Cronkite (7 page)

Not long after football season, Cronkite accepted a job as a K.C. manager at Braniff Airlines—founded in 1928—whose corporate headquarters were in Dallas. The job gave Cronkite a chance to stay close to Kansas City and seriously date Betsy Maxwell, whom he wanted to marry. The pay wasn’t impressive, but it was higher than journalism offered. Although Cronkite was only twenty-two, he was a bona fide executive, with real coat-and-tie responsibilities. One part of the Braniff job was a seat at the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce. Cronkite could see how the powerful and rich held themselves and exerted their societal influence, and he learned how to approach them with ease. Cronkite never tried to hide his middle-class roots, but he didn’t allow them to hold him down, and this coveted opportunity to mix with movers and shakers in K.C. was invaluable.

At some other juncture, it’s possible Cronkite might have been lulled into a long career at an airline such as Braniff, with the good life in Kansas City it promised. But like millions of Americans, he was catching Edward R. Murrow’s courageous reports from Europe on CBS Radio News and in his case his life was altered. Murrow wasn’t a mindless recorder of facts like UP reporters. He was a voice—
the
voice—of America on the precipice of World War II. He was to electronic journalism what George Washington had been to the Revolutionary War: the deity. Murrow’s father, a railroad worker, moved the family from Polecat Creek, North Carolina, to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington in 1914, when his son was still in britches. Tall, energetic, content to be alone in the evergreen wilderness, and steady-eyed about how the world worked, Murrow had fallen into radio by accident while he was a student at Washington State in Pullman. He had originally gone to Europe in 1932 to oversee the International Educational Association (which arranged student exchanges from European nations), a job that Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy would use to smear Murrow in the 1950s as a communist sympathizer. While working as CBS’s director of talks in the 1930s, Murrow fell in love with Great Britain, wore suits cut in the English style, and took on the unflappable demeanor of the British in the face of the evil aggression of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.

In the world of journalism, Murrow had created buzz by hiring ambitious young correspondents to broadcast for CBS News in the late 1930s. Cronkite was envious. Many of America’s most aggressive journalists—like Eric Sevareid (formerly of the
Minneapolis Journal
) and Howard. K. Smith (a Tulane University graduate and Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University)—understood that working in Europe under Murrow was a hot ticket. Cronkite, stuck at Braniff, couldn’t possibly compete with college-graduate world travelers such as Murrow, Smith, and Sevareid. In the first place, he never dreamed of foreign locales. He didn’t even have a passport. As the folks of Kansas City learned, he was good at gumshoe reporting, investigating, editing, and announcing. But he wasn’t a standout. His raw talent had not taken charge of his career like Murrow’s and Shirer’s had. While others in his generation of budding journalists were following their instincts and strategically positioning themselves for the rising tide of World War II, Cronkite was lagging behind as a Braniff meet-and-greet man. By 1939, Cronkite, ever the revolving-door opportunist, finally saw where he needed to be. He once again decided to embrace the news business, preferably at United Press. “I loved the United Press,” he realized, “and I had missed it ever since I left.”

The twenty-three-year-old Cronkite groveled at the UP altar to be rehired, throwing himself on the executives’ mercy. “The management had not been happy about my leaving so precipitously a couple of years before,” he said. “But they welcomed me back.” Once again joining the Kansas City bureau, Cronkite picked up where he had left off as a junior reporter-editor, usually on the UP night desk. Virtually every day a new revelation about Tom Pendergast, chairman of the Jackson County Democratic Club, and his political machine, with its connections to mafiosi and grifters, shocked K.C. citizens. But Cronkite pursued a different journalistic track. A half year after returning to the UP office, he finally got a story with national potential. Circumstances worked in his favor; he received the reportorial assignment mainly because he happened to be working the night desk when it broke.

