Cronkite (64 page)

Bill Paley didn’t like Watergate Part I and dreaded the very idea of part two. A supporter of Nixon’s reelection bid, Paley deemed the work of Cronkite, Gould, Manning, and Mason “unfair, unbalanced, derivative, inaccurate, based on hearsay, and mingling rumor with editorial opinion”—but he didn’t order part two killed. He maintained that he expected CBS, as a news-gathering organization, to be responsible for everything it presented. Because Cronkite was a friend, Paley’s rage was aimed more at reporter Daniel Schorr. “The broadcast troubled me,” Paley later wrote. “It just did not seem in keeping with Cronkite’s usual objectivity.” After harshly criticizing the October 27 report, Paley allowed that the decision as to what to do about Part II still belonged with news division president Salant. But on October 30—the day before it was due to air—Paley called an emergency meeting at Black Rock with Frank Stanton (CBS vice chairman), Arthur Taylor (president of CBS), Jack Schneider (the president of the CBS Broadcast Group), and Salant. Paley’s ultimate message was that the White House heat was getting unbearable. On a regular basis, Charles Colson, full of veiled innuendo and cause-and-effect threats, would call Paley to harass him about the FCC not renewing affiliate licenses. Colson went into action in Florida—at WPLG (Miami) and WJXT (Jacksonville)—determined to revoke their licenses because they were owned by
The Washington Post
. “We’ll bring you to your knees,” Colson threatened, “in Wall Street.”

Nixon aide Charles Colson confronted Paley face-to-face the day after “Watergate: Part I” aired, infuriated at the content of the report and the timing, so close to Election Day. “I had called Paley on Nixon’s behalf and went to see him in his New York office,” Colson recalled. “We got along extremely well. I told him how Stanton was on a crusade against the president, that Cronkite’s long ‘Watergate’ segment sounded like the DNC had written it. Paley told me he was embarrassed by the segment. The net effect was that Paley called me a few days later, letting me know he got the second Watergate report cut way down in size.”

While Paley denied that he was influenced by Colson’s arm-twisting visit, devoting nine pages of his 1982 memoir to his defensive version of events, it is reasonable to surmise it had a huge impact. After the Black Rock meeting, Salant heeded the disgruntled Paley and decided that Part II of CBS’s Watergate exposé could be reduced in length. Conferring with Cronkite’s executive producer, Sandy Socolow (and secret producers Gould and Mason), Salant didn’t mention his tense meeting with Paley. Although Salant did somersaults in his memoir to deny it, he had succumbed to White House intimidation tactics. He should have resigned in protest. The CBS producers resented paring down Part II, but agreed to make the necessary revisions. “Walter Cronkite,” Salant recalled, “did not participate. At least, so far as I was involved, he never took a position one way or another.”

Paley’s meeting with Salant constituted the one and only time that the CBS chief ever tried to influence specific content within the
Evening News
during Salant’s twenty-five-year association with the program. (Paley had asked Cronkite and Schorr to tone down their mockery of Goldwater in 1964.) A righteous Salant, worried about being seen as a patsy, said later that if he had known about Colson’s confrontation with Paley, he would have stood his ground on sheer First Amendment principles and refused to shorten the second part. “If I thought [Paley] was responding to White House pressure,” Cronkite wrote, “he might not be able to control the eruption.”

“Watergate: Part II,” cut from fourteen minutes to seven minutes, was broadcast as planned on Tuesday, October 31. Cronkite then added a disclaimer to finish the broadcast. “The Nixon administration calls these allegations false, in some cases, overblown, hearsay, and misleading in others,” he said. “But apparently this segment of the press, and those disturbed at the possible injury done to the country’s delicate election process, will not be satisfied with mere denials, will not put their suspicions to rest unless or until some impartial body examines the case and renders its verdict. And that’s the way it is, Tuesday, October thirty-first, nineteen seventy-two.”

Washington Post
editor Ben Bradlee was ecstatic about Cronkite’s Watergate segments. No longer was the
Post
alone in the trench warfare with the White House. “When Cronkite aired the Watergate bits, the sun came out for me,” Bradlee recalled. “It was just like being blessed; if Cronkite was taking the Watergate story seriously,
everyone
in journalism would.”

