Cronkite (6 page)

Just as Cronkite was getting going on K.C. radio, executive vice president of CBS News Edward Klauber hired twenty-nine-year-old Edward R. Murrow as “Director of Talks” (which meant that he would arrange for scientists and scholars to broadcast on the radio for fifteen minutes on Sundays). Realizing that his clear voice was a resonant asset, Murrow, who had been studying elocution since college at Washington State in Pullman, majoring in speech, wanted a broadcasting career. Late in 1936 the young executive received permission from Klauber to step behind the microphone and deliver a news broadcast. At the time, the CBS network was not much more sophisticated than struggling KCMO in Kansas City: broadcasts consisted of a few lines for each story, with no original reporting or remote feeds. Murrow was nervous enough to solicit private coaching from Robert Trout, a North Carolinan with a dozen years of experience in radio. Unflappable in the extreme, Trout had taken to radio easily, and he tried to impart the importance of a natural cadence to the budding Murrow.

Murrow was assigned to Europe by CBS to broadcast cultural events such as Viennese waltzes and German operas. In March 1938, CBS journalist William L. Shirer told Murrow that the expected
Anschluss
, Hitler’s annexation of Austria, had begun. German troops were pouring over the border. Springing to action, Murrow flew first to Berlin, then chartered a twenty-seven-seat Lufthansa transport at great expense to get to ground zero: Vienna. Taking a streetcar from the airport to downtown Vienna, he described on a shortwave radio the sacking of the Austrian city perched along the Danube River. On March 13, with Cronkite listening in Kansas City, Murrow broadcast his dramatic report from Austria for American listeners’ edification. It was a leap into grown-up reality:

This is Edward Murrow speaking from Vienna. It’s now nearly 2:30 in the morning and Herr Hitler has not yet arrived. No one seems to know just when he will get here, but most people expect him sometime after ten o’clock tomorrow. . . . I arrived here by air from Warsaw and Berlin only a few hours ago. From the air, Vienna didn’t look much different than it had before, but nevertheless it’s changed . . . they lift the right arm a little higher here than in Berlin and the “Heil Hitler” is said a little more loudly . . .

Up until that Murrow broadcast, the most illustrious voice Cronkite knew was NBC’s Lowell Thomas, an old boyhood hero. Murrow’s
Anschluss
report turned Cronkite inside out like a sock. For the first time, Cronkite started listening regularly to CBS News. The whole CBS News “Round-up” crowd—from William L. Shirer in London, to Edgar Ansel Mowrer in Paris, to Pierre Huss in Berlin, to Frank Gervasi in Rome, to the indomitable Robert Trout everywhere—were major discoveries to Cronkite. How did CBS News present real-time history in the making with such dramatic flair? The tumultuous events in Europe were being routed via a shortwave transmitter in Berlin, onward to London, then to New York and straight to the American heartland.

Generally, radio news in 1936, during the lull between the two wars, was synonymous with such diligent and dapper men as Trout. He happened to be a good newsman, but first he had been a voice. A mesmerizing voice: that was the only thing that radio offered over newspapers at the time. Cronkite had, for all intents and purposes, abandoned print journalism—
Houston Press
style—for wireless entertainment. At first, talking to the microphone was fun for Cronkite. His star turn each week lay in broadcasting sporting events without seeing them. That was the accepted sleight-of-hand of radio, first learned in Texas bookie joints. Cronkite, fast on his feet, mastered the art of what he called “reconstructed games.”

During the fall of 1936, Cronkite, broadcasting under the fictional name Walter Wilcox (Cronkite sounded too German), sat in the KCMO studio every Saturday and received via Western Union telegraph a running description of a preselected college football game. Cronkite had to rely on a nimble mind and a tireless imagination to create a fully believable and exciting live broadcast. Listeners were informed at intervals that the broadcast was a re-creation based on wire reports, yet Cronkite continued to hone the masquerade of play-by-play broadcasts. It was fake sports announcing by a fake Walter Wilcox. Four words on the ticker were turned into a solid minute of description over the radio. It was exactly the opposite of his work during the week, when he turned long newspaper articles into three- or four-sentence news briefs for the radio. “I didn’t need many facts,” Cronkite told
The Oklahoman
in 2002. “I just used my imagination.”

