Cronkite (65 page)

Cronkite had good reasons for embracing Feder’s club. The mimeographed newsletter was an excellent way to build a loyal fan base in those pre-Internet days. It was like a Facebook page or a Twitter account before its time. It was one more confirmation that by 1972, Cronkite had become part of the popular culture. Comedian Robert Klein recorded a song called “Middle Class Educated Blues,” in which he crooned, “I watch the Walter Cronkite news . . . I love Walter.” A
New Yorker
cartoon by Ed Arno showed an average guy having an after-work cocktail slumped down in an armchair with CBS News on the telly. Its caption read, “OK, Cronkite! Lay it on me!” The ABC News affiliate in Baltimore hung a poster of Cronkite dressed like the pope above the words “What makes you think the power has gone to my head?” Pick your comic strip—
Peanuts
,
Lil’ Abner
,
Dennis the Menace
—the cartoonists all used Cronkite as Father Time and wise-man fodder.

For Cronkite aficionados, an essential moment in the anchorman’s career occurred when Lyndon Johnson died on January 22, 1973. When the
CBS Evening News
returned from its first station break that night, viewers were jarred. Cronkite was on the telephone, his head bent and his eyebrows gathered together, full of consternation. Devoted watchers of the
CBS Evening News
had never seen anything like it. With the handset to his ear, the half-knowing, half-bewildered Cronkite was listening without speaking at all. It was as if the television veteran had been caught ordering pizza or humoring a long-winded friend. Cronkite interrupted the person on the other end of the phone line and explained the situation to his CBS viewers. “I’m talking to Tom Johnson,” he said, “the press secretary for Lyndon Johnson, who has reported that the thirty-sixth president of the United States died this afternoon . . .”

After hanging up the phone, Cronkite ad-libbed briefly about the former president’s recent health and activities. He then returned to the scripts of the day, detailing battlefield news of Vietnam. “What always impressed me about that moment,” the future
CBS Evening News
anchorman Scott Pelley recalled, “was Cronkite’s lack of formality. I’ll always remember how he did it. How he told Americans to hold on for a minute, I think I have a big story. The folks trusted him, myself included.” Or, as Brian Williams surmised, “Walter loved the challenge of broadcasting Johnson’s death without a net.”

Tom Johnson had first alerted the Austin bureaus of AP and UPI to LBJ’s death. Then he reached out to NBC News, who wanted to wait for the “flash bulletin” from the wire services. Then it was CBS News’ turn. In a blink, the news of LBJ’s death traveled fast from Tom Johnson in Austin to the CBS News operator, then to producer Sandy Socolow in the fishbowl, and then to live news. Cronkite, breaking his own rule, went with only one source on the story. “Cronkite had just been with LBJ at the ranch,” Tom Johnson said. “He didn’t need confirmation. He knew me and knew my voice. It surprised me, too, but he simply talked with me on air. I even heard somebody in the CBS control room say, ‘It’s coming over the wire now.’ But Walter had beaten the AP and UPI in announcing the news. That was the first time that network news was ever interrupted like that. There was a risk involved. But Cronkite was merely pioneering what we started doing all the time at CNN a decade later.”

Cronkite had been at the LBJ ranch only ten days earlier, preparing what would be the last installment of a multipart special “conversations” series with the ex-president produced by Burton Benjamin. While the five-part series wasn’t dramatic TV, it was a wonderful historical document. Lyndon Johnson had finished his memoir
The Vantage Point
and the Cronkite interview had been arranged to sell books. As Cronkite and LBJ sat in a guest cottage conducting the taped interview, both in casual attire, the haggard former president suffered a debilitating bout of angina pectoris, a condition related to the heart disease that would soon kill him. He retreated outside and took a prescription pill. When LBJ returned, he waved aside a conspicuously reticent Cronkite’s suggestion that they postpone the rest of his questions, which focused on civil rights.

Health scares aside, Cronkite and LBJ got along extremely well during the grueling ranch interviews. There was something bittersweet about seeing the codgers reminisce about Vietnam . . . Selma . . . “We shall overcome” . . . Glassboro . . . Medicaid . . . Medicare. But behind the scenes, a volcano was erupting. CBS News producer Bud Benjamin and John Shamick had poorly edited the Cronkite-LBJ talks. Showing zero respect for the former president, Benjamin spliced the film footage in unflattering ways very different from the actual as-delivered answers. “It was just awful,” Bob Hardesty, LBJ acolyte and editor of
The Vantage Point
, recalled. “Johnson had expected more of Cronkite. He redid his facial expressions so when Johnson spoke about Vietnam, it looked as if Cronkite had raised his eyebrows in disgust or nodded his head. Johnson was mad as hell.”

