had stopped in Studio 41.” For a while, Cronkite kept the broadcast silent, glasses in hand, shaking his head from side to side in disbelief. Schirra, like millions of viewers, was anxious to hear what immortal words Cronkite would utter for the history books.

The previous day, the two had met for a quick dinner at the old Regency Hotel on Park Avenue to discuss the impact of the anchorman’s words. Schirra had even gone through
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations
to offer Cronkite ideas from Aristotle and T. S. Eliot. Now that the time-frozen moment had arrived, Schirra looked at Cronkite with anticipation. “Wow,” the great journalist said. “Oh, boy!”

No two words could have been more apropos than “Oh, boy!” There was cunning in the ring of honest human simplicity. Cronkite, lost in thought, was oblivious to the audience and he was speechless. Yet, in truth, “Oh, boy” was a successful trope he had used since the Project Mercury days. It worked again for
Apollo 11
.

For Cronkite’s CBS team, the post-landing coverage was the hardest part of the marathon broadcasts. Cronkite and Schirra had a lot of time to kill, with only the static-infused voices of the Apollo astronauts as reliable guides to what was happening. At that point, the banter between Cronkite and Schirra mattered the most. They had to build the suspense back up in a reverential way, getting people ready for a moon walk that was six hours and thirty-nine minutes away. Cronkite filled that void with reams of fresh information provided by the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston and friendly banter with Schirra and Clarke. Then the matchless moment began, the
Eagle
door opened, and Armstrong started his descent.

Cronkite
: There he is. There’s a foot coming down the steps.

Houston Voice
: OK, Neil. We can see you coming down the ladder now.

Armstrong
: OK. I just checked getting back up to that first step. It didn’t collapse too far. It’s adequate to get back up.

Houston Voice
:
Roger. We copy.

Armstrong
:
It’s just a little jump.

Cronkite
:
So there’s a foot on the Moon, stepping down on the Moon. If he’s testing that first step, he must be stepping down on the Moon at this point.

A billion people were watching on TVs all around the globe. Not many seconds had elapsed since the hatch opened when Armstrong said: “One small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.” Unfortunately, those perfect words, prepared by Armstrong himself, were partially indecipherable due to static. Cronkite worked his Houston contacts to get the phrase right. And it was Cronkite, more than any other TV personality, who made hay out of Armstrong’s choosing to say
mankind
, not
America
. “The step on the Moon was an awesome achievement,” CBS News president Richard Salant recalled, “so was its reporting on television, because it emphasized television’s extraordinary ability to unify a disparate world through communicating with so many people, in so many places, and thus providing them with a common—and an extraordinarily satisfying—experience.”

Before long, Aldrin joined Armstrong on the Moon to collect rock samples and plant Old Glory on its surface, to Cronkite’s obvious delight. The hatch was open on the Moon for two hours, thirty-one minutes, and forty seconds. As Armstrong and Aldrin bounced around on the Moon, Cronkite told viewers the two men were “like colts” finding their footing. He had gotten a lead from the White House that President Nixon would soon talk by radio-telephone to the
Apollo 11
astronauts. Cronkite reported that fact first. Armstrong and Aldrin had moved the existing camera, which had been activated by Armstrong as he descended the ladder, to be mounted in a fixed position on the tripod so that the world could watch their moon exploration live. This had been Cronkite’s hope since he promoted cameras back in 1963 with Gordon Cooper orbiting Earth on
Faith 7
, the last of the Mercury missions.

After hours of exulation over Armstrong and Aldrin’s antics, Cronkite raised the specter of how the astronauts were going to get home. Once Armstrong and Aldrin reboarded the
Eagle
, what would happen if its rockets didn’t fire? Would they die on the Moon? Could they return safely to the mothership, where Collins was waiting for them? The most pressure-packed moment of the mission was yet to come: the liftoff of the lunar module. Cronkite built up the tension for these next phases of the mission. When the
Eagle
module did reunite with the mothership, Cronkite once again expressed his relief in a slang colloquialism: “Hot diggety dog!”

