Cronkite (81 page)

After New York City officially designated Cronkite a “living legend,” he told Rooney he better do something philanthropic to live up to the honor. Always seeking publicity, he allowed himself to be auctioned off for four or five nonprofit events a year under the gambit “Have lunch with Walter Cronkite.” Pay $10,000 to a charity and Cronkite would feast with you at the 21 Club or the Four Seasons. “This was Walter’s way of getting to pig out on gourmet food for free,” Rooney said, laughing. “It was shameless. Not only would he never pick up a tab willingly, he had now also devised ways to get the best free meals in the world while getting credit for being charitable. That made him, in my eye, the Smartest Man in America.”

Trying to capitalize on Cronkite’s broadcasting gravitas, the Discovery Channel launched
The Cronkite Report
, a new prime-time quarterly documentary series. John Hendricks paid Cronkite a goodly sum for his services. Discovery, in turn, received premium advertising revenue because of Cronkite’s celebrity status. The first episode, “Help Unwanted,” focused on unemployment; it featured both President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore. The ratings were decent.
The Cronkite Report
—with Sandy Socolow as executive producer and Chip Cronkite as supervising producer—aired at 9:00 on Friday evenings. Channeling the ghosts of Murrow and Sevareid, Cronkite insisted that old-fashioned investigative journalism was a prerequisite in a democracy.

Looking for a consistent revenue stream, Cronkite, with the help of Adler, understood the enormous earnings potential of cable TV. In 1993, he cofounded an LLC called Cronkite, Ward and Company. Cronkite’s partner in this pennywise operation was Jonathan Ward, a former producer at CBS News. Other founding producers were Sandy Socolow, Dale Minor, and Chip Cronkite. The company opened up offices in both New York and Washington (near Dupont Circle) and produced more than one hundred award-winning documentary hours for the Discovery Channel, PBS, and other networks.

But the rigors of a whirlwind press tour to promote
The Cronkite Report
for Discovery in mid-1993 caused Cronkite’s health to buckle, as his old back problems resurfaced. At an interview session with Los Angeles
Daily News
reporter Ray Richmond, conducted at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Cronkite complained of severe back pain. He lowered himself down upon a chair with a slow, ponderous movement. He put on a good game face for Richmond, revealing his personal hatred of the syndicated
Inside Edition
tabloid-format show, and elucidating the toxic effects that such programming had on American society. When the hourlong session ended, he steeled himself to rise from his chair, Betsy offering a helping hand.

“Come on Walter. It’s time to get to the orgy,” she said.

“Oh golly, not another one. I don’t know if my back can take it.”

That summer of 1993, Cronkite was tied up with
The Cronkite Report
and sailing his beloved
Wyntje
to Maine. He did not meet up with Bill and Hillary Clinton, who headed to the Vineyard for an eleven-day vacation. But he did see Clinton at a White House function celebrating the arts in early September. An awkward moment occurred that evening when cellist Mstislav Rostropovich finished playing Tchaikovsky’s
Nocturne
in the East Room and walked over to the circular dining tables, looking for his assigned seat. He didn’t have one. All spots were taken. A snafu in protocol had occurred. Instinctively, Cronkite rose and offered Rostropovich his chair. It was the gesture of a gentleman. When Clinton spoke a few minutes later, he noted Cronkite’s generosity. “You know, when I was a boy,” Clinton said, “they used to say Walter Cronkite could get elected president by file-in, and now he’s shown once again why.”

The Clinton White House asked Cronkite to be the master of ceremonies for a slew of galas commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Second World War. This was much better treatment than being blacklisted by the USIA during Reagan’s first term or dissed by Bush for an
Address the Nation
interview. Cronkite, at the invitation of the White House, was in Normandy with the Clintons on June 6, 1994, regaling the president with stories about zero visibility over fog-covered Omaha Beach on D-day. CNN likewise tapped Cronkite to co-anchor its D-day (Plus 50) coverage. “Any question I had about the Battle of Normandy,” Wolf Blitzer of CNN recalled, “Walter had the fast answer.”