The CBS News rough cut was viewed by LBJ himself, who declared it “dirty pool.” A score of Johnson aides were tasked with keeping the blasphemy off the air at all costs. “It burned the hell out of the president,” LBJ aide Harry Middleton recalled. “It was a matter of great concern. It was unbelievable. Benjamin had re-shot Cronkite asking the questions in a completely different way, giving a raised eyebrow and making expressions he hadn’t done at the ranch.”

LBJ’s lawyer, Arthur Krim, who was then chairman of United Artists, threw a fit with Frank Stanton about the misleading Benjamin-edited interview. It was a real black eye to Cronkite. Eventually, Krim prevailed and the Cronkite-LBJ conversation was unscrambled back to its actual, as-delivered Q&A format. “It was my very first experience with that ‘technique,’ ” Tom Johnson, who served as president of CNN from 1990 to 2001, recalled. “It was reprehensible.”

That January 22, when LBJ died, the ex-president was still bitter toward Cronkite, not for his Vietnam dissent of 1968 but for his dishonest collaboration with Benjamin on what would be the last big interview of his life. Lady Bird Johnson, however, didn’t hold a grudge against Cronkite at all. It helped that Cronkite had treated President Johnson like a colossus in death, a political figure on a par with FDR or Kennedy. In coming years, Lady Bird would visit the Cronkites at Martha’s Vineyard for sailing trips around Cape Cod.

The spontaneous announcement of Johnson’s death reminded Cronkite’s CBS colleagues yet again why their anchor was Top Gun. His instincts were beyond formidable. When Bill Felling—who would later become a national editor for CBS News—started working at the network around the time of Johnson’s death as a desk assistant, his principal morning job was to roll the AP, Reuters, and UPI copy into fat scroll-like documents at the crack of dawn and deliver them to the bigwigs according to their status. The first wire machine printout had the darkest, easiest-to-read type. The last printout was faint; a magnifying glass was needed to decipher some of the quasi-disappeared letters. That one went to “the schmuck” (in Felling’s jargon). “Walter got the first roll,” Felling explained. “I’d ink his name on it and type it up so nobody could poach it from him. I’d put them all on his desk. In ritualistic fashion, he’d come in, put his feet on the desk, and read all the rolls religiously. He’d rip off stories that mattered and use a ruler to make the tear clean.”

Felling soon observed, as only a newcomer can, that all day long Cronkite had his ear tilted toward the wire room. The machines were kept under noise-dampening lids, in a corridor just across from the main newsroom. But Cronkite seemed to hear them like a dog hears a high whistle. Others waited to get served the copy, but Cronkite, a wire addict, was always ready to pounce. “If the three bells would go off, that old man would pop up like a goddamn jaguar and head down the corridor,” Felling said, laughing, years later. “He couldn’t wait to get his paws on the raw news first. He had simply conditioned himself to be the UP guy.”

Cronkite had zero tolerance for slackers in the newsroom. It was best to leave your eccentricities at home if you wanted to survive. Socolow recalled that at one point Cronkite wanted to put the squeeze on a scriptwriter for being dangerously unstable. “We’ve got to get rid of him,” he told Socolow; “he’s a drunk.” He had residual anger about his father’s alcoholism and simply wouldn’t tolerate a boozehound in the newsroom. Socolow told Cronkite to chill out; he had secretly searched the suspect’s office and found no bottles. “I’m telling you, he’s a drunk,” Cronkite reiterated. “Fire him.” Socolow refused, on the grounds that the scriptwriter hadn’t done anything wrong. “That was until the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C.,” Socolow recalled. “There had been a minibar in the writer’s room. The scriptwriter in question cleared it out. Drank it all. Walter had been right after all. I dismissed him.”

In late summer 1973, Cronkite flew with producer Ernie Leiser to Laos and Vietnam to document the release of American POWs. It was the newsmen’s first visit since February 1968, but the psychic scars remained. Tagging along with them was photographer David Hume Kennerly of
Time
. Cronkite hoped to score interviews with the released POWs, including John McCain, about their ordeals of torture, dysentery, solitary confinement, and beatings. Many of the POWs were near death, not unlike survivors of Auschwitz. “These POWs were dressed in striped pajamas and were getting released one by one,” Kennerly recalled. “One of the prisoners said to me, after I gave him a pack of cigarettes, that he didn’t believe we were going to get out of Vietnam until he saw Walter Cronkite waiting outside the gate. That, to him, represented freedom.”