Just eight days after Part II aired, President Nixon defeated McGovern in the biggest presidential victory in U.S. history: 520 electoral votes to 17. Clearly, Cronkite’s Watergate reports hadn’t been a game changer with the electorate. Nixon—who had taken the United States off the gold standard, allowing the dollar to float on international currency markets—was riding a strong economy that relegated Watergate to a cat-burglar farce with doubtful legs. But the dark clouds of scandal thickened overhead, in part because Cronkite had treated the Watergate break-in as Big News. The controversial two-part report on the
CBS Evening News
was credited with keeping Watergate on the front burner, where it dramatically sizzled for the next twenty-two months. As Bradlee put it, “Somehow the Great White Father, Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, had blessed the story by spending so much time on it.”

Days after Nixon was reelected, Colson delivered a blistering speech to New England newspaper editors, with Bradlee as bull’s-eye. “I think if Bradlee ever left the Georgetown cocktail circuit, where he and his pals dine on third-hand information and gossip and rumor,” Colson jabbed, “he might discover out here a real America, and he might learn that all truth and all knowledge and all superior wisdom doesn’t emanate exclusively from that small little clique in Georgetown, and that the rest of the country isn’t just sitting out here waiting to be told what they’re supposed to think.”

While Colson easily lacerated Bradlee, getting at Cronkite was a more difficult proposition. No one saw Uncle Walter as an East Coast elite. His brand was a benign, not-so-tough interviewer. But Colson was insistent that Cronkite—the patron saint of the liberal media—had to be knocked down a peg. President Nixon himself, as revealed in the White House tapes of November–December 1972, was irate at CBS News for aiding
The
Washington Post
. On December 15, he spoke to Colson about hitting CBS News with buckshot until it cried uncle:

Colson
: I talked to Paley yesterday, Mr. President. . . . I’m seeing him Monday at one o’clock.

Colson
: I’ll just say look, you guys are crazy. You can hire all the executives you want; that isn’t going to solve your problem. You need to put somebody on the air who is . . . going to give balance to all the goddamn slamming that we’ve been taking from Rather and Pierpoint and Sevareid and Cronkite and Schorr. . . . I tell you, I’m going to make a real pitch out of it . . .

Nixon
: Well, you do it.

Colson
: I’ll, I’ll put the screws to him. . . . He’ll be here Monday and I’ll put the screws to him very hard.

Nixon
: Say we want [Herb] Klein and he ought to put him in there. They ought to have balance in their show and Klein is a hell of a television personality . . . and that they ought to have a little balance in the goddamn thing.

From the long “U.S.-Soviet Wheat Deal” report onward, Nixon came to believe that NBC’s John Chancellor and ABC’s Howard K. Smith were more fair-minded than Cronkite. By 1973, in fact, the White House tapes reveal that Nixon pejoratively deemed “intellectual people” who were against him “Cronkites” in the way LBJ used to rail against “Harvards.”

Somehow the president had to curtail Cronkite’s growing stature. “When Nixon got in the White House it wasn’t the most hospitable environment,” Colson recalled. “CBS acted like the Nazis had taken over. Only Sevareid was seen as worse than Cronkite, whom Nixon developed a ‘cordial dislike’ of.” With the exception of Howard K. Smith on ABC, Nixon thought all the TV reporters were flaming Ted Kennedy antiwar lefties. “I’m a conservative,” Colson said in 2011 in his defense. “Nixon wasn’t wrong about the liberal media.”

Through the controversies of Nixon’s White House tenure, Cronkite remained popular with the American public. For twenty-nine years, he had worked at the network as writer, producer, and executive—everybody knew it was Cronkite, in the end, who decided what flickered blue in the suppertime darkness across America. When he took time off around Thanksgiving 1972 to have a benign tumor removed from his throat at Lenox Hill Hospital, the get-well-soon cards came pouring into CBS.