Before dawn on a Saturday morning, October 28, 1939, word arrived from rural Missouri of the overnight search for an airplane that had taken off and never returned. Cronkite rushed to the town of Brookfield, north of Kansas City, and started filing stories for the afternoon newspapers, hour by hour.

BROOKFIELD, MO., OCT. 28—(UP)

Officials of airfields throughout the nation were asked today to watch for a small yellow monoplane in which, state police believed, Carl Bivens, Brookfield flying instructor, was being held prisoner by a student.

A mysteriously-acting man who had been tentatively identified through an automobile drivers license as Larry Pletch took off yesterday from the instructor’s private field and, after circling over the countryside in sight for 30 minutes, the plane disappeared in a southeastern direction.

Cronkite, playing Sherlock Holmes, talked with investigators and rummaged through Pletch’s car himself. Working until he was good and tired, he spoke to employees at a local restaurant who thought they had seen the aviation student just before he took off. He also managed to interview the instructor’s wife and son, both pilots. He learned that another son flew for Pan Am in South America. For papers with later editions, he rewrote his lede, indicating that the search was not for an airplane but, more narrowly, for a criminal.

BROOKFIELD, MO., OCT. 28—(UP)

State authorities appealed to airports and fliers through the country today for aid in hunting down a man they believed to be a flying kidnaper with no apparent motive.

Whoever he was, he had apparently made off with Carl Bivens, Brookfield flying instructor, and his new yellow monoplane, thereby precipitating a mystery that baffled local and state authorities.

State police officials said they had established a strong chain of circumstantial evidence that the mystery flier was Ernest Pletch, known to authorities throughout the Midwest as the “Lochinvar of the Air.”

The “Lochinvar” bit came from an old Sir Walter Scott poem about an ardent lover. It gave Cronkite his hook for the story about romance, kidnapping, aviation, and mystery. Determined to grab notice, to have his UP articles appear in dozens of newspapers, Cronkite added vivid details about Ernest “Larry” Pletch, scion of a prosperous Indiana family, who had recently been arrested for absconding with a young woman. He had trapped her in an airplane and taken off, trying to force her at high altitude to agree to marry him. After hopscotching through the Midwest, he let her go. It had been assumed that this was merely an impulsive prank. In truth, Pletch was a dangerously disturbed man, as Cronkite’s reporting on Saturday implied. All day, Cronkite worked every angle of the surefire cliffhanger: a missing plane, a cloud of theories, and irresistible suspense.

Cronkite was competing against both the clock and the Associated Press. Both wire services broke the news that a farmer in northwest Missouri had announced that a yellow plane had landed on his property the night before, and that the pilot—in blood-spattered coveralls—had spent the night. The AP, however, topped Cronkite’s coverage by interviewing members of the farm family. Cronkite wasn’t licked yet, though. He calculated the range of the plane, with the gasoline available, and plotted a circle approximately that distance from the farmer’s property. “I began calling airports in the circle,” he later recalled, “On the second call I hit bingo.” Workers at an airport in Indiana reported that they had helped a monoplane land in a nearby cornfield via radio; its gas tank was on empty. The employees at the airfield were excited that the infamous yellow monoplane had come down in their neck of the woods. “I had a nice beat on the opposition,” Cronkite said of his scoop.

In a matter of days, the Lochinvar case was resolved. The kidnapper was indeed Ernest Pletch, who confessed to having shot Bivens twice in the back of the head as they flew along. He did not offer any reason. Pletch pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to life in prison. Cronkite’s aggressive reporting was well received by his bosses at United Press.

In August, two months before Pletch took his last flight, Eric Sevareid was in Paris mulling over the offer of a full-time job with United Press. Just then, Murrow offered Sevareid employment as a CBS News reporter, the fourth in all Europe. Both organizations—UP and CBS—were betting that war was imminent and were trying to snap up hot-to-trot journalists for the impending blanket radio coverage.

