Cronkite (68 page)

CBS News correspondent Ed Bradley—who had been wounded in Phnom Penh covering the war in Cambodia, receiving shrapnel wounds in his back and arms—became Cronkite’s go-to guy. With some conceit, Cronkite claimed he had
discovered
Bradley when the young reporter was on the CBS-owned New York radio station WCBS back in 1967. What Cronkite admired about Bradley was his tough interview style. “And at the same time,” Cronkite recalled, “when the interview was over, when the subject had taken a pretty hard lashing by him—they left as friends. He was that kind of guy.”

When on March 1, 1975, a fierce North Vietnamese offensive was unleashed in the central highlands of South Vietnam, Cronkite knew America’s longest war (at that time) was over. Cronkite interviewed Ford from the Blue Room of the White House a few weeks earlier, along with colleagues Bob Schieffer and Eric Sevareid. Many South Vietnamese, Ford told them, were desperately seeking to leave the country before the Vietcong took over. In early April, Cronkite instructed Bradley to outperform NBC News and ABC News on the end of the U.S. military engagement in South Vietnam. Two days before the fall of Saigon, on April 30, President Ford, in a speech given at Tulane University, conceded that the United States’ war in Vietnam was over: “Today, Americans can regain a sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished. . . . These events, tragic as they are, portend neither the end of the world nor America’s leadership in the world.” Two U.S. Marines were killed in a rocket attack at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut airport on April 30; they were the last Americans to die in the war. Within hours, looters sacked the U.S. embassy and the North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon.

CBS News scheduled a two-and-a-half-hour
Special Report
for the end of the Vietnam War. Cronkite was slated to anchor the special, but he was home in bed, racked with back pain, a condition that occasionally sidelined him. Stouthearted, he refused to take prescription painkillers or morphia, though he was barely able to move. Time and rest, his physicians advised, but Cronkite was a famously restless man. During the past fifteen years, almost a million Vietcong troops had been killed, a quarter of a million South Vietnamese soldiers had died, and fifty-seven thousand Americans had perished. Almost immobile, it behooved him to soldier through that night’s
CBS Evening News
, even with excruciating back pain. “Nothing was going to stop him from doing this broadcast,” Les Midgley recalled. “Nothing.”

Cronkite called a doctor, who trussed his back tightly and accompanied him to the West Fifty-seventh Street studio. He went from wheelchair to anchor chair. At any moment, a jolt of shooting pain might cause him to flinch, but he started the April 30
CBS Evening News
broadcast with a report about the People’s Army of Vietnam capturing Saigon and made it to its end. The
Evening News
footage of the chaos in war-torn Saigon as the last American helicopters rose from the U.S. embassy rooftop, desperate Vietnamese citizens clinging to their struts, was unforgettable. Cronkite now knew that the stalemate conclusion from his “Report from Vietnam” back in February 1968 stood up “rather well” in history. At the program’s end, Cronkite had time to summarize the $150 billion war. “There is no way to capture the suffering and grief of our nation from the most decisive conflict since the Civil War,” Cronkite said. “We embarked on this Vietnam journey with good intentions, I think. But once upon the path, we found ourselves having been misguided.”

What worried Cronkite that evening, as he was put back in the wheelchair and taken home, was that the Pentagon was trying to blame the media for losing the war. “ ‘We could have won,’ hawks insisted, if the press had not shown those pictures of naked, napalmed Vietnamese girls fleeing our bombing, of prisoners being shot in the head, of burning houses, of wounded G.I.s,” Cronkite wrote in
A Reporter’s Life
. “Television brought the war into our living rooms at home and destroyed our will to fight, the theory goes.” In the coming decades Cronkite would be excoriated by General Westmoreland, President Nixon, and the
Military Review
(the official journal of the U.S. Army) for turning America’s pro-war attitude of 1964 to the antiwar one of 1975. Cronkite knew that in the next war whoever was in the White House would try to say . . .
no television cameras
! In tribute to Cronkite’s truth-telling about Vietnam from 1968 to 1975,
Esquire
put him on its cover as one of the “Great American Things,” along with Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Robinson, and Lassie. Going with the praise, Cronkite boasted that his favorite album of 1975 was Paul Simon’s
Still Crazy After All These Years
—an apt description for a wizened TV survivor like himself.