After the 1972 presidential election, with CBS still the ratings leader, Cronkite’s lawyer negotiated a major contractual clause. Cronkite would get three months off every summer—June through August—to enjoy sailing off Martha’s Vineyard on his ketch,
Wyntje
. Only NASA launches, Cronkite said, would warrant his leaving Cape Cod. His colleagues knew he had it made: $250,000 a year with three months off every summer. And Cronkite, trying not to war with the entire Nixon administration, threw a lifeline to Henry Kissinger (who was never implicated in Watergate). “I was Cronkite and the media’s alibi for their treatment of Nixon,” Kissinger recalled. “Cronkite had made a turn on Vietnam under Johnson. When Nixon came in, he continued to have that bias. But he tried to be fair to me.”

In 1972, the Oliver Quayle and Company opinion research firm surveyed people in eighteen states, asking which public figure they most trusted. Strangely, Cronkite was included with Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, Ed Muskie, George McGovern, Edward Kennedy, and Spiro Agnew on the “trust index” ballot. Cronkite finished in the lead, with 73 percent, compared to Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, who were both rated at 57 percent. CBS News’ public relations office seized on Cronkite’s poll victory with gusto. When asked about being the heroic “Most Trusted Man in America,” Cronkite chuckled, pleased with the designation. “I’ll be glad to wear the crown.” The poll confirmed overnight what had long been apparent: Cronkite was the ultimate reliable source. “When Cronkite was on CBS during the Nixon years,” future NBC anchorman Brian Williams noted, “it wasn’t mere anchoring. It was addressing the nation.”

Cronkite secured many exclusive interviews with key figures of the Watergate saga, including John Dean; Archibald Cox (shortly after he was fired from his post as special Watergate prosecutor); and Leon Jaworski (on the day he was appointed to succeed Cox). Nixon loathed all of them.

But Cronkite was excluded from Nixon’s infamous Enemies List. Daniel Schorr and Dan Rather interpreted the omission of Cronkite as proof that he hadn’t warred enough with the White House. Andy Rooney teased Cronkite mercilessly about the exclusion. “I was always offended by the fact that [Nixon] put out an Enemies List midway through his administration and that somehow or other I wasn’t on it,” Cronkite recalled. “It was a kind of a source of embarrassment among my colleagues that I didn’t make it.”

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-
E
IGHT

Fan Clubs, Stalkers, and Political Good-byes

GROWING UP WITH CAPTAIN KANGAROO—BREAKING THE COLOR LINE WITH BERNARD SHAW IN HAWAII—CONNIE CHUNG HAS A ROLE MODEL—TOM BROKAW’S JOE DIMAGGIO—THE CRONKITE FAN CLUB—LBJ’S DEATH ON AIR—ANSWERING MAIL—BOY SCOUT MANNERS—JUMPING LIKE A JAGUAR—GAY PRIDE—GOING ROGUE ON
THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW
—A HOME IN THE VINEYARD—NIXON FLEES—OF LESLEY STAHL AND BARBARA WALTERS—DARWIN’S TOP DOG

N
o one has yet written the definitive history of television as babysitter for millions of cold war–era children. But starting in the late 1950s, the phenomenon hit its stride. American kids grew up with programs such as CBS’s
Captain Kangaroo
and Cronkite’s
You Are There
as educational explainers and directors of life. Bernard Shaw, growing up on Chicago’s South Side in the 1940s and ’50s, was one of many nurtured on the Tube. Shaw’s father had bought a twenty-one-inch Zenith and his son watched
You Are There
on a regular basis. Just as the young Cronkite in Houston had a newspaper route, Shaw grew up delivering four Chicago dailies: the
Tribune
,
Sun-Times
,
Herald-American
, and
Daily News
. “We had Cronkite on the set and four Chicago newspapers delivered to the house,” Shaw recalled. “Plus two black papers, the
Pittsburgh Courier
and the
Chicago Defender
. My idol was Cronkite. I decided I wanted to be just like him at a very early age. I followed
everything
he did.”

