Cronkite (83 page)

How did Cronkite get away with such World Federalist rhetoric and not cause Republicans to collectively turn on him the way Fox News Channel would against Wall Street financier George Soros? For starters, he had too many GOP establishment friends, such as Roger Ailes, John Lehman, and George Shultz. It was also disconcerting to them that, after sounding like Paul Robeson at the United Nations, Cronkite headed to the Kennedy Center Honors in a tuxedo looking for all the world like Captain Kangaroo. Nothing about his kindly demeanor was menacing in the least. There is also, it must be said, an unwritten rule that once you pass eighty years old in America you have earned the right to pontificate without much penalty.

Election Day, November 7, 2000, redefined the term
political cliffhanger
in the United States. The square-off between George W. Bush and Al Gore seemed to be a dead heat. All the networks made predictions that Vice President Gore had won Florida that they were then forced to retract. Who actually won the 2000 election was eventually decided in Bush’s favor by the U.S. Supreme Court. While most Americans worried about the breakdown of the democratic process, Cronkite kept his ire focused on his media colleagues. “I think it’s up to the networks and the subscribing newspapers and press services to not call until all the states have closed,” he said. “I don’t understand the need for speed, although I was certainly one of the progenitors of the whole idea of exit polling. . . . The point is that nowadays, with the exit polling, we’re calling these states so early that there are some three hours left of voting time out on the West Coast, and it seems to me that very probably it could work just as well to withhold returns until all the states have voted.”

Just after Thanksgiving, Cronkite had surgery on his right heel to replace a part of his Achilles tendon. While the procedure went well, he was in terrible pain. With weariness and disgust, he canceled all his Christmas obligations, including serving as host of the Kennedy Center Honors. It wasn’t like him to miss a gig, but his discomfort was very real. Gala producer George Stevens Jr. was shocked, saying that Uncle Walter was “irreplaceable.”

That New Year’s Eve—ushering in Y2K—a still recuperating Cronkite was forced to cancel his hosting of PBS’s New Year’s Concert at the gilded Musikverein concert hall in Vienna. The Cronkites instead celebrated with their oldest Kansas City friends, Frantz and Dorothy Barhydt. “I had to think more about the millennium than anyone,” the eighty-three-year-old Cronkite would soon joke at a speech before the University of Wisconsin Medical School, “as the world’s oldest reporter.”

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-
F
IVE

The New Millennium

9/11/01 IN ITALY—CONSOLING AMERICA WITH LETTERMAN—AROUND AMERICA—KING FEATURES SYNDICATE COLUMNIST—ANTI-IRAQ WAR—SCOLDING JOHN KERRY—MEMOGATE—THE FLUSHING OF DAN RATHER—CHEERING UP MOONVES—DEATH OF BETSY—THE LOVELY JOANNA SIMON—WC ARCHIVES AT UT—WORKING WITH CARLETON—LEGACY IN PHOENIX—CHALLENGING THE WAR ON DRUGS—ATTACKED BY THE RIGHT—FADING AWAY—STANDING FOR THE GENTLEMAN—TOM SHALES’S FINE GOOD-BYE

A
fter watching the U.S. Open tennis tournament at Flushing Meadows on September 7, 2001, Walter and Betsy Cronkite packed their bags for an Italian holiday. The last of the broadcasters from the golden age of TV was going to receive an honorary degree from La Sapienza University (founded in 1303 and still Europe’s largest university). While in Florence, Cronkite heard the ghastly news of September 11: nineteen al Qaeda terrorists had hijacked four commercial planes and crashed two into the World Trade Center in New York City; the third into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia; and the fourth into a fallow field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Nearly three thousand people were killed in the most gruesome string of terrorist attacks in American history.

Cronkite was glued to CNN in his Florence hotel near the Uffizi Gallery, watching anchorman Aaron Brown broadcast the nonstop, commercial-free coverage. Scenes of people plunging to their deaths and plumes of smoke and ash rolling down Wall Street made Cronkite shudder. Scores of New Yorkers were fleeing from the crumbling towers with cloths over their mouths to avoid breathing in the smoke. Walter and Betsy desperately tried reaching their three children, determined to make sure they were safe. It took a while, but they eventually succeeded. “When Dad reached me, I suggested that he stay out of New York for a while,” Chip Cronkite recalled, “but he was very anxious to get back to Manhattan. He wanted to get back to cover the story.”

Marlene Adler was with the Cronkites in Italy, managing her boss’s various entrepreneurial ventures when the news of 9/11 broke. “Get me out of here!” he demanded of Adler. When she explained to him that U.S. airports were in lockdown mode, planes grounded, he groused, “Then get me a private plane!” Adler frantically tried to book a flight, to no avail. With thousands of miles of sea separating him from New York, Cronkite told Adler in exasperation, “OK, then we’ll take a boat.” His impatience had become almost debilitating. It was the first time Adler had seen her beloved boss so demanding and rigid. His helplessness frustrated him terribly. “He
had
to see Ground Zero for himself while it was smoldering,” Adler recalled. “He
had
to use his reporter’s eye on the front line. Nothing would satisfy him until I got him to New York. Nothing.”