NBC’s Chet Huntley and David Brinkley were boring compared to Cronkite; their attitude was oddly blasé, treating the excitement as a so-so affair. At ABC both Frank Reynolds and Jules Bergman came off as too academic and lacking any chattering warmth. When Cronkite ended CBS’s historic thirty-two-hour broadcast, he signed off with this observation: “Man has finally visited the Moon after all the ages of waiting and waiting. Two Americans with the alliterative names of Armstrong and Aldrin have spent just under a full Earth day on the Moon. They picked at it and sampled it, and they deployed experiments on it, and they packed away some of it to pack with them and bring home.” Sounding like a child, he hoped someday to touch the lunar rocks and dust that the
Apollo 11
astronauts were bringing home with them.

Talk about Iron Pants. Cronkite had stayed live on CBS TV for seventeen and a half hours straight. After a brief nap, he went back on the Tube for another nine hours. He claimed he never noticed the “fatigue factor.”
The
New York Times
saluted him for his “seemingly effortless performance.” It applauded Cronkite’s having read Archibald MacLeish’s original poem “Voyage to the Moon” as a broadcast wrap-up of “Man on the Moon.” Like Carl Sagan—best known for making space and science accessible—Cronkite was able to break down aerospace concepts for the average American without dumbing them down. Wussler, the executive producer for CBS, had pulled off miraculous television, making the well-schooled Cronkite the broadcaster beneficiary. Cronkite agreed that
Apollo 11
was the high-water mark of television; he called it the new “Golden Age of American Greatness.” With his raw, nationalistic pride, he was in stark contrast to Eric Sevareid, though, who, like Armstrong, publicly fretted that
Apollo 11
would lead to the militarization of space. “History has never proceeded by a rational plan,” Cronkite said, “not even science knows what it is doing beyond the immediate experiment. It is possible that the divine spirit in Man will consume him in flames, that the big brain will prove our ultimate flaw, like the dinosaur’s big body.”

Cronkite fervently believed that out of all the momentous acts of the sixties—the Kennedy assassinations, the March on Washington, Freedom Summer, César Chávez’s boycotts, Medicare and Medicaid, women’s liberation, the Vietnam War debate, take your pick—the
Apollo 11
mission to Earth’s moon was the most historically significant of all. Cronkite’s bold claim was credible. An astonishing 94 percent of all American homes had elatedly tuned in for the historic moon walk of Neil Armstrong on July 20, 1969. “It was a wonderful story of achievement, and everybody at Cocoa Beach and the Space Center at Cape Canaveral was looking up,” Cronkite recalled. “They were looking toward the stars rather than looking down with the depressed state of world affairs, civil rights and Vietnam going on at the same time. So this was a relief story to all of us.”

Of the three
Apollo 11
astronauts, Aldrin paid Cronkite the highest compliment of all. In his memoir,
The Long Journey Home from the Moon
, Aldrin praised Cronkite as the voice of the moon shot. With humor, Aldrin used to say he sometimes wished he could have stayed home, eaten potato chips, and watched CBS News’ commanding marathon broadcast. “Odd as it might seem,” he wrote, “I have always wished that I could have shared that exhilarating experience [of walking on the Moon] with everybody else on Earth as they watched the electrifying moments leading up to our touchdown. We missed sharing in the reaction, the emotion embodied by the sight of broadcaster Walter Cronkite wiping away his tears.”

Other reviewers were not as impressed with the Cronkite marathon. “CBS,” wrote
The
Washington Post
’s Lawrence Laurent, “did overwork Walter Cronkite and in his weariness, Walter did tend to fall into a monotonous, sing-song kind of delivery.” More people saw Cronkite and stayed with him, though, than saw the coverage on either of the other networks. CBS drew 45 percent of the audience, NBC drew 34 percent, and ABC drew 16 percent. Cronkite had attached himself to the
Apollo 11
event, an earnest effort that had started a dozen years before, when he staked out space coverage as his beat on
The Twentieth Century
. His dedication had its own rewards, but it was a good investment of his time as well. Cronkite, the anchorman, wasn’t merely the messenger of bad news. He was Mr. Moon Shot. At a reception room in Houston for the contractors who helped build
Apollo 11
, a hostess was stationed at the door. “The tourists who look in are always asking for Walter Cronkite,” she said, “and are disappointed that he’s not here. He’s more popular than the astronauts.”