Without money for college, Shaw joined the Marines in 1959. During the early Kennedy years, Corporal Shaw was stationed at the Marine Corps Air Station in Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii. One afternoon he was sitting in Barracks Number 225, reading the local
Honolulu Advertiser
, when an item made him sit straight up with excitement. Walter and Betsy Cronkite had arrived in Hawaii. Shaw was determined to meet his TV hero in the flesh. The
Advertiser
noted that the Cronkites were staying at the exclusive Reef Hotel in Waikiki. Overcome with excitement, Shaw bombarded the hotel switchboard with telephone calls. Try as he might, Cronkite was unreachable, out in the jungle conducting an interview for
The Twentieth Century
with an intransigent Japanese soldier who refused to accept his country’s surrender in 1945. “I felt,” Shaw later chuckled, “like a stalker.”

Eventually Cronkite returned Shaw’s calls and they arranged to meet the next day for an amicable chat in the hotel lobby. Shaw, full of nervous anticipation, arrived early. “I was convinced he wouldn’t show up,” he said. “He was running a little late. But suddenly there he was, sticking out his hand with ‘Gee, Sergeant, I hope I haven’t been keeping you long.’ He had purposefully given me a promotion up from corporal as a joke.”

It felt like a dream come true: Shaw, in full tropical marine uniform, discussing world affairs with his CBS News idol, who looked tan and bearish in a brightly colored Hawaiian shirt. Betsy excused herself to dress for dinner, leaving the men to mull over world events. A twenty-minute meeting became forty-five minutes long. They had bonded instantly. Shaw, an African American, told Cronkite that institutional racism would never bring him down, that he was going to be a Big Three anchorman someday. Did Cronkite have any advice? “Read, read, read” was the answer. He paternally explained that a TV journalist first had to become a general assignment reporter. That meant knowing something about international affairs, sports, gardening, architecture—everything. “I’m not going to let anything or anybody
DEE-ter
me from succeeding,” Shaw said.

“No,” Cronkite replied, smiling. “Don’t let anything di-TUR you.”

If Shaw was going to reach the major leagues, his pronunciation would have to be
Webster’s Dictionary
precise. But Cronkite took the ambitious Shaw, full of passion and unrealized potential, seriously. He recognized that the Marine was a wonderful monologuist blessed with a rich bass-baritone voice, and they made a pact to stay in touch. In 1994, when Shaw received the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism at Arizona State University, he recalled that the face time with Cronkite in Hawaii was “pivotal . . . seminal . . . inspirational . . . educational.” After Shaw completed his military service and began studies at the University of Illinois in Chicago, he corresponded consistently with Cronkite, who followed his career trajectory with sublime pleasure as Shaw rose from local news to White House correspondent for Westinghouse Broadcasting. “My goal was to be at CBS working with Cronkite by age thirty,” Shaw said. “I missed the mark by one year. I was thirty-one when CBS executive Bill Small hired me in 1971.”

Shaw was assigned to the CBS News Washington bureau. Cronkite, presiding over the entire CBS News enterprise from his New York perch, bragged about how he had discovered the young talent in Hawaii back in 1961. He was elated to have Shaw, an excellent extemporizer known for his perceptive vitality, on his team. Starting in the 1950s, CBS News had executive producers—Bud Benjamin, Russ Bensley, Ernie Leiser, Paul Greenberg, and Sandy Socolow among them—who were unabashed civil rights activists. By the early 1960s, CBS News also had a stable of correspondents whom Martin Luther King Jr. embraced as allies: John Hart, Charles Kuralt, Nelson Benton, Murray Fromson, Robert Schakne, Howard K. Smith, and Dan Rather. “I’ll never forget the first story I did for Cronkite’s
CBS Evening News
,” Shaw recalled. “When introducing me, a smile curled on Walter’s lips. He looked so happy and proud that I had made it, that my dream to be his colleague was real.” Cronkite welcomed Shaw with a warm letter that included a friendly warning about CBS. “We are a long way from perfection,” Cronkite wrote, “and I know that you are sophisticated enough not to let the petty annoyances dim your broader vision of the outfit. Our feet may not be of clay, but our little toe is suspect.”