Cronkite’s KCMO sports broadcast re-creations were successful, even if the station was still by far the weakest on the Kansas City radio dial. The proof came when an official from the FCC told the station to increase the number of advisories that the broadcast was not actually live, but a re-creation from telegraph reports.

After Cronkite relocated to Kansas City, his mother returned there to be near her son. Walter didn’t live with her, instead taking an apartment with his KCMO coworker Harry Bailey. Cronkite explored local bars and jazz haunts, sometimes with Bailey, who wrote commercials at KCMO. The waitresses at the Chesterfield Club were naked, though that was not entirely uncommon in the clubs, where serving drinks and prostitution were often blended into one profession. At Chesterfield’s, the waitresses’ pubic hair was shaved to reflect the suits in a deck of cards: clubs and spades for the African American waitresses, hearts and diamonds for the Caucasian ones. That innovation seemed almost innocent when compared with the scheduled onstage sexual performances, at some clubs, that might feature any combination of humans—and animals. “The joints were shoulder-to-shoulder, and there wasn’t any closing hour,” Cronkite recalled. “There were girls in most, transvestites in a few and, the street’s real glory, great jazz in many. . . . If there was anything comparable in Houston, it had certainly escaped my attention. I was nineteen when I hit Kansas City. The visits to Twelfth Street and the brief associations with its denizens helped me grow up in a hurry.”

Soon after starting at the radio station in early 1936, having finally worked Bit Winter out of his emotional system, Cronkite met a beautiful young advertising copywriter at KCMO. Mary Elizabeth “Betsy” Maxwell was a recent graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia. Cronkite couldn’t take his eyes off her when she glided into the station. Although he wanted to flirt with Betsy, he was tongue-tied by her comeliness. “I watched her coming down the hall,” he later recalled, “and I was stricken, absolutely stricken.” But Betsy could feel Cronkite’s gaze, and reciprocated with a smile worthy of Veronica Lake. “It was,” she recalled, “love at first sight for both of us.” The two began dating a few days later, and within months they were seriously considering marriage. “Betsy and I went from the studio to lunch, from lunch to dinner,” Cronkite wrote, “and from KCMO through life together.”

Betsy was bright, feisty, and rapt with words. A native of Kansas City, she was, in the parlance of the time, a
looker
. At the University of Missouri, while earning As in journalism courses, she became runner-up in the campus election of Agriculture Queen. About five foot four, with a lithe, nimble figure, slightly pale, with large eyes and a profusion of curl-ironed hair, Betsy exuded a girl-next-door allure. Blessed with a wicked sense of humor and the gift of putting everyone at ease, she was the unusual combination of homespun sweet and scorpion sting. After graduation, she took the job at KCMO, but her goal was to join the staff of a newspaper. The first time Walter and Betsy bonded was when they were co-reading a radio commercial script for the Richard Hudnut Corporation, a cosmetics company. They performed together on air, selling makeup, courtesy of a come-on written by Betsy:

Cronkite
: “Hello, Angel. What heaven did you drop from?”

Maxwell
: “I’m not an angel.”

Cronkite
: “Well you look like an angel.”

Maxwell
: “That’s because I use Richard Hudnut.”

By the beginning of 1937, Betsy had found a new job, writing features for the women’s page at the
Kansas City
Journal-Post
, a lot of local-color copy on quilting bees and library functions. The paper was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, but Betsy was pleased to be a “woman’s section” writer. Before long she was assigned to write the “advice to the lovelorn” column. The future Mrs. Cronkite joked that she wasn’t old enough to
read
some of the rather revealing letters sent into the paper, let alone to provide counsel on the problems. Betsy kept dating Walter, who was irresistibly attractive, but not handsome. “He used to be such a string bean,” she recalled of their courting days, “that my mother insisted on having us over for dinner all the time to fatten him up. Also, for many years he wore his hair slicked back, as was the fashion—but it wasn’t extremely flattering.”

