Cronkite (78 page)

Rather was widely criticized for the lapse of judgment in Miami, and Cronkite didn’t pull any punches. Sounding like a rioter screaming “off with his head,” he publicly claimed that he would have “fired” Rather outright for gross insubordination. Rather was understandably hurt by Cronkite’s smackdown. How was it good, Rather asked, for CBS News to have Cronkite maliciously carping about him? “Walter, I long knew, was competitive down to his marrow,” Rather recalled. “It was like he woke up in 1987 and saw me in his old job with successful ratings, making more money than he ever did—and I was relatively young to boot. He wanted to destroy me. I didn’t know what to do. I kept wondering how to handle his venom. I decided I didn’t want to fight him. So I hunkered down in the fetal position and just took it. I just let him take big chunks out of my ass.”

Given the insularity of the upper management at CBS News, exactly who banished Cronkite in 1988 remains unclear. But Van Gordon Sauter (president of CBS News from 1985 to 1986) and Howard Stringer (president of CBS News from 1986 to 1988) seem to be left holding the bag. From 1962 to 1981, CBS News had ridden Cronkite’s voice and work ethic to TV dominance. No more. The attitude toward him on West Fifty-seventh Street was an unspoken “get your mail and get out of here, old man.” Why couldn’t Cronkite go gently into that good night like Douglas Edwards? He should just go moor
Wyntje
in Sarasota, Florida, and stay put. The power circle around Rather maintained an oh-how-the-mighty-have-fallen disdain toward Cronkite. Peter J. Boyer of
The
New York Times
published an article on June 8, 1988, about his dissatisfaction with being persona non grata at Fifty-seventh Street. Two former CBS News presidents—Van Gordon Sauter and Edward M. Joyce—acknowledged that Cronkite had been deliberately “shut out” of CBS News because they didn’t want Rather to throw a tantrum.

What caused the Rather-Cronkite feud to escalate even further in 1988 was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the JFK assassination. Earlier that year, Cronkite had floated a detailed proposal to Sauter about hosting a prime-time
Special Report
on the anniversary of the Dallas tragedy. Everything would be looked at with fresh eyes, including Oswald’s ties with Cuba, LBJ’s fears of a conspiracy, and what the Warren Commission got wrong. Cronkite thought this was a no-brainer, the perfect special for him to host. Instead, the CBS network (not the news division) passed on it. Cronkite blamed Rather for dogging him out of the gig. Whenever an opportunity arose, Cronkite dumped Rather into the warlock’s pot and stirred. “I think it’s unfortunate that any other person feels about another as I do about Dan,” Cronkite said. “But to me, I guess, Dan just reeks of insincerity.”

What Cronkite never fully comprehended was that Rather wasn’t the one who nixed his JFK special. No one at CBS News was getting an hour of prime-time TV in the 1980s—with vulture capitalist Larry Tisch as honcho—unless it was something like a
Challenger
disaster special. Rather himself could not have finagled an hour of such prime TV real estate; the very notion was laughable. Prime-time television was cage fighting—every ratings point counted. “He was pushing this Kennedy anniversary special ridiculously hard,” Rather recalled. “Believe me, it was a complete nonstarter from the get-go. It wasn’t even for a blinking instant a serious consideration. But Walter created this false scenario that I had somehow nixed his Kennedy special.”

When CBS News broadcast a two-hour
Apollo 11
twentieth-anniversary special in 1989, it was hosted by Rather and Charles Kuralt. Cronkite was once again nixed from the entire nostalgic enterprise. Rather believed that only his resignation would have pleased Cronkite. Therefore, he just curled his mouth up and took whatever buckshot Cronkite fired at him. Over the summer of 1988, Black Rock determined that it was better to renegotiate Cronkite’s contract than have him debase Rather for sport. If CBS paid Cronkite, they could at least guarantee in writing that he couldn’t criticize company employees. After a protracted negotiation, CBS agreed to give Cronkite a ten-year contract. It was also a gag order, in the spirit of the old Arab proverb: “It’s better to have the camel inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.” The contract was nonexclusive, stipulating that Cronkite could work with most other media companies, the notable exceptions being NBC and ABC.