Another member of the CBS News class of ’71 who considered herself a Cronkiter was Connie Chung (née Jung Yukwa), whose father was a Chinese diplomat. Growing up near Washington, D.C., Chung—honest, smart, and utterly telegenic—tried emulating Cronkite in hopes of pioneering in broadcast journalism and refused to let being an Asian American serve as a roadblock to her professional success. Chung got her first serious job covering Capitol Hill for a local station. Before long, CBS News’ Washington bureau chief, Bill Small, searching for women broadcasters in the early 1970s, hired her. Considered just a “kid reporter,” Chung had no desk or typewriter at the bureau and was forced to borrow equipment from a few Murrow-era veterans. A number of the CBS correspondents—Daniel Schorr, in particular—were chauvinistic about Chung joining the boys club, but Cronkite wasn’t among them.

With Chung, Cronkite was paradoxically lenient and strict at the same time. Feeling that Chung was going to become a huge star, sensing she had that special
something
, he warned her to “never get a big head.” There was also advice about simply waiting for an AP or UPI wire, not believing a second- or third-tier source just to break the news.
Survival
. . . that was the key to success in broadcast journalism. In 1993, Chung, to Cronkite’s delight, was chosen to co-anchor the
CBS Evening News
with Dan Rather. Having half of Cronkite’s old job made her giddy with disbelief. “I said I wanted a no-asshole staff,” she recalled. “Cronkite had raised the bar not just on the air but also in how to be in a workplace environment. He was kind of fatherly to me, Uncle Walter. The way he carried himself around women was charming. When he called me from New York, the first thing he said was, ‘That was a very, very good job.’ I felt I had come of age. A double
very
from Uncle Walter!! I was floating in heaven.”

Tom Brokaw of NBC News, in his early thirties, was based in Los Angeles when he first met Cronkite at a White House press event in 1971. There was Cronkite in the flesh, Brokaw’s all-seasons hero, just another face in the crowd of reporters. Brokaw was in awe of Cronkite from head to toe. “It was like being a diehard Yankee fan for all your life,” he recalled, “and suddenly you’re on the grass in Yankee Stadium getting to chat with Joe DiMaggio. The moment was indelibly carved on my imagination.” For his part, Cronkite could tell from their first conversation that Brokaw was a “particularly fine ad-libber” with a “marvelous extemporaneous style.” Brokaw was named NBC White House correspondent during the Watergate scandal, and Cronkite became a trusted friend. The shorthand between the two was immediate—they could almost read each other’s minds. What strengthened their friendship was the fact that Brokaw’s wife, Meredith, was enamored of Betsy Cronkite. “To Meredith,” Brokaw recalled, “Betsy was proof that you could be in the crazy TV news business and still have a strong, strong family life. As a couple, they became our ideal.”

Another die-hard Cronkite fan was the future NBC News anchorman Brian Williams. Although Williams was born in New Jersey, he grew up in a small, cream-colored ranch house in Elmira, New York. His two-bedroom home was the kind that defined middle-class life in the cold war era. Around the time of the JFK assassination, when Williams was only four, his working-class parents started religiously watching Cronkite anchor the
CBS Evening News
every Monday through Friday. “I was a Cronkite groupie by the age of six,” Williams recalled. “At our household, dinner was hinged on Walter saying, ‘And that’s the way it is.’ Only then could the meal get served. That was the mid-1960s, and I continued to travel with him from the age of polyester to the age of his ever-thickening sideburns and beyond.”

Williams didn’t mess around when it came to Cronkitiana. He might as well have opened up a Walter Cronkite Fan Club chapter in Elmira. Every time there was even a mention of Cronkite in
Time
,
Look
, or
Life
—the three publications his family subscribed to—he’d clip out the story. All Cronkite’s CBS News special events dealing with the Apollo program were almost sacred happenings in the Williams home. As if preparing for a role as a body-double, Williams analyzed the way Cronkite spoke, his voice inflections and facial expressions, even the stylistic bravado of his wide-knot ties and two-toned dress shirts. “I grew up in a CBS household,” Williams recalled, “and even though I’m paid by NBC, I won’t deny it. The Cronkite team members were my superstars. What Lambeau Field is to a Packers fan, Cronkite’s newsroom was to me. I eventually made my way to West Fifty-seventh Street, the broadcast center, just to touch Cronkite’s U-shaped Formica desk and see his woodcut map of the world behind him. Call me a CBS News nerd if you want. I knew more about Ike Pappas than I care to admit.”