While Cronkite’s love life was on the upswing, his professional life hit a roadblock. One day the wife of his boss, Jim Simmons, called the station to report that three firemen had been killed in a blaze in her neighborhood. Simmons rushed to Cronkite’s desk, saying, “Get on the air with a flash! The new city hall is on fire, and three firemen just jumped to their deaths!” Cronkite, full of protestations and litanies, insisted on checking the facts himself with the fire department by telephone.

“You don’t have to check on it,” Simmons snapped at Cronkite. “My wife called and told me.”

“I do too have to check on it,” Cronkite said, remembering the fundamentals of journalism instilled in him at San Jacinto High,
The Houston Press
, and INS.

“Are you calling my wife a liar?” a ticked-off Simmons asked the young Lone Star hotshot.

“No,” Cronkite said, evoking the Standard Model of Professional Journalism. “I’m not calling your wife a liar, but I don’t know the details.”

Simmons was now livid. “I’ve told you the details. The new city hall building’s on fire, and three firemen have jumped.”

With Cronkite resolutely refusing to go on air, Simmons, in a temperamental snit, headed to the microphone himself. Playing the fool, he went on the KCMO airwaves ad-libbing a breaking news bulletin about the supposedly burned firemen. Cronkite’s sleuthing subsequently proved that the fire had been minor. There were no deaths. Nevertheless, the next day, Cronkite was summarily fired by the ego-bruised Simmons. Cronkite felt betrayed, clubbed over the head with the farce. “They felt,” Cronkite recalled, “that I was getting a little bit too big for my britches.”

This unsettling fire incident might have precipitated the split with KCMO, but it probably wasn’t the only source of friction. Once the glamour of radio wore off—such as it was at a weak, 100-watt midwestern station—Cronkite began to chafe at the shallow radio version of events that passed for news. Even though he was unsure how his bills would get paid, he was relieved to be out of KCMO, uncontaminated by Simmons. With a snort of contempt, he remained proud of getting fired for refusing to go live without first triple-sourcing for confirmation of the fire’s reality. And he got the last laugh. When Cronkite died in 2009, one blog told the story of how KCMO canned, for being ethical, the broadcaster who became the Most Trusted Man in America. The headline of the post was “KCMO: Stupid Enough to Fire Cronkite, Downhill Ever Since.”

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

Making of a Unipresser

UP TRADITION—NEWS AS COMMODITY—MISSOURI METHOD OF JOURNALISM—THE WELL-PRESSED JOHN CAMERON SWAYZE—TEXAS SCHOOL EXPLOSION—PHONE BOOTH REPORTING FOR CBS—ACTION ADDICT—WKY SOONERS SPORTSCASTER—LEARNING TO AD-LIB—FLYING LOW WITH BRANIFF—MESSRS. SMITH AND SEVAREID GO TO EUROPE—BEGGING FOR THE UP JOB—THE HIGH-ALTITUDE KIDNAPPING CAPER—SPELLBOUND BY MURROW—HITLER’S RAMPAGE—POISED FOR WAR

A
fter three months of uneasy post-KCMO unemployment, Cronkite gladly accepted a job as night editor with the Kansas City office of the United Press. Located at the intersection of East Twenty-second and Oak Street, just two blocks from a burlesque joint, the UP bureau wasn’t much more than a garret with typewriters, Teletype machines, and a water cooler. Cronkite was elated to be a Unipresser, as UP’s wire service reporters were called. The
Chicago Tribune
got it right when it called UP a “scrappy alternative” to AP. UP’s fighting underdog attitude fit Cronkite’s indefatigable personality to a tee.