Getting his life in order, in 1988 Cronkite donated his papers to the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. He also asked Dr. Don Carleton, the center’s director, to help him organize the research for his memoir,
A Reporter’s Life
. A born-and-bred Texan—best known for his important anti-McCarthyism book
Red Scare
—Carleton conducted sixty hours’ of recorded interviews with Cronkite. Within a relatively short time, Carleton became a trusted confidant. An amiable rapport developed between the two men, one that grew steadily in importance to Cronkite over the years. Like so many of the friends Cronkite made late in life, the two men shared the brotherhood of the sea. “Every three or four months for a period stretching over four years,” Carleton wrote, “Walter and I met for two or three days, sometimes longer for me to interview him. . . . Those interviews were conducted in his office at CBS, his home in Manhattan, his summer residence in Martha’s Vineyard and in the British Virgin Islands on his sailboat.”

Cronkite didn’t have much of a role in the 1988 presidential campaign that eventually pitted Vice President George H. W. Bush against Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. But he nevertheless had CBS News pay his way to the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary that January. He circulated among the political stars—Bush and Dukakis included—with ease. One evening,
New York
magazine columnist Joe Klein joined Cronkite and Jerry Brown, former governor of California, for a drink at the Wayfarer Inn in Bedford, New Hampshire. “Walter was entirely shit-faced,” Klein recalled. “He was slurring his words but having a grand old time.” Suddenly, a very pesky right-to-life advocate interrupted their conversation with a rant against
Roe v. Wade
. This pro-lifer ripped into Governor Brown for being a faux Catholic, a promoter of abortion, a baby killer. After a few minutes of pontificating, her eyes locked on Cronkite for the first time. She was taken aback, thrilled to see the famous CBS News anchorman in person.

“Mr. Cronkite,” she said, “don’t you agree with me that abortion is wrong? What do you think?”

Whereupon Cronkite, with a dismissive wave of the hand and ironic expression, uttered the unutterable in his mellifluous voice.

“Kill them all,” he said.

The woman gasped. Almost fainted on the spot. At loose ends as to how to respond to such a deplorable remark, she just walked away discombobulated. “That put an end to the haranguing,” Klein said. “I don’t know whether Walter meant it or it was just a ploy to get her to go. But we laughed hard.”

On February 28, 1988, Cronkite went to Houston for the Democratic candidates’ debate held at the George R. Brown Convention Center. The Sun Broadcast Group and the National Association of Television Program Executives International cosponsored the event. He had been chosen to moderate. The job was the highlight of his spring. On the day of the debate, he received a jolting call from Black Rock in his Four Seasons hotel room. Because the Democratic debate wasn’t airing on CBS News—was in fact airing on NBC News—company lawyers argued that Cronkite would be in breach of his million-dollar-a-year contract if he moderated. This was a cruel, embarrassing blow to him. As a last-minute replacement, Linda Ellerbee filled in. Although Ellerbee had been an NBC reporter on the
Today
show, she had turned in 1987 to producing children’s TV shows for cable channels. All Cronkite had for consolation was the press report that neither Dukakis nor Gephardt was going to participate in the Texas debate. “Cronkite watched,” Ann Hodges of the
Houston Chronicle
reported, “just like you and me.” Ellerbee, caught up in the moment, ignored Cronkite. All the press swarmed around Al Gore, Jesse Jackson, Gary Hart, and others, while Ellerbee was the toast of the town. Cronkite walked back to the Four Seasons alone, feeling old and useless. CBS had shot him down yet again.

His doldrums continued through the spring. That April, he joined forces with James Reston of
The New York Times
for a luncheon “conversation” with the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Every comment Cronkite made that afternoon in Washington had a curmudgeonly cast. Whether it was the Barbara Walters entertainment-as-news syndrome or the overscripted presidential debates or the mixing of celebrity with politics, everything sickened him. And even though the communications school at Arizona State was named in his honor, he dissed the notion of going from college straight into TV broadcasting. “It’s the glamour of the business that attracts them,” he grumbled. “I think that what some of the schools are committing is fraud. They don’t have to go to college to learn [the technical part] of TV news; they could learn that in a trade school in about three weeks.”

Cronkite did offer political commentary for the
CBS Evening News
from the Democratic Convention (July 18–25) in Atlanta and the Republican Convention (August 15–18) in New Orleans, but it didn’t add up to much. Bored by the 1988 presidential square-off of Bush-Dukakis, and dismayed that Mars exploration was not being embraced fulsomely enough by Congress, Cronkite decided that sailing his double-ended
Wyntje
around the Atlantic seaboard was the smartest thing to do. Although he personally liked Vice President Bush, whom he sometimes called “Poppy,” and thought his extensive résumé as CIA director and vice president was impressive, Cronkite was aghast at the political tactics of GOP cutthroat Lee Atwater. He was disgusted with the anti-Dukakis smear ad centered on Willie Horton. (While Dukakis was governor, Horton, a convicted felon, was released from a Massachusetts prison as part of a weekend furlough program, during which time he committed rape and carjacking.) But he was just as livid at Dukakis for running a lackluster campaign, running away from being dubbed a liberal.