Cronkite’s admiration of President Ford—another supposedly avuncular figure—grew considerably after the Vietnam War ended that spring of 1975, even though Bradley warned him that Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge government was participating in a genocide the president was doing little to stop. While Bradley bonded with Cronkite over a shared appreciation of Ford, both Mudd and Schorr thought the anchorman was “too-much-the-toady” of the Ford White House. “Ford was probably the most personable, as far as just being a regular fellow, of any of the presidents,” Cronkite recalled. “He was an old-shoe fellow, no presumption and no pretense. I don’t think he was terribly bright in the presidential sense, but on the other hand, he didn’t take on airs of being an intellectual, either.” For both Schorr and Mudd, Cronkite seemed too cozy with Ford. Cronkite believed that Ford’s duty was to heal the nation of the Johnson-Nixon abuses of executive power. Cronkite felt Ford was doing a pretty good job of it.

Beginning on July 4, 1974, CBS News aired sixty-second “Bicentennial Minutes” for two straight years, construed as a healing gesture by the network. These popular segments won CBS News an Emmy for “Outstanding Program and Individual Achievement.” On Independence Day 1976—the official bicentennial—Cronkite broadcast
In Celebration of US
. He anchored the festivities from Madison Square Garden from 6:00 a.m. to midnight, but he seemed to be at every crossroad town from Altoona to Yuma where there was a flagpole. Pretaped segments can have that effect. “It was,” Cronkite said, “a glorious, spontaneous upwelling of enthusiasm for that special day in American history.” During cosmic fireworks displays in Boston and New York City, he could be heard oohing and aahing like a little boy. Perhaps the most touching moment occurred when a massive choir from Washington, D.C., sang “America the Beautiful” and Cronkite, assuming his microphone was dead, proceeded to sing along loudly, as if he were standing in a baseball stadium, hand over heart. It was an endearing blunder. (Or was it staged, like the fidgeting with his glasses during the JFK assassination?)

Everyone at CBS, from correspondents to location scouts, excelled at Cronkite’s eighteen-hour bicentennial coverage, with pickups from forty-two locations. Charles Kuralt reported from the parade of tall ships on the Hudson River, with Cronkite telling viewers how he envied that assignment. Dan Rather somehow managed to report a Battle of Gettysburg reenactment, a baseball game in Colorado, and a progressive-left protest in Washington, D.C. CBS News’s Reid Collins was stationed at Battery Park in New York City, while Hughes Rudd delivered prerecorded
Jeopardy
-like did-you-know history pieces. CBS treated the Founding Fathers almost as national deities throughout the coverage—the longest CBS News broadcast since
Apollo 11
. (It would hold that distinction until the beginning of the first Gulf War in January 1991.) Segments were aired from a rodeo in Geeley, Colorado, and an Indian powow in Carnegie, Oklahoma. Cronkite was obsessed with a Freedom Train crisscrossing the country, displaying national oddments such as Dorothy’s dress from
The Wizard of Oz
, Joe Frazier’s boxing shorts, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s pulpit along with dozens of other pop culture thingamajigs and gewgaws. When Cronkite heard “Amazing Grace”—his favorite song—played on bagpipes that special Fourth of July from the Mall, he wept openly. This was the Great National Healing that Cronkite believed was exactly what America needed after Vietnam and Watergate. Cronkite used the bicentennial to tell Americans it was alright to be proud of their country again.

Brit Hume, an up-and-coming young reporter who reminded media executives of Roger Mudd, did a lot of the bicentennial remote work for ABC News. It was a grueling day of patriotic gore, with field reporters scattered all over the country broadcasting festivities. When an exhausted Hume got home around 10:30 that evening, he turned on CBS News and was flabbergasted to see Cronkite still doing live coverage. Holy cow! Talk about “Iron Pants” stamina! At 11:00 p.m., the local WCBS news came on and Hume naturally assumed that was the end of the Cronkite marathon. But to his utter astonishment, at 11:30 Cronkite was back on TV, live. “Walter came on the air and said, ‘What a day! What a day! What a day it has been!’ ” Hume recalled. “I’ll remember it forever. I thought . . . ‘I’ll be damned.’ At that moment I understood why Cronkite was so good. He had that indisputable key quality for a long career in the business: enthusiasm. It was like he truly never wanted the bicentennial to end.”