Feeling useless and detached, Cronkite pottered around the Piazza della Signoria, pondering the gloom of 9/11. He wondered if World War III had started. He digested the gruesome reality that New York City, his adopted hometown since the early 1950s, was in a state of emergency. One supposes that a cramp of envy consumed him because Dan Rather of the
CBS Evening News
was anchoring fifty-three hours and thirty-five minutes of coverage. He felt again like a has-been broadcaster. Instead of canceling his La Sapienza speech in Rome, though, Cronkite spoke to the Italian audience, including in his remarks a brief interlude of silence for victims of the 9/11 attack.

On September 12, Cronkite, still glued to CNN’s marathon coverage, telephoned Brown in New York, urging the broadcaster to hold up under the intense pressure. Even though seeing the jagged jawbone of the smoking World Trade Center towers was traumatizing, he nevertheless had the wherewithal to critique Brown’s on-air performance. “This is your Kennedy,” Cronkite told Brown. “This is how people will think of you.” Brown said that “no call had ever meant more” to him.

Once back in New York and reunited with his family, Cronkite hugged all of his kids. Turning down dozens of interview requests, he ultimately accepted an invitation from CBS’s
Late Night with David Letterman
, hoping to offer healing remarks about the 9/11 wickedness. It proved to be a sentimental segment between the great comedian and the great broadcaster. Letterman and Cronkite, pros at banter, held a somber chat about how the Bush administration shouldn’t overreact to al Qaeda’s diabolical attacks. A sedate Cronkite admitted that his immediate reaction while in Italy had been to “get even, for heaven’s sake,” with the murderous foes. Retaliation, he said, was a natural instinct against “Bin Lad . . . Bin Adam . . . whatever that idiot’s name is. I’m trying to forget it already, as if that would help somehow.” But rushing to war to get even wasn’t the solution.

Letterman:
As someone who has seen and covered big stories all your life, when you heard of this, how did it feel compared to other big news stories in America?

Cronkite:
Well, how do you think it felt? I mean, how do you really think it felt? I think the question is acceptable, I’m not criticizing your question, except that I think we all felt the same way. I really think that’s one of the unifying things about us. I don’t think there was an American with a different thought except invoking the deity, “My God, how could this happen?” and the shock of it happening, the terrible awareness of our vulnerability, that a small band of fanatics, idiots could commit such mass murder in the middle of the greatest city in the world.

For a few weeks in the fall of 2001, Cronkite refrained from overtly criticizing President Bush, but the mute button wasn’t on pause for long. He soon lost patience with the administration’s false linkage of Iraq to the al Qaeda terrorist network. The unconscionable mistake that President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld were making, Cronkite believed, was insisting that the United States needed a post-9/11 demonstration of war to prove national greatness. That October, Cronkite took to the CNN airwaves demanding that President Bush adhere to the War Powers Act, which required that the president seek congressional authorization before dispatching military forces abroad. That was just his opening shot. Cronkite decided in December 2001 to expose what he regarded as the Bush administration’s warmongering and its false linkage of Saddam Hussein with al Qaeda. “I was hot under the collar about Bush overreacting to 9/11 with the Freedom Fries and all that,” Andy Rooney recalled. “But Walter was hotter.”

And Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld weren’t Cronkite’s only targets. He also lashed out at the evangelicals Jerry Falwell (pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia) and Pat Robertson (host of the
700 Club
). In a
TV Guide
interview, Cronkite said that Falwell’s remark about 9/11 (that the terrorist attacks were divine retribution for pagans, abortionists, feminists, and homosexuals) was “the most abominable thing I’ve ever heard.” As Cronkite prepared to host the Emmy Awards in Los Angeles, he took his criticism of the Christian right a bridge farther. “It makes you wonder,” he said of the evangelical’s post-9/11 remarks, “if [Falwell and Robertson] are worshipping the same God as the people who bombed the Trade Center and the Pentagon.”

With the November publication of his sailing memoir,
Around America: A Tour of Our Magnificent Coastline
(W. W. Norton), Cronkite attended book signings at what seemed like every Barnes & Noble, Borders, and independent booksellers from Marin County, California, to Portland, Maine. On the promotional stump, he saw his public role as championing America’s pristine national seashores, such as Cape Hatteras, Padre Island, and Assateague Island . He fell in love with old Savannah: the buggy rides, fountains, and parks. As the “Air War Dean” of World War II journalism, he was thrilled to learn that an Eighth Air Force museum was being built near the airport. However, autograph seekers didn’t want to talk about General Eaker or the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge’s dwindling whooping crane population when newspapers headlined anthrax scares and whodunit theories about Saudi Arabian treachery. Everybody, it seemed, wanted Cronkite to compare 9/11 to Pearl Harbor or the JFK assassination or the Oklahoma City bombings. So he did. Practically every time a TV viewer turned on CBS or CNN, Cronkite was holding court as the Great Eyewitness. “Somehow knowing that Walter was still around to put the terror acts in perspective,” Katie Couric, future anchor of the
CBS Evening News
, believed, “was cathartic.”