In May 1995, CBS News—envious that CNN had used its old anchorman for D-day (Plus 50)—asked Cronkite to appear live from London on the
CBS Evening News
broadcast on the fiftieth anniversary of V-E Day. Cronkite, full of nostalgia about his days at United Press, agreed. He did a fine job. A couple of days later, he was on Bob Schieffer’s
Face the Nation
(with Dan Rather) to discuss V-E Day. CBS News had erected a handsome set in London with Westminster Abbey as the backdrop for Cronkite. After Schieffer finished the
Face the Nation
broadcast that Sunday, Cronkite, without a job assignment, lingered with the London film crew, telling bawdy jokes about “Gunga Dan” Rather going to Afghanistan soon after the Soviet invasion in 1980 and donning a wool hat and shawl. Eventually, Cronkite, in the company of producer Al Ortiz, said good-bye to the technicians and left the studio. Walking down the hallway, Cronkite spotted the men’s WC (his initials) sign and blurted, “Let’s hit my place.” At the urinal, the legend turned philosophical. “Let me give you three pieces of advice, Al,” he said to Ortiz. “Number one: never pass up a urinal; number two: never trust a fart; and number three: never, ever ignore an erection.” Ortiz cracked up.

Just days after Cronkite turned seventy-seven years old in November 1993, word reached him that his mother Helen had died of congestive heart failure. Burying Helen took a toll on Cronkite. She was 101 years old, still dating retired U.S. Army officers. Somehow having his mother alive made him feel young and vibrant. What everybody, her only son included, had loved about Helen was her feisty vitality. At her hundredth birthday party, Cronkite had danced with his mom, but she seemed a little light-headed. “Walter, I think I need my medicine,” she said, sitting down. Worried about her health, he quickly went and fetched her heart pills.

“Walter,” she snapped, “who said I needed that?”

“You did, Mother,” he said. “You said you needed your medicine.”

And she replied, “I meant my martini.”

Throughout 1994 and 1995, Cronkite grew discontented with how CNN, MSNBC, and the Fox News Channel interrupted broadcasts with “Breaking News” flashes for silly items like an L.A. freeway chase or another Clinton sex allegation story. He watched the 1996 presidential election between Clinton and Dole unfold with utter boredom. On November 5, 1996, when Clinton beat Dole by 379 electoral votes to 159, Cronkite celebrated with Art Buchwald and Andy Rooney. But politics no longer held much appeal for Cronkite. While the right wing was calling Clinton “Slick Willie,” and allegations of adultery filled the airwaves, Cronkite told people that the president was indeed trustworthy, although he hedged his defense with faint praise. “Would I, at this lunch,” he said to a reporter, “give him my wallet and ask him to pick up a few greeting cards and return the wallet this afternoon? I wouldn’t have a problem with that.”

When Cronkite’s mother, Helen, died, one of the many condolence letters he received came from Joe and Shirley Wershba, his old friends from the Korean War days at WTOP-TV. Their card motivated Cronkite to telephone the Wershbas. “If you have time to write a condolence card,” Cronkite told Joe, “you can help me finish my memoir.” Since the 1950s, Cronkite had written up anecdotes and put them in a memoir box. But they all added up to a themeless pudding. “Walter sent us his notes and a long oral history he’d done with Don Carleton,” Shirley Wershba recalled. “And we went to work. My job was organizing the material. Joe started looking up all the facts and statistics and dates. We did a lot of work, but it was Walter’s book. We just helped.”

Ultimately, though, Cronkite had to focus on doing some heavy lifting on the manuscript, and to that end, fate stepped in. After his knee replacement surgery in 1995, he was trapped in the house with little to do but work on his
A Reporter’s Life
manuscript. He wrote every word himself (with a lot of editorial help from the Wershbas). The book finally appeared, four years late, in 1996, a year after Andy Rooney’s memoir,
My War
, was published. Both appeared on the New York Times bestseller list, Cronkite’s debuting at number two and hitting number one during the week of Christmas 1996. The same year, CBS broadcast the two-hour tribute
Cronkite Remembers
, which combined the network’s vintage footage with family home movies. The concept was expanded the following year with an eight-hour version of
Cronkite Remembers
on the Discovery Channel. A few years later, NPR hired Cronkite to contribute radio essays for
All Things Considered
, his occasional features marking anniversaries of the major historic events of his lifetime. He was also seen frequently on cable television, hosting programs or granting interviews on current events. But his bread and butter, and the source of much of his income, was the marketing of his own life story in print and video.