Unipressers such as Cronkite knew how to stretch a dollar, cheat a pay phone, use rented typewriters, and sleep in the backseat of a broken-down Ford instead of squandering money on a motel room. Unipressers were preternaturally hungry for scoops to sell to newspapers. At all times, UP tried to break news first, not just to beat AP, but all other media as well. In 1914, UP was the first to use the Teletype (invented that year), and in the 1930s it was the first to develop the International Unifax machine (the pioneering automatic picture receiver). Most important for Cronkite’s career trajectory, UP, starting in 1935, was the first major news service to offer breaking news to radio stations. Before long, UP, a worldwide news wholesaler headed by a dynamic general manager, Roy Howard, also became the first North American news agency to offer wire service to newspapers in Europe, South America, and the Far East.

In
Fortune
magazine (May 1933), the artiste Stephen Vincent Benét explained the religious devotion Unipressers had to their company. “It is a business concern and its members work for profit,” Benét wrote. “But there is another motive that drives them quite as strongly. You can call it pride of profession or professional zest or enthusiasm or self-hypnosis. But, whatever you call it, it is as common to the stockholding executives as to the lunch-money copy boy—it is indeed the strongest bond that holds U.P. together. And what it boils down to, when the sentiment and the wisecracks are both skimmed off, is an actual genuine love of the game.”

A young Unipresser such as Cronkite, outposted in Missouri, had to dream of big national bylines. He had been jobless long enough to bring a new level of dedication to his UP work. Kansas City was his proving ground. With constant pressure to provide content for thousands of newspapers, especially in the Midwest, Cronkite found himself reporting, fact-checking, rewriting, editing, and even generating story ideas from his UP bureau desk. Although an individual newspaper, such as the
Kansas City
Journal-Post
(where Betsy worked), naturally reflected a particular point of view—that of the locality, as the editors saw it—at a UP office, news was a commodity. When a major story hit Missouri or Kansas, the staff had to scramble to cover it, preferably with greater speed and style than the competing Associated Press or local reporters. Likewise, when mundane events occurred, UP still had to provide news of all types: from eye-catching headlines to incidental squibs to box scores to garden club announcements to instant obituaries. UP was in the wholesale business, and the marketplace didn’t lie. Newspapers, Cronkite learned, voted allegiance with the amount of space accorded to UP-originated material. His reputation would be made by how many “Cronkite” stories sold per week.

A harmful trend to which the advent of the AP and UP wire services contributed was the decline of daily newspapers (or, as Max Lerner plugged it in
America as a Civilization
, the “thinning of the pipelines of communication” from coast to coast). In 1909, when Theodore Roosevelt was president, there were 2,600 daily newspapers operating in America. By the time Franklin Roosevelt was in the White House during the Great Depression, that number had been reduced to 1,750. An argument can be made, in fact, that the wire service led to many cities no longer having competing newspapers. To the detriment of America, news was getting streamlined into two main pipelines: UP and AP.

Kansas City in the year 1938 still had two fine newspapers: the
Star
and the
Journal-Post
; Cronkite intellectually gravitated to the second because of personal friendships. A lot of Betsy Maxwell’s classmates from the University of Missouri–Columbia, it turned out, had worked on the
Columbia Missourian
in college and ended up at the
Journal-Post
after graduation. These budding Missouri reporters became lifelong friends of the Cronkites. Both Walter and Betsy were exposed to what was known as the “Missouri Method” of journalism: hands-on reporting in real-world local media market outlets, a kind of provincial baptism by fire that characterized the Missouri School of Journalism, the oldest J-school in the world. John Cameron Swayze was then a young columnist at the
Journal-Post
—he would become one of Cronkite’s closest friends.