Not all future TV journalists grew up in awe of Cronkite. Bill O’Reilly, host of Fox News’
The O’Reilly Factor
, was raised in a decidedly non–
CBS Evening News
home, although he occasionally caught Cronkite hosting
The Twentieth Century
. Part of O’Reilly’s dissociation with Cronkite was simply a matter of circumstance. Bill’s father, William O’Reilly Sr., a corporate accountant for an oil company, wasn’t home for suppertime. As O’Reilly made his way up the electronic journalism ladder, working at CBS News from 1982 to 1986, he saw Cronkite as “too retro” to be relevant. “My guys were Tom Snyder and Howard Cosell,” O’Reilly recalled. “They were lively and jumped out at you. Walter was bland by comparison. And he was always too much of a liberal who traveled in Martha’s Vineyard and Upper West Side circles. I was from Levittown. He was obviously good, but not on my wavelength.”

Time
magazine did a cover story of Cronkite in 1966 titled “The Electronic Front Page” that grappled with how the anchorman held a “kind of subliminal authority” over the American home unprecedented in communications history. Cronkite, the managing editor, decided what
you
—mothers and fathers in all fifty states—needed to know about the world at large. While newspapers transmitted facts, television was about shared experience in its rawest, most emotional form. Growing up, Shaw (in Chicago), Chung (in Washington, D.C.), Brokaw (in South Dakota), and Williams (in upstate New York) all read different papers, each chockablock full of local news, but the Cronkite broadcast brought shared historic pageantry—like the death of Kennedy and
Apollo 11
—into their lives. CBS News vice president Gordon Manning described the Cronkite phenomenon this way: “Pictures plus words plus personality equals believability.”

Robert Feder of Skokie, Illinois, was Exhibit A for Manning’s point. From the time he was six or seven, Feder believed in the societal importance of the Cronkite broadcast. While other kids made Neil Armstrong or the Beatles their heroes, Feder fell for Cronkite. When he turned fifteen in 1972, he wrote the CBS anchorman a fan letter telling him he had created a fan club in his honor. To Feder’s surprise, Cronkite wrote him back. “I personally am appreciative of your loyalty, given the assumption that you in reality are paying tribute to the efforts of all of us at CBS News to deliver the news fairly and impartially without fear or favor. Please extend my very best wishes to all the members of the Club.”

The official
Walter Cronkite Newsletter
was born with that missive. To Cronkite’s surprise, the mimeographed sheet had a fine tactile quality. Working out of his parents’ home, Feder eventually recruited more than a thousand members. With intelligent assistance from die-hard
CBS Evening News
fans, the monthly newsletter was packed with biographical tidbits about the CBS anchor in chief. Correspondence continued between Cronkite and Feder, and a friendship blossomed.

Casting a wide net, Feder solicited his activist members to scan newspapers and periodicals for
any
information—even gossip—pertaining to Cronkite. The newsletter placed Cronkite in a pantheon, promoting him as a towering reportorial icon in the same vein as Lippmann and Murrow. In January 1975, Cronkite, with prankish solemnity, even gave an interview to the
Walter Cronkite
Newsletter
about his amazing on-air stamina anchoring Election Night marathon broadcasts. “I don’t take any pills,” Cronkite said. “I don’t go on a low-residue diet. I just don’t feel fatigue. I think the interest factor keeps me revved up.” In the same issue, Feder asked Cronkite if the rumor was true that sometimes he actually wore tennis shorts or cut-offs when broadcasting the
Evening News
. “No,” Cronkite told his fan club, “but sometimes my pants don’t match my jacket.”