While Cronkite was in Vietnam, charges of financial misdeeds (income tax evasion) surfaced against Vice President Spiro Agnew. He claimed through his attorneys to be “a victim of a deliberate [media] campaign calculated . . . to drive him from office.” On October 10, Agnew resigned as part of a plea bargain that kept him from going to trial. He pleaded nolo contendere to a felony charge of income tax evasion. The news was not unexpected and yet caught many people by surprise when it was announced as a
CBS News Special Report
at 2:35 p.m.

Cronkite’s broadcast led with the resignation, but did so without glee. There was no victory in kicking a man when he was down—even his nemesis. Viewers respected that posture. Cronkite saved several minutes at the end of the October 10 program for a comment, expressing both regret and irony. “I first met Spiro Agnew in 1967 and I liked him,” Cronkite said. “He was warm, friendly, witty, candid, open—qualities that a newsman appreciates in a news source. Then there came that November 1969 speech that opened officially the Nixon offensive against the news media. Some of us thought it was demagoguery at its worst and frankly, I was surprised that Agnew would lend himself to it. But he did and because of my beliefs that a free press must fight any attempt to intimidate it, we became ideological enemies. But we would not have wished even on Spiro Agnew the disgrace in which his reputation, his hopes and dreams are smothered tonight. As Americans, we all share his tragedy.”

Agnew’s resignation enhanced Cronkite’s appeal. He had become a full-fledged celebrity dragon slayer. No longer was Cronkite safe walking the streets of New York. Everybody, it seemed, wanted something from him. Refusing to have a limousine driver because it was too expensive, Cronkite set himself up to be an easy target for autograph seekers, photo hounds, and full-fledged kooks. Back in those pre-9/11 days, television studios didn’t have security guards. A complete stranger could wander into the Fifty-seventh Street building and take an elevator right up to Cronkite’s fishbowl office. It took gall, but it happened fairly often.

The days of lax security at CBS News abruptly ended on December 11, 1973, when twenty-three-year-old Mark Allan Segal, a demonstrator from an organization called the Gay Raiders, with accomplice Harry Langhorne at his side, interrupted a Cronkite broadcast, causing the screen to go black for a few seconds. Cronkite was delivering a story about Henry Kissinger in the Middle East when, about fourteen minutes into the first “feed,” Segal leapt in front of the camera carrying a yellow sign that read, “Gays Protest CBS Prejudice.” More than sixty million Americans were watching. Segal had insinuated himself into the CBS newsroom by pretending to be a reporter from Camden State Community College in New Jersey. He had been granted permission to watch the broadcast live in the studio. “I sat on Cronkite’s desk directly in front of him and held up the sign,” Segal recalled. “The network went black while they took me out of the studio.”

On the surface, Cronkite was unfazed by the disruption. Technicians tackled Segal, wrapped him in cable wire, and ushered him out of camera view. Once back on live TV, Cronkite matter-of-factly described what had happened without an iota of irritation. “Well,” the anchorman said, “a rather interesting development in the studio here—a protest demonstration right in the middle of the CBS News studio.” He told viewers, “The young man identified as a member of something called Gay Raiders, an organization protesting alleged defamation of homosexuals on entertainment programs.”

Segal had a legitimate complaint. Television—both news and entertainment divisions—treated gay people as pariahs, lepers from Sodom and Gomorrah. It stereotyped them as suicidal nut jobs, flaming fairies, and psychopathic villains. Part of the Gay Raiders’ strategy was to bring public attention to the Big Three networks’ discrimination policies. What better way to garner publicity for the cause than waving a banner on the
CBS Evening News
? “So I did it,” Segal recalled. “The police were called, and I was taken to a holding tank.”

But both Segal and Langhorne were charged with second-degree criminal trespassing as a result of their disruption of the
CBS Evening News
. It turned out that Segal had previously raided
The Tonight Show
, the
Today
show, and
The Mike Douglas Show
. At Segal’s trial on April 23, 1974, Cronkite, who had accepted a subpoena, took his place on the witness stand. CBS lawyers objected each time Segal’s attorney asked the anchorman a question. When the court recessed to cue up a tape of Segal’s disruption of the
Evening News
, Segal felt a tap on his back—it was Cronkite, holding a fresh pad of yellow lined paper, ready to take notes with a sharp pencil.