Cronkite (84 page)

When the insurgency against Americans in Iraq reached full murderous throttle, Cronkite had Adler set up a “date” for him with Amanpour. They greeted each other like old friends. “We met in the restaurant of the Mark Hotel in Manhattan,” Amanpour recalled. “He came alone, an elegant elderly dignified gentleman, walking slowly into the lobby. I think we both felt we knew each other, and there is a deep sense of camaraderie silently expressed between brothers- and sisters-in-arms. I myself had had a deep reverence for him and for everything he stood for. Anyway, after lots of chitchat over a couple of stiff whiskeys on the rocks, I asked him whether anyone today could do what he did back in Vietnam after Tet. And to my abiding disappointment, he gently told me, no, he didn’t think so, because unlike in his time, there are multitudinous voices and channels out there today.”

When it looked as if John Kerry had locked the Democratic nomination for U.S. president in the spring of 2004, Cronkite, instead of congratulating the Massachusetts senator, whacked him for ceding the “high ground” to conservatives and refusing to declare or even acknowledge his “liberal” principles. “If 1988 taught us anything, it is that a candidate who lacks the courage of his convictions cannot hope to convince the nation that he should be given its leadership,” Cronkite wrote Kerry. “So, Senator, some detailed explanations are in order if you hope to have any chance of defeating even a wounded George II in November. You cannot let the Bush league define you or the issues. You have to do that yourself. Take my advice and lay it all out, before it’s too late.”

For the 2004 election season, Cronkite watched Tom Brokaw of NBC News during his final season as anchor. The contrast between Brokaw’s classy comportment and Rather’s look-at-me arrogance told Cronkite who his
real
heir was. CBS News faced one of its darkest moments shortly after Labor Day: anchorman Rather claimed that President Bush had often been AWOL from duty when he was a lieutenant in the Texas Air National Guard from 1968 to 1973. Convinced that a document he’d obtained from Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian’s personal files was genuine, Rather took to the CBS airwaves on
60 Minutes Wednesday
(an offshoot of the original Sunday program) on September 8, 2004, and leveled the accusation at the president. Rather had broken Cronkite’s cardinal rule of always confirming information before reporting it.

During his twenty-three-year career as CBS News anchorman—four years longer than Cronkite’s stint—Rather, a gambler, often ran stories that were confirmed by only one solid source. His batting average of being right was high, but he was playing with fire. Eventually he had to get burned. The same razor-sharp investigative instincts that allowed Rather to help break the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse story betrayed him on the Texas Air National Guard story just as the election year stakes were jacked up sky-high. President Bush was running against Kerry in a dead-heat contest for the White House. Questions were raised over whether Kerry deserved the Silver Star, Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts he had been awarded for his Vietnam service in the U.S. Navy. Vietnam had emerged as part of the 2004 presidential election fisticuffs. At a Museum of Radio and Television conference about “breaking news” around this time, Cronkite warned that a single false on-air report could destroy a brilliant career; Rather had just stepped on a claymore mine in a career-killing way.

When forensic experts determined that Rather’s crucial
60 Minutes Wednesday
document could not be authenticated because of seemingly anachronistic typography, that it easily could have been cooked up by some forger out to damage Bush (or planted by GOP operatives to embarrass Rather), CBS News’ obdurate anchorman was forced to offer a humble, almost indignant, retraction. “This was an error made in good faith as we tried to carry on the CBS News tradition of asking tough questions and investigating reports,” Rather said, “but it was a mistake.” Subsequently, Rather retreated from his apology, claiming he was coerced into making it. He then claimed he had nothing to do with the report itself, that he was only a talking head. Further, he denied that any mistakes had been made at all.

Rather, blaming everyone but himself, reluctantly announced that he would step down from the anchor chair in early 2005, while remaining at CBS News. Unable to emulate Douglas Edwards and just retreat to the graveyard shift show
Up to the Minute
, Rather fought like a wildcat to protect his reputation. For forty-three years, he had represented the CBS Eye tradition of Murrow. Now he was being dismissed as a pariah. Everybody at CBS News knew Rather had essentially been demoted. Not just for Memogate:
CBS Evening News
was sagging far behind NBC’s
Nightly News
and ABC’s
World News Tonight
. The Big Three anchors were Brokaw, Jennings, and way down the line, Rather. The
60 Minutes
gang wanted Rather publicly flogged for Memogate. Hewitt had built
60 Minutes
into an American institution and now Rather, looking for glory, had given the entire news-gathering operation a blinding black eye. Cronkite, refusing any connection to CBS’s Judas, told a reporter that he didn’t watch Rather’s poorly produced show, just couldn’t stand it. “There’s nothing there,” he said, “but crime and sob sister material . . . tabloid stuff.”