That July Cronkite visited his longtime friend (and producer since the 1950s) Bud Benjamin in a New York hospital; he was suffering from a just-diagnosed brain tumor. They held hands and reminisced about everything from
The Twentieth Century
to Watergate specials to
Westmoreland v. CBS.
On September 20, Benjamin died at age seventy. At the funeral in Scarborough, New York, Cronkite was a weeping mess. “Benjamin had been Walter’s backstop,” Andy Rooney recalled. “Living in a world without Bud wasn’t easy for Walter.”

Just a couple of weeks after Benjamin’s death, Cronkite watched Dukakis implode in a televised debate with Bush. CNN anchorman Bernard Shaw had asked Dukakis, a death penalty opponent, how he would respond if his wife were raped and murdered. Dukakis mistakenly tried answering logically instead of emotionally. It proved to be a watershed moment in the campaign, and it buried Dukakis’s White House odds.

Shaw
:
Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?

Dukakis
:
No, I don’t, Bernard. And I think you know that I’ve opposed the death penalty all of my life. I don’t see any evidence that it’s a deterrent, and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime. We’ve done so in my own state . . . one of the reasons why we have had the biggest drop in crime of any industrial state . . . the lowest murder rate of any industrial state.

According to Rooney, Cronkite tossed a bowl of popcorn in the air when Dukakis blundered. “Game over,” he said, and demanded the TV be turned off. That November 8, Bush routed Dukakis, 426 electoral votes to 111; the vice president carried forty states. Bush had lambasted Dukakis with negatives, painting him as a big-spending liberal, wobbly on crime, short on patriotism, detached from family values. To Cronkite’s chagrin, Dukakis never fought back. At least when McGovern went up in flames back in 1972 he had courage, defending New Frontier–style liberalism and denouncing the Vietnam War with moral indignation. The Dukakis ship had sunk without a fight. An incensed Cronkite was concerned that the Bush crowd had turned
liberal
into an epithet.

Playing the Grand Old Man, Cronkite publicly came out as a card-carrying liberal with an ACLU pedigree at a People for the American Way’s Spirit of Liberty dinner honoring Congresswoman Barbara Jordan of Texas on November 17, 1988. Dressed in a tuxedo with a handkerchief protruding from his pocket, he looked handsome and dapper on the dais at the Roseland Ballroom in New York City. Heading to the event that evening, in a taxi going down Park Avenue, he was in a discernibly feisty mood. His oratory that night, influenced by Sidney Lumet’s touchstone movie
Network
, soared in a no-holds-barred “Defense of Liberalism.” It was Cronkite’s equivalent of Murrow’s RTNDA speech of 1958 in Chicago. Roseland’s multipurpose hall, with its purple and cerise tentlike décor, was Cronkite’s favorite music venue. He had seen Harry James, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie (who wrote “Roseland Shuffle”) perform there. But on this night, a celebration of the pioneering Texas congresswoman Barbara Jordan from the Eighteenth District, it was Walter Cronkite’s stage.

At the podium, Cronkite, spinning his thoughts in the low, rapid voice of a broadcaster just liberated from the rules of objective journalism, scolded Democrats to never again abandon the liberal tradition that Barbara Jordan represented. His spontaneous remonstrance was electrifying. Some people thought he was Maker’s Mark drunk or brain-fevered. Perhaps he was a little of both. The soaring speech became treasured as Cronkite’s political coming-out party:

The temptation is rather great at this point to digress into the defense of liberalism, but I shall fight off that temptation. No, I won’t. I know that liberalism isn’t dead in this country. It isn’t even comatose. It simply is suffering a severe case of acute laryngitis. It simply has temporarily—we hope—lost its voice. But that Democratic loss in the election. . . . It seems to me it was not just the candidate who belatedly found a voice that could reach the people. It was not just a campaign strategy built on a defensive philosophy. It was not just an opposition that conducted one of the most sophisticated and cynical campaigns ever. It was not just a failure to reach out to every section of our nation and every sector of our society. It was the fault of too many who found their voices still by not-so-subtle ideological intimidation.