Though Swayze was perceived as a handsome dandy by NBC News viewers in the 1950s, Cronkite knew that Swayze was a true reporter at heart. The
Journal-Post
newsroom was just across a stairwell corridor in the same downtown building where UP rented offices. Almost daily, as Cronkite was punching out from his night shift, he’d bump into the meticulously groomed Swayze, with a pocket-square in his suit jacket, racing to make airtime (he had a 7:00 a.m. radio news show). Cronkite would hand Swayze the UP news copy, placed in metal-ringed notebooks, for him to speed-read before broadcast. He would sit at his desk and read over Cronkite’s tight UP copy, barely having time for a gulp of coffee. Then Cronkite, with amazement, would watch as the broadcast light went on and a suddenly cool and collected Swayze performed flawlessly. “Good morning, John Cameron Swayze here with the news from the
Kansas City Journal-Post
city room. Today . . .”

When Cronkite joined UP, he brought with him a good two years of Texas news-gathering experience, checkered though it was. He eagerly volunteered to substitute for vacationing editors and reporters in other UP offices around the region, a form of training that exposed him to other cities and, more important, to colleagues with a wide range of talents and tips. Such assignments, usually in the southeasterly direction, down secondary blacktop roads from the Ozarks to the Rio Grande Valley, kept Cronkite away from Kansas City for two- or three-week stretches. Betsy Maxwell, busy with her own career at the
Journal-Post
, was patient, although Walter’s out-of-state absences to Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas severely tested their courtship.

Two months after starting at UP, Cronkite was assigned to work at the Dallas bureau for a brief spell, on loan from the Kansas City desk. On March 18, 1937, at 3:05 p.m. on a beautiful spring day, Cronkite was at his Dallas desk when there was a natural gas explosion at a consolidated public school in New London, Texas, causing 295 deaths, a majority of them children. A gas leak at the two-story school, a steel-formed building only a couple of years old, had caused a bomblike detonation that blew the edifice to kingdom come. Balls of rolling gas shot into the Texas sky like a fiery orange tornado and caused the ground to shake for miles around.

The area around New London—located in the northwest corner of Rusk County—was surrounded by ten thousand oil derricks; eleven had been fatally erected on school grounds. Governor James Allred called up the Texas Rangers, Texas Highway Patrol, and the Texas National Guard to pull out bruised and battered survivors. The New London boom’s echo, it was said, had been heard a hundred miles away, in the stockyards of Fort Worth. Some students miraculously walked out of the rubble unscathed, dazed and confused but spared serious injuries.

Cronkite received a dispatch from the Houston UP bureau confirming the explosion, and off he raced in his Dodge to New London with Bill Baldwin, the manager of the UP bureau in Dallas. Just how horrific the tragedy was became vividly apparent when he saw a line of cars, ambulances, and trucks parked at the funeral home in Tyler, all unloading corpses. Makeshift morgues had been erected in Henderson, Kilgore, and Overton to accommodate the dead.

Cronkite flashed a United Press badge for access to the disaster zone. He hitched a ride on a fire department searchlight vehicle that had just arrived from Beaumont to help out in the impending nighttime rescue efforts. Cronkite searched for eyewitnesses who saw the school’s roof blow off. “It is not easy,” Cronkite quickly learned, “to approach someone in such distress to seek answers to the questions that need asking.”

Nothing in his University of Texas journalism classes or the Missouri Method had prepared Cronkite for
this story
. Oil roughnecks had rushed to New London from the Permian Basin to look for lost children, to collect the charred and crushed bodies of the young. Cronkite’s harrowing eyewitness UP features offered emotional images of what the reporter saw—and yet kept the reporter out of the articles. His eye for ironic detail—such as a surviving school wall with a blackboard on which someone had written, “Oil and natural gas are East Texas’ greatest mineral blessings”—was superb. One of his UP reports read, in part, as follows:

OVERTON, TEX., MAR. 19 [1937]—(UP)

Take oil from this town and nothing would be left. The last census showed its population to be a little more than 500 yet 3,000 persons receive their mail at the general post office.

It is the capital of the East Texas oil field, the richest in the world, whose forest of derricks stretch
[sic]
90 miles across the Texas hills on a line one to 15 miles wide.

Week days, its few streets are dotted by the toughest migratory workers in the world—the men who go from field to field where oil is gushing, who work hard and dangerously and live hard and gaily.