There were more fireworks yet to come that summer. Following the Independence Day celebrations were the political conventions of 1976. Bill Small recalled working with Cronkite at the Republican Convention, held August 16–19 in Kansas City. CBS had set up a booth at Kemper Arena, but Cronkite used the Muehlebach Hotel as his personal salon when off the air. At the Muehlebach, every bellman, waitress, and desk clerk treated him like a long-lost high school friend. While it wasn’t quite Dorothy Parker at the Algonquin, Cronkite feted reporters from midsize Midwest newspapers such as the
Peoria Journal Star
and
The
Topeka Daily Capital
with liquid meals. “Walter would endlessly talk with small-town newspapermen,” Bill Small recalled. “He was a good party boy, a good mixer.”

Cronkite made a fast friend with Nick Clooney, a reporter for WKRC-TV (Channel 12) in Cincinnati, the ABC affiliate. Clooney, whose son, George, would become a legendary actor in Hollywood, interviewed Cronkite about the advent of Barbara Walters co-anchoring with Harry Reasoner for ABC News nationally. The discussion turned into a heavy drinking bout where everything from Tom Brokaw becoming the new anchor of NBC’s
Today
show to entrepreneur Ted Turner founding WTBS in Atlanta to Rupert Murdoch purchasing the
New York Post
was discussed. “Back then, Cronkite set the tone and tenor for all of us in local TV news,” Clooney recalled. “Murrow was a radio guy. He had no influence, really, on local TV news. It was Cronkite who brought local TV anchors along with him in markets all over the country. His
Evening News
led the way in inventing the TV news format. He made us at WKRC feel that what we did was important, that TV news was a new American tradition.”

Leslie Midgley seconded Clooney’s claim in his memoir
How Many Words Do You Want?
Too often Murrow was cited as the role model for television broadcasting aspirants. But would KCTV in Kansas City or WREG in Memphis or WWCO in Minneapolis learn anything from Murrow’s carefully produced and packaged
See It Now
or
Person to Person
or “Harvest of Shame”? Murrow was a mediocre broadcaster at live events like political conventions, election nights, and assassination tragedies. By contrast, Cronkite
loved
to ad-lib on the air and set a high standard for how to succeed at the art form. “Cronkite’s picture should be hung in every local TV newsroom,” Nick Clooney maintained. “He was our industry’s George Washington.”

Television had turned America into an indoor nation, delivering entertainment and news smack into viewers’ living rooms. But Cronkite never abandoned the pavement, walking the streets of every city, adding two or four new cards a day to his Rolodex. CBS Washington bureau chief Bill Small discovered walking around a city block with Uncle Walter was an experience in friendly theatricality. Small was Cronkite’s sidekick one afternoon in Kansas City, sampling the best barbeque Kaycee joints had to offer. Cronkite kept saying, “I have a friend at such-and-such place,” and indeed he did. Folks would just drop free plates of ribs and chicken for Cronkite to eat, nourishing him to keep on keeping on, telling the truth about Washington power brokers. Cronkite might have risen up the ladder at CBS News in New York City, but he never stopped being the Kansas City kid willing to talk about how ABC’s hot shows—
Happy Days
,
Charlie’s Angels
, and
The Six Million Dollar Man
—were giving CBS’s programs a run for their money. There was High Cronkite (anchorman) and Low Cronkite (storyteller); people loved both personas. This was a key to all the great TV newsmen’s success: never forget your hometown folks. Cronkite’s hometown just happened to be the whole damn United States of America. Holding court in various Kansas City bars, Cronkite willingly made a fool of himself by reciting the lyrics to C. W. McCall’s hit song “Convoy” and spontaneously dancing when the Bay City Rollers’ “Saturday Night” blared out of the speakers of a jukebox.

The big story in Kansas City in 1976 was the challenge made by California actor and former governor Ronald Reagan to incumbent Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination. Ford had won more primary delegates than Reagan but hadn’t collected enough to secure the nomination. It looked like an old-fashioned floor fight might ensue. On the Democratic side, Senators Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington and Frank Church of Idaho were among those running against Governor Jerry Brown of California and Jimmy Carter, a former one-term Georgia governor. Both Democratic and Republican candidates were looking for ways to use television in the tight competition, and at least a few of the candidates were taking advantage of the medium through a significant tactical shift. Campaigning before the people was important, but appearing with Cronkite on the
Evening News
was essential for maintaining ballot-box appeal. “His persona became so prominent in American culture,” Tom Shales recalled, “that he was credited with massive swings in public opinion.”