On September 1, 1939, the German army rolled into Poland, an overt act of aggression that seemed to demand a response from the rest of the world. Murrow waited impatiently for the next two days for Britain, or France, or any leading power to come to the defense of Poland. Everyone in free Europe was waiting for the same thing, and yet nothing was happening. Murrow, making daily broadcasts from London over CBS Radio, tried to reflect the defiant feeling on the street. He concluded his September 3 broadcast: “The general attitude seems to be, ‘We are ready, let’s quit this stalling and get on with it,’ ” he said. “As a result, I think that we’ll have a decision before this time tomorrow. On the evidence produced so far, it would seem that that decision will be war. But those of us who’ve watched this story unroll at close range have lost the ability to be surprised.”

Shortly after that Murrow broadcast, Britain, France, Australia, and New Zealand declared war on Germany. Americans, proclaiming neutrality for the time being, were desperate for raw, hour-by-hour news reports from Europe. Cronkite had become a compulsive listener to
CBS World News Roundup
, with reporters broadcasting live from London (Ed Murrow), Vienna, Paris, Berlin (William Shirer and Pierre Huss), and Rome (Frank Gervasi). Walter Cronkite and Betsy Maxwell could no longer wait for the morning newspaper: They wanted to hear CBS over the radio from Europe in step-by-step real time. It was Murrow who made Cronkite realize that the days of stringers and passenger pigeons were over at UP. The wire service needed serious-minded and hard-boiled correspondents to cover every aspect of the gathering global conflagration. Cronkite fit the work-for-hire bill of the moment. In the United States alone, UP had more than 1,715 newspaper and radio clients, and nearly all of them would be running stories by Cronkite before long. (UP ended up sending 150 of its best reporters to cover World War II; five would be killed and over a dozen would be wounded, captured, or held as POWs in Germany, Italy, and Japan.)

Cronkite had been working on the UP night desk in Kansas City when the news of Germany’s brutal invasion of Poland with tanks and
Stuka
dive bombers came across the wire that September morning. The regular night editor had gone home just before the alarming news from Europe came clickety-clacking through the Teletype machine. Cronkite had, as he later recalled, all the “excitement” of Hitler’s blitzkrieg to himself.

PART II

The Second World War

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

Gearing Up for Europe

MARRYING BETSY MAXWELL—THE NEWLYWEDS—WIRELESS LISTENERS—POOR ROTTERDAM—COLOR BLINDNESS—EDWARD R. MURROW LEAGUE—MR. PALEY’S CBS—TRANSFER TO THE BIG APPLE—DONNING THE FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT UNIFORM—CAREER AHEAD OF MARRIAGE—AT A BRITISH PORT—MISADVENTURES ON THE U.S.S.
TEXAS
—SLINKING HOME ACROSS THE ATLANTIC—LEARNING THE ROPES OF TRANSMISSION—CATCHING A BREAK AT THE UNITED PRESS

W
alter Cronkite married Betsy Maxwell on March 30, 1940, in a formal ceremony at the Grace and Holy Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Kansas City. Up until the vows, they had been courting covertly for four years, in violation of
Kansas City Journal-Post
employee policy. Because Cronkite’s UP columns appeared in the newspaper, this strict standard applied to Betsy and him. So the Cronkite-Maxwell romance blossomed with an illicit edge to it. When Cronkite, not wanting to turn Betsy into a sexual outlaw, popped the big question, she said yes . . . with an engagement ring on her left hand . . . and a promise that they’d soon have a brood.

Cronkite’s Kansas City wedding was very traditional. The church was bedecked in calla lilies and ferns, and the bride wore an old-fashioned white gown with a long train, and a gold locket that both her grandmother and mother had worn on their wedding days. Leaving at the rising of a pale blue prairie dawn, the Cronkites went on a whirlwind auto honeymoon to Houston, Galveston, El Paso, and Mexico, before heading back to western Missouri. Cronkite, procuring journalism contacts and future sources along the way, visited upstart United Press cubbyhole offices (the 1940s equivalent of stopping by Pony Express stations) far and wide. Thanks to his insatiable need for human company, the honeymoon became what Hemingway called a “movable feast.” Betsy learned during all those road trip hours that despite any inner sadness, her new husband never stopped laughing. He had an infectious laugh. It wasn’t coarse or hearty or even especially loud. It just had an amazing
ain’t life somethin’
ring to it. “We were traveling with a little group,” Cronkite fondly recalled of the honeymoon. “I’d keep inviting people to come along.”