A number of old-time CBS reporters—including Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, and Andy Rooney—recalled how jubilant Cronkite was that Rather’s career crashed so dramatically that fall. “Walter’s hip was bad,” Rooney explained. “He couldn’t move well. But that ol’ boy danced a jig when Dan went down.” Cronkite long knew that Rather’s Achilles heel was his tendency to jump the gun. What surprised him wasn’t Memogate but that Rather hadn’t botched a story sooner. What irritated Cronkite even more was how Rather was going after some chicken-shit story about Bush and the National Guard that had nothing to do with 2004. For once, Cronkite actually felt some sympathy for President Bush.

Rather was insistent that his departure from CBS had been illegal and filed a $70 million breach-of-contract lawsuit against CBS and its former parent company, Viacom. A New York state court of appeals dismissed Rather’s frivolous suit. Many historians think Rather’s
60 Minutes
blunder contributed significantly to President Bush’s reelection in an extremely close contest, with Bush winning 286 electoral votes to Kerry’s 251. Rather hadn’t just had an oops moment. He had self-immolated in front of seventy million
60 Minutes Wednesday
viewers. “It surprised quite a few people at CBS and elsewhere,” Cronkite said on CNN’s
American Morning
, “that they tolerated his being there for so long.”

Easing Rather out of the chair wasn’t atonement enough for Les Moonves. In early January, as Rather was starting to clear his desk, Moonves asked four CBS executives associated with Memogate—Mary Mapes, the story’s producer; Josh Howard, executive producer of
60 Minutes
Wednesday
; Howard’s top deputy, Mary Murphy; and CBS News’ senior vice president, Betsy West—to resign from the network. Moonves’s decision was based on an independent study chaired by former U.S. attorney general Dick Thornburgh claiming that Team Rather had “myopic zeal” in trying to embarrass George W. Bush. Moonves thought Rather’s use of “unsubstantiated documents” was the low ebb of CBS News history, a “black mark” against the reportorial house Cronkite, Murrow, and the
60 Minutes
gang had helped build. Determined to be the new Murrow, a crusader for social justice in the twenty-first century, Rather had inadvertently become the Soupy Sales of TV news gathering.

When Mike Wallace bumped into Rather in a CBS bathroom in the
60 Minutes
offices, a nasty verbal clash erupted between the men. Wallace called Rather, to his face, a shameless creep, a public disgrace, who instead of manning up for Memogate, allowed the fine talents of Mapes, Howard, Murphy, and West to suffer humiliation. Was that Rather’s idea of courage? “We know it as the battle of the bathroom,” longtime executive producer of
60 Minutes
Jeff Fager explained. “It’s never been reported, but it was bad.”

The day that Moonves undertook the dismissals, he asked that nobody disturb him in his office at Black Rock, then on the nineteenth floor, refusing even to take phone calls. Ensconced at his desk, a huge Peter Max painting of the CBS Eye behind him, listening to soft music, he was suddenly startled by a light rap on his door. Before he could get up, it cracked open. It was Walter Cronkite, white-haired and ruddy, his eyebrows raised like splayed brushes, fidgeting with his hearing aid and radiating a sympathetic warmth.

“Well, Les,” Cronkite said, having charmed his way past the pool of secretaries, “you’ve just done the hardest thing a man has to do in his life. You let good people go. . . . But you had to do it for journalism, for fairness, and for the CBS brand. I just want you to know you did the right thing. I’m proud of you.”

The suddenly unemployed Rather signed up as a producer with HDNet, a high-definition cable television station, and in October 2006 he began to host
Dan Rather Reports
.

For the next thirty or forty minutes, Cronkite and Moonves chatted about Memogate and what it meant to television history. The weight of the world had been lifted from Moonves’s shoulders. For nights, he had suffered from insomnia, tormented at having to fire a bevy of longtime CBS employees. But Cronkite’s generous gesture, completely unnecessary, much like when he took the Clintons on the
Wyntje
during the Lewinsky scandal or wrote Bob Simon after his Iraq hostage ordeal, choked Moonves up. The CEO of CBS had long treated Cronkite with deference. Now he saw him as family. “You’ll never know what that meant to me,” Moonves later recalled, eyes clouding. “Everything came into focus. I’m getting goose bumps just talking about it. I went home able to sleep, able to feel whole. Walter said it was okay.”