Without question, Neil Armstrong was a veritable hero, and on August 17, Cronkite interviewed him, along with Aldrin and Collins, on CBS News’
Face the Nation
. Normally, Cronkite shunned the Sunday show. But getting to interview the three
Apollo 11
astronauts at KHOU-TV in Houston—one of his two hometowns—was irresistible. Cronkite, declining to be a panelist, bigfooted out George E. Herman, the moderator, for the first time in fourteen years.

While ostensibly Cronkite was going to debrief Armstrong about his moon walk on
Face the Nation
, the journalist in him couldn’t help addressing the widespread rumors that the celebrity astronaut was an atheist, a charge propagated by Madalyn Murray O’Hair. When Armstrong was a test pilot in southern California during the 1950s, he had applied to become a Boy Scout troop leader at a local Methodist church. On the application form, when asked his religion, Armstrong had written, “Deist.”

Seemingly embarrassed to be cornering Armstrong on the deist question, Cronkite nevertheless pursued the point on
Face the Nation
. If he hadn’t, his two press colleagues on the show—David Schoumacher of CBS and Howard Benedict of the Associated Press—would have. “I don’t really know what that has to do with your ability as a test pilot and as an astronaut, but since the matter is up,” Cronkite asked, “would you like to answer that statement?”

“I don’t know where Mrs. O’Hair gets her information,” Armstrong said, “but she certainly didn’t bother to inquire from me nor apparently the agency, but I am certainly not an atheist.”

“Apparently,” Cronkite followed up, “your [NASA astronaut] application just simply says ‘no religious preference.’ ”

“That’s agency nomenclature,” a frustrated Armstrong explained, “which means that you didn’t have an acknowledged identification or association with a particular church group at the time. I did not at that time.”

Because Cronkite was known as Mr. Moon Shot, he was especially reluctant to be seen giving Armstrong a free pass. But after that program, Cronkite felt like a bum. Had it really been necessary to push Armstrong on religion? Cronkite wasn’t alone in trying to get Armstrong to reveal his inner self that summer, but his inquisition on
Face the Nation
was painful to watch. “Walter told me that the biggest on-air mistake he’d ever made was holding Armstrong accountable for his religion on the
Face the Nation
show,” the CBS correspondent Ed Bradley recalled. “He said, ‘I did the lowest thing a man can do, Ed. I embarrassed him about his very private relationship with God. . . . It’s not worth it in the long run. You’ll get one day of glory and a lifetime of regret.’ ” (Armstrong didn’t hold it against Cronkite—he appeared exclusively with him on CBS’s fifth-anniversary special about the Moon landing.)

On November 14–24, 1969, the
Apollo 12
mission flew to the Moon and returned safely. But CBS’s ratings weren’t particularly good. None of the networks’ audiences came close to those for
Apollo 11
.
Apollo 12
astronauts Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon, and Al Bean didn’t elicit the excitement of Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins. While Cronkite did a fine job discussing how the LEM landing was controlled remotely and how the astronauts were bringing home pieces of the
Surveyor 3
robot that had landed on the Moon in 1967, there just was no “one giant leap for mankind” moment. Still, Cronkite received fine reviews for his on-air repartee with Schirra, and all the astronauts’ wives watched CBS’s coverage because of the “fatherly” anchorman.

An unforgettable moment occurred for both Cronkite and Arthur C. Clarke during CBS’s
Apollo 12
coverage. Scientist Paul Gast, who ranked high in NASA leadership, had arrived in the green room at the CBS Broadcast Center in New York. Like a drug dealer going psst . . . psst . . . , he summoned Cronkite to inspect the contraband goods he had stashed in his suit coat pocket. “He had little vials of real, 3.8 billion-year-old lunar material with him.” An awestruck Cronkite stood in a druid circle with Schirra, Clarke, and a few others in hushed silence. He held the moon soil in the palms of his hands. It had been brought back from the Moon just a few months before on
Apollo 11
.