Saturday night, dressed in their silk shirts and pleated trousers, a week’s pay in their pockets, the men come in for what diversions the town affords. They are strong men and hard men.

Today they were in town on another mission and beneath the flamboyant shirts, knotted shoulder muscles bent beneath unseen weights. Faces were heavy-jawed and screwed tensely.

They stood about in small knots, looking not into passing faces but toward their feet. They gathered at the curbs. From a distance they seemed to be chatting. But closer, the passerby heard men weep, heard rasp-like voices oddly strained in unaccustomed efforts to be tender.

Decades later, even after he was credited with helping end the Vietnam War, Cronkite called the New London tragedy his most memorable reporting assignment. Sleeping at the Overton Hotel, calling CBS Radio News in New York from a pay phone to offer a nationwide listening audience a detailed eyewitness report, Cronkite earned his spurs that sad March week. Fifty years later—on March 18, 1987—reporter Harry Smith of
CBS Morning News
was preparing to do an anniversary segment on the Texas explosion and was surprised to discover after thorough research that Walter Cronkite of UP had been
the
premier reporter of the deadliest school disaster in U.S. history, one that practically wiped out a whole community. “I got some very good lessons in emergency coverage there,” Cronkite recalled, “and wrote two or three stories that got some notice.”

No sooner were the bodies buried in New London than Cronkite’s managing editor assigned him to open a bureau in El Paso, where United Press was just starting to sell its service to KTSM radio (the voice of the Rio Grande Valley). Unbeknownst to Cronkite, he was walking into a media gunfight between the
El Paso Arrow Post
(owned by Scripps Howard) and KTSM (using UP reports extracted from Scripps Howard services). After a week in hot, contentious, and dusty El Paso, smack in the middle of a local press war, a month having passed since he’d seen Betsy, Cronkite simply drove home to Kansas City to let the chips fall where they may. With hours to kill behind the wheel, he felt odd thinking that New London had been more fun than El Paso. “I used to think life wasn’t worth living,” Cronkite later recalled, “if I couldn’t be in on the action.”

After a year with UP, unable to settle back comfortably into his K.C. job and more than a bit impetuous, Cronkite bolted back into radio broadcasting on WKY in Oklahoma City. After an interview in Dallas where he auditioned in an empty studio and was told to improvise a football game, Cronkite was hired. He grabbed the chance to do play-by-play coverage of live football games at the University of Oklahoma for the powerful NBC affiliate, which had acquired exclusive broadcast rights just before the season opener on September 26, 1937 (against the University of Tulsa Hurricanes). The Oklahoma locals were sports fanatics, and Cronkite came advertised on WKY as a “hot shot” in football broadcasting with a supposed track record at the University of Texas.

But once again Cronkite found himself in the danger zone of faking football plays on air. In anticipation of the first game in September, he hired spotters and had WKY concoct a costly electronic system to hook him up almost walkie-talkie style with his moles. The scheme was for the spotters to sit in the stands of Oklahoma Memorial Stadium (in Norman) and punch buttons on a WKY board, which in turn would indicate the formation, jersey number of the running back, and the tackler. Cronkite would be in a press booth, watch basic raw data appear on his electronic board, and then riff on air.

This system proved to be a complete disaster. Cronkite’s electronic board went haywire. The spotters made mistakes. Wrong buttons were pushed. There were three or four technical glitches. Cronkite was a complete and utter bomb. “It was really one of the lowest moments of my life,” he recalled. “When it was over I just wanted to go out and silently slip away. But I stayed in the press box waiting. I remember finally when there was no one there, walking slowly out.” The moral of the WKY story for Cronkite was profound. “If you’re going to be doing an ad-lib extemporaneous broadcast never depend upon anybody to do any part of your work. From there on out, I spent twelve hours a day learning the names and numbers of each player on each squad of the team we would play. And I knew their hometowns, their ages, their weight, and probably their mother and father’s names and how many brothers and sisters they had.”