Once back in springtime Kansas City, the Cronkites moved into a Locust Street apartment in the southwest part of town. The quarters comprised four rooms—living area, bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom. There was a little alcove where Cronkite kept his
World Book Encyclopedia
set. The floors were inlaid wood, the wall panels rich oak; there were forest green silk tapestries and a pedestal wide enough to hold a huge Victrola radio. They became great friends with another young journalist, Frank Barhydt, who was a community writer-director and later a publicity director for WHB Broadcasting Co. in Kansas City, Missouri. Together, the Cronkites and Barhydt tried to make a movie in their spare time just for fun.

Betsy Cronkite, a stately figure for all her down-to-earth ways, continued her newspaper work as women’s page editor of the
Kansas City
Journal-Post
. Blessed with a wicked sense of droll humor, always dressed to the nines, she was beloved by colleagues at the paper. Her journalistic specialty was human interest stories of the sentimental variety. One of her duties was to continue writing an advice column for the lovelorn, “Ask Hope Hudson.” Because there was real pain behind the letters she answered weekly, Betsy took even the most frivolous ones seriously. Betsy, it turned out, was a better natural writer than her husband, with a loose, breezy, and distinctive style all her own. Nevertheless, she downplayed her career in later years. “My journalism was really trivial,” she said in a 1979 interview. “I just worked for the money.”

Cronkite’s United Press bureau was on the top floor of the same factory building occupied by the
Journal-Post
, so when work permitted, she and Walter sneaked off for a quick whisper, hug, or fool-around. Cronkite determined that his beloved Kansas City was the ideal town in which to raise a family. But those gathering CBS News broadcasts from Europe made him want to get in on the burgeoning war action. If radio news became too popular, even newspapers would become passé. A few of Cronkite’s bosses in Kansas City advocated for UP to boycott any news delivery to radio companies. A press-versus-radio war had kindled, but Cronkite, hungry for income, declined to choose sides. He wanted paychecks from both print and radio companies. With CBS Radio News delivering real-time transmissions from overseas, Cronkite, the consumer, was a news junkie. He couldn’t get enough international reportage. No longer did he care when the American Newspaper Publishers Association (ANPA) scoffed about radio as a fad: he knew it was the future of the communications industry.

For Cronkite, early May 1940 was the most eye-opening moment of the war thus far—violating the neutrality of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, Nazi Germany unleashed the Luftwaffe fire. The Dutch did their best to thwart this air assault, but the bustling port of Rotterdam was soon reduced to rubble by the German Luftwaffe, and nearly a thousand people were killed. With no other choice at hand, Cronkite’s ancestral homeland, under the threat of continued German bombing, surrendered; this led to five years of brutal occupation. More than 250,000 buildings had been destroyed. “The Dutch people would never be the same again,” Cronkite believed. “When the reports of the bombing of Rotterdam came in, we could scarcely believe the stories of heartbreak and devastation.”