To the surprise of his family and friends Cronkite, riled up by 9/11, agreed to write a weekly column for King Features Syndicate, largely, it seems, to criticize President Bush. Ever since his Roseland speech in defense of liberalism, Cronkite told
The New York Times
, he had refused to be an “ideological eunuch.” Since he lived to read the morning papers, Cronkite figured, why not write for them? Operating out of UN Plaza, using his laptop’s search engine with great skill, he weighed in on the big foreign policy decisions facing the United States. What concerned Cronkite the most was that his two favorite papers—
The New York Times
and
The Washington Post
—were allowing the Bush administration to hype the unprovable notion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Cronkite had a deep and sickening feeling that the fourth estate, cowed by the intimidation tactics of the Bush White House, was failing spectacularly. To Cronkite, the whole class of American journalists, with a very few notable exceptions (namely the McClatchy chain and
The Nation
), had paved the way for Gulf War II by not asking the tough questions about the Bush administration’s rationale for the war. Why didn’t journalists explain the tension between the Shiites and Sunnis that was bound to keel into civil war?

Written with the assistance of Dale Minor, Cronkite’s weekly column was picked up by 153 U.S. newspapers from August 2003 to August 2004. At eighty-eight years old, he had a platform once again. Refusing to be intimidated by Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, who regularly took to the airwaves insulting antiwar liberal reporters like Ted Koppel, Cronkite promoted his secular, human rights–oriented, pro-NATO, pro-UN views of world affairs, with the conviction of Eleanor Roosevelt on the stump. Democrats lapped it up. His iconic status soared in deep blue precincts. “No longer was he trying to be Mr. Center,” Couric recalled. “He wanted to be a vital voice of dissent on war-related issues.”

The Cronkite of King Features Syndicate was a circumspect columnist who deftly wove fact, analysis, and morality. His liberal arguments—directed at President Bush in the spirit of bringing home the American soldiers from Iraq—were smart but homespun. “You might remember MAD—the Cold War policy of Mutually Assured Destruction in which the United States and the Soviet Union each planned to obliterate the other in the event of nuclear attack,” he wrote in his November 13, 2003, column. “Well, among themselves, the Democratic presidential candidates have triggered their own version of mutually assured destruction.” Cronkite thought John Kerry, John Edwards, Joe Lieberman, Dick Gephardt, Wesley Clark, and Howard Dean—all vying to be the Democratic nominee for president in 2004—were committing “political fratricide.” They needed to aim their collective fire at President Bush. The USA Patriot Act, Cronkite lamented, was stripping Americans of civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution while Democrats were engaged in silly intramural schoolyard fights. There were many primary sources and pieces of classified information being acquired that raised questions about the casus belli. If American journalists had simply done their due diligence, they could have thwarted the Bush administration’s hawkish moves vis-à-vis Iraq. It was the lack of any rigorous questioning that surprised and dispirited Cronkite. “Walter liked being in the ring,” Minor recalled. “After decades of trying to be objective, the columns meant he no longer had to abide by any strictures.”

Perhaps if the fourth estate had listened to Cronkite—their wise man—a trillion dollars and four thousand U.S. troops could have been saved. But they ignored him as the out-of-touch author of
Around America
. While Cronkite’s sustained hostility toward President Bush surprised even Socolow, Rooney, Wallace, and Safer—his four best friends in the media world—he pleased the progressive blogosphere to no end. In a column titled “Where Do We Go from Here?” (May 20, 2004), Cronkite suggested firing Bush on grounds of rank incompetence. Few other major U.S. media figures, except perhaps Michael Moore and Bill Maher, went after Bush with the impeachment vitriol of Cronkite. At Southern Illinois University that October, Cronkite, a gray-haired antiwar icon cheered as the ghost of John Reed, bluntly declared Bush’s Iraq War the “worst policy decision this nation has ever made.” The wire services transmitted Cronkite’s insult around the world. The Bush Doctrine of preemptive strike was to Cronkite a jingoistic atrocity destined to bankrupt America morally and fiscally. “Bush is setting an example for every nation in the world,” Cronkite carped. “If you don’t like what’s going on with your neighbor, it’s perfectly all right to go to war with them.”

Frank Rich of
The New York Times
praised Cronkite for trying to awaken America to the Bush administration’s distortions. “At the networks, Cronkite’s heirs were not even practicing journalism,” an incensed Rich wrote. “They invited administration propagandists to trumpet their tales of imminent mushroom clouds with impunity.”

If Cronkite thought one television broadcaster was brave during Mr. Bush’s war, it was Christiane Amanpour of CNN. Amanpour had grown up in Iran and had never watched Cronkite broadcast as a child. When she emigrated to the United States in 1981, Cronkite was already poised to retire the
CBS Evening News
anchor chair. Always with an eye toward the female foreign correspondents, Cronkite developed a schoolboy crush on Amanpour as her star rose. Every time she appeared on CNN from Baghdad, he turned the volume on the TV way up, adjusting his hearing aid, not wanting to miss a word. To Cronkite, Amanpour had the guts of Murrow for blowing a hole in the famous “aluminum tubes” defense for the Iraq War featured prominently in
The
New York Times
.