An old Dutch proverb has it that the tulip that grows the tallest gets cut down. Cronkite experienced a taste of that folk wisdom in early 1997. His many TV interviews and the success of
A Reporter’s Life
—including landing the front page of
The New York Times Book Review
—made him a target of the conservative movement. Everybody knew that he was liberal; that fact never bothered Cronkite’s establishment Republican friends such as William F. Buckley and John Lehman. But midway through the
Cronkite Remembers
documentary, Cronkite postulated that the Soviet Union wasn’t ever a dangerous threat: “I thought that we Americans overreacted to the Soviets, and the news coverage sometimes seemed to accentuate that misdirected concern,” he said. “Fear of the Soviet Union taking over the world just seemed as likely to me as invaders from Mars.”

Conservatives cried foul. Cronkite’s recycling of the past had, with that whopper, become farcical.
The
Washington Times
criticized Cronkite for a self-serving distortion of reality. “With newscasters like Mr. Cronkite,” the
Times
scoffed, “who needs
Pravda
?” The gloves were off. Cronkite now became fair game. Tim Hughes, an Ohio blogger, created an anti-Cronkite website titled “Walter Cronkite Spit in My Food.” It featured a cartoon Cronkite character drunk at Disney World, trashing former CBS colleagues, bragging about screwing another man’s wife, and spitting in people’s desserts. The
New York Post
—a conservative-leaning tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch—ran a story about the website that caused Cronkite to throw a fit.

Instead of suing the Ohioan, Cronkite went on the offensive against the very “right-wing conspiracy” that Hillary Clinton, the first lady, once talked about on NBC’s
Today
show. Refusing to clam up, worried that the GOP was trying to exploit God for political gain, Cronkite joined the Interfaith Alliance, an organization headed by Rev. C. Welton Gaddy, a Baptist minister from Monroe, Louisiana, that championed individual rights and promoted policies aimed to protect both democracy and religion. At Gaddy’s request, Cronkite wrote an open letter denouncing the Christian Coalition of Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed for “wrapping their harsh right-wing views in the banner of religious faith.”

Not that Cronkite wasn’t in a praying mood. On April 1, 1997, after a routine cardiac stress test, Cronkite underwent quadruple bypass surgery at the New York–Cornell Medical Center (the operation was followed by knee replacement surgery). The operations went well. Because Cronkite was unable to walk for a while, Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead—who was on the board of the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function—bought him seventeen different drums to play. If you visited the Cronkites for dinner, it was mandatory to launch into a drum jamboree. “The music seemed to heal his soul,” Chip Cronkite recalled. “Along with medication, it was part of his recovery therapy.”

That same April, Betsy had to have one of her knees replaced. It no longer made sense for the couple to live in a four-story town house with a lot of stairs. Reluctantly, they put 519 East Eighty-fourth Street—where they had resided for nearly forty years—up for sale; it was snatched up in four days. All the Cronkite kids were middle-aged: Nancy was forty-eight; Kathy, forty-six (with two kids); and Chip, forty (with two kids). It was time to move into the last phase of life. All of the books, commendations, and trophies in the large living room had been put in boxes.

How Cronkite decided to purchase a co-op at 870 UN Plaza (East Tower) was fraught with romance. The real estate agent was Joanna Simon, a beautiful, glamorous, and smart real estate broker from a well-to-do Manhattan family. A classically trained mezzo-soprano opera singer, she was married to Gerald Walker, the article editor of
The New York Times Magazine
from 1963 to 1990. Even though Cronkite was happily married, he had a crush on Simon. While he liked that the 25A co-op had almost an airplane-level look at the East River, the
real
purchase closer for him was Simon’s charm. Quickly inspecting all the rooms with Betsy, he turned to Simon and said, “I’ll take it.” A few years later, after their friendship blossomed, Simon asked Walter about his impulse purchase. “I took one look at you,” he said, “and I wanted you in my life at all costs.”

After rummaging around closets for the best keepsakes, the Cronkites packed up and moved into UN Plaza, where they had doormen, elevators, and river views. Tom Brokaw remembered communicating with Betsy at the time of the Cronkites’ move to UN Plaza. “It must be terrible leaving with so many family memories,” Brokaw said. “What I’ll miss is the backyard we had,” Betsy said, “for I had a plot of land where I could bury all of Walter’s plaques.”