Cronkite now hoped to join the Army Air Corps if the United States entered the European war to help the Dutch people. The Luftwaffe now had the ability, it was feared, to bomb London back to the preindustrial age. Both he and Betsy—big believers in Billy Mitchell’s “Air Power Doctrine”—responded to a Roosevelt administration call for airplane pilots by signing up for flying lessons in Missouri. A huge aviation buff since childhood, Walter hoped to learn how to pilot the P-39s and P-40s, the best Army Air Corps fighters. A monkey wrench soon presented itself that changed the direction of Cronkite’s life. One afternoon at flight school, Cronkite learned that he was color-blind. When asked to read a chart by a U.S. Army optometrist, he couldn’t tell red from green. The condition meant he’d be exempt from the draft and ineligible for military service. It was a devastating blow to the ego of the young Unipresser. He felt neutered. While Betsy professed sadness at her husband’s visual impairment, a secret part of her celebrated: his diagnosis would keep him out of combat. Forging onward, she ended up getting her pilot’s license. It was Betsy’s big one-up over her husband, who later would bundle honorary doctorates the way some men collected butterflies or coins.

Judging by all the press reporting from Great Britain, America would soon be pulled into World War II. Cronkite, wanting to help the Allied cause, refocused on his journalism career and campaigned for reassignment by the United Press to New York City. Kansas City was too cloistered from the gathering storm. If he couldn’t pilot fighter planes, then he’d at least report on them. UP was known for moving journalists willy-nilly from bureau to bureau; as of 1933, the average tenure at one office was a year and a half. Cronkite had been at the Kansas City bureau for more than two years. At every opportunity when speaking with UP executives in New York, Cronkite mentioned his abiding interest in becoming a foreign correspondent who could report on military aviation.

The U.S. military draft was draining UP of a lot of young talent. When UP news manager Earl Johnson, at the wire service’s New York office, irritably said
not now
to Walter’s relocation requests, it churned up resentment in Cronkite. Nevertheless, he hunkered down in Kansas City, working harder than ever at his UP bureau job, which often took him out of state to meet sources who liked roadhouses and pool rooms. He got acquainted with pawn shops, burlesque theaters, blood-donor stations, and drab hotels offering dollar beds. “If I hadn’t been trained as a journalist, we wouldn’t have made it,” Betsy Cronkite said of their marriage. “All the stories you hear about life with a newsman are true—chasing fire trucks, crazy hours and the company they keep, all for the sake of getting the whole story. During our first years of marriage, we were apart more than we were together.”

Talking with fellow reporters at UP, Cronkite learned that Murrow, on CBS Radio, had become the new patron saint of journalism. Cronkite was a tad skeptical and a lot envious. As Cronkite learned from a telephone chat with Johnson, the
real
genius behind CBS’s European operation was William S. Paley, the network’s energetic president. Paley had started in radio in 1928, when he signed a fifty-dollar-a-week advertising contract between his family’s cigar company and Philadelphia radio station WCAU for
The La Palina Hour
. The program was a winner: La Palina cigar sales shot through the roof, and Paley was hooked on broadcast radio. Before long he owned sixteen radio stations, which formed the nucleus of the Columbia Broadcasting System. He kept buying stations, and built his fledgling network into a powerful rival to NBC. By 1930 he owned seventy stations and earned a net profit of $2.35 million. Hence was born the intense competition between CBS and NBC in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

While Paley was on the march with CBS Radio, he worried that TV was too much of a “technological toy” instead of an “everyday necessity.” He focused on attracting listeners with high-quality radio programs. Instead of following NBC’s approach—whereby affiliates were charged fees for sustaining (unsponsored) programs but reimbursed for sponsored network programs—Paley made CBS’s entire sustaining schedule available to affiliates free. This created a huge windfall, especially for smaller radio stations in midsize markets, because for twelve hours a day a CBS affiliate could use as many national programs, or as few, as it needed.

Word had gotten to the UP bureau that the Battle of Britain had begun on July 10, 1940. Cronkite, on the road in Lawrence, Kansas, found a college bar that was playing CBS News on the radio. Dressed in a pressed suit and subdued tie, surrounded by farmers and students, he learned that the Luftwaffe was bombing London nightly, while the Royal Air Force pushed back with all the fighters it could put in the air. Rumor had it that the Nazis were aiming to sabotage all British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) transmission stations. Murrow, reporting from London, sometimes recorded his reports in CBS studios on Fleet Street—which were themselves periodically bombed out. Avoiding sitting-duck syndrome, he wisely broadcast from other, undisclosed locations. He made frequent use of portable shortwave transmitters that fed into long-distance networks connected to the United States. This made him CBS’s appealing man of mystery to Americans catching his ethereal broadcasts on their big radio boxes at night. With London calling, the planned Main Street future, insofar as it spelled raising a happy family in Kansas City, no longer made sense to Cronkite.

When Hitler imposed a blockade of the British Isles in late August 1940, London became an even more difficult place to be, and Murrow seemed to relish this. Not only did he hitch a ride on over twenty-five combat missions for his CBS Radio reports, many not necessary, but he actually
wanted
to get into an aerial firefight, as if to prove his mettle. There was never a down moment for Murrow as long as the evil Third Reich existed; he was wired for action and opportunity. “There was,” his CBS colleague Larry LeSueur recalled with nostalgia years later, “a perverse exhilaration to it all.”

Newspaper reports from Europe might have offered more detail, but radio, Murrow brilliantly proved on CBS, could be as immediate as real life. For his broadcast of August 24, 1940, he stood in London’s Trafalgar Square and, as his American audience heard air-raid sirens in the background, set the scene in a visceral, urgent, and elevated manner, a true civic feat that helped his fellow Americans cope with the urgency of the moment:

A searchlight just burst into action, off in the distance, one single beam sweeping the sky above me now. People are walking along quite quietly. We’re just at the entrance of an air-raid shelter here and I must move this cable over just a bit so people can walk in. . . . There’s another searchlight, just square behind [Admiral] Nelson’s statue. Here comes one of those big red buses around the corner, double-deckers they are, just a few lights on the top deck; in this blackness, it looks very much like a ship that’s passing in the night and you just see the portholes. . . . More searchlights come into action. You see them reach straight up into the sky and occasionally they catch a cloud and seem to splash on the bottom of it. . . . One of the strangest sounds one can hear in London these days, or rather these dark nights: just the sound of footsteps walking along the street, like ghosts shod with steel shoes.

What a dramatic radio bulletin for Cronkite to hear on the radio. Murrow’s edgy broadcast was immediately imbued for Cronkite with the old atmosphere of democratic optimism—the same stiffening of the spine that his father had felt when President Wilson had declared war on Germany back in 1917. AP’s report from London that same August 24 appeared in print, and was just as immediate. Drew Middleton, a twenty-six-year-old New Yorker, wrote for the Associated Press:

Off to the east, searchlights poked up through the sky. We could hear the German plane, but couldn’t see it. We stood there. Presently a woman walked past. Tragic-eyed, dressed in nightclothes and a man’s old greatcoat, she clutched a baby to her breast. There was silence while she passed. The men’s faces reflected only a sober, fierce anger. A man came pounding up the street bawling, ‘Stretcher party! Stretcher!’ His cries soon brought four men carrying stretchers. One of the stretcher-bearers was immaculately clad in evening dress. In a few minutes they trudged past in the opposite direction, their stretchers occupied. A limp arm dangled from one.

Middleton’s talent for the telling detail was as good as Murrow’s, but the AP print journalist, even in a feature story like this, had to relate dramatic incidents in order to retain the interest of a reader. Middleton could not have made news of a red double-decker bus rumbling past Trafalgar Square as Murrow had. Murrow’s bold reporting was what had Americans talking at the diners and churches that summer and fall. “There was an awful lot of clatter of showmanship in radio broadcasting,” Cronkite explained in a 1973
Playboy
interview. “The telegraphic ticker, the Walter Winchell approach, and a lot of the deep-voice announcer types, reading copy prepared by someone else. Ed [Murrow] squared that away pretty quickly by setting a tremendous example, fighting for the truth, honesty, integrity, and all the proper things. What we owe Ed is just absolutely immense.”