On March 15, 2005, the Cronkite family suffered a devastating blow when Betsy Cronkite, the auburn-haired beauty from Missouri, died of cancer just two weeks before her sixty-fifth wedding anniversary. Betsy had held her own in the New York–Edgartown social whirl without losing any sense of her own midwestern roots or taking on the pretensions of the nouveau riche. One had the impression that she and Walter would have been content living in a cold-water flat in Kansas City with an old Victrola playing Count Basie records for company. Betsy was so down-to-earth, she made forks drop at dinner parties with what Barbara Walters called her “wry and acidic” bluntness. Whenever anyone called Cronkite the Most Trusted Man in America, he would invariably offer the line, “They didn’t poll my wife.”

Now Betsy was no more. Feeling unprotected and lonely, he wondered whether he could persevere on his own. “Everything just crashed around him,” Cronkite’s daughter-in-law Deborah Rush recalled. “Betsy was the glue that held him together.” Hundreds of people, including celebrities, attended Betsy Cronkite’s memorial service at St. Bartholomew’s Church in Manhattan. Rev. C. Welton Gaddy of the Interfaith Alliance gave the principal eulogy. All the other speakers were dwarfed and overshadowed by Hillary Clinton—who wasn’t in the program but showed up unexpectedly. People gathered outside the church to offer Cronkite condolences and in the hope of catching a photographic glimpse of the first lady on their cell phones. To the surprise of Cronkite’s kids, Dan Rather attended the service. That afternoon, Cronkite chatted with Joanna Simon, the real estate broker who sold him his UN Plaza co-op. Weeks later, Simon invited Cronkite for a drink. Her husband, Gerald Walker, had died the previous year of a stroke while working on the novel
Witness
(unpublished). “Walter was bereft and lost,” Simon recalled. “His plan was to go to the British Virgin Islands, where
Wyntje
was moored for the winter months, with his kids for a week. And then he wanted to take me out on a date.”

Coincidentally, Bill Small’s wife died the same day as Betsy Cronkite. A few weeks after the funerals, Small received a telephone call from Walter. “Let’s go commiserate together over lunch,” he said. Upon arriving at a private midtown Manhattan club, the two old-timers were ushered into what was almost a private room to compare notes about losing their mates. Cronkite spoke of his deep grief and of sitting on his sofa at UN Plaza surrounded by a small theme park’s worth of memorabilia. “I just wander around the apartment completely lost,” he confided to Small. “All I do is puddle up and cry from morning to night.”

When the conversation turned to Dan Rather’s twenty-four-year career as CBS News anchorman, Cronkite stiffened, no longer convivial. He told Small horror stories about how Rather had purposely tried to humiliate him time and time again. He was glad that CBS had removed Rather from the chair. Cronkite relayed how the paranoid Rather had poisoned his well at CBS News by badmouthing him to other employees. “I don’t believe that’s true,” Small told Cronkite. “My long experience with Dan was that if you had a problem he was always willing to listen. In fact, he was practically solicitous about avoiding bad blood or feuds.”

“Should I call him?” Cronkite sheepishly asked. Small at first thought that was the right thing to do but then hesitated, understandably not wanting to play the middleman. “It’s not a bad idea,” he said, “but that has to be up to you.”

Cronkite didn’t call Rather for lunch. Instead, he remained hateful toward him till death. It can be said Rather was the only man whom Cronkite despised. “I could talk to Walter about anything,” CNN anchorman Aaron Brown, a regular lunch companion, recalled. “But not [about] Rather.” Both Cronkite and Rather had behaved badly toward each other. “Dan didn’t have many friends,” Jeff Fager recalled. “Walter had everybody on his side.”

Nearing the end of his life, Cronkite decided to mend fences with all of his past CBS News colleagues—except Dan Rather. The very last special Roger Mudd did at the History Channel, where he hosted a show, was an interview with Cronkite at the Vineyard. Whatever disagreements they’d had in the past were either ignored or left unspoken. It was obvious how much they cared for one another. When Cronkite had trouble hearing, Mudd helped his old boss by devising a special feed (with the help of an expert soundman) that would get crystal-clear audio. He “was overjoyed.” At the very end of the taping, with the cameras still rolling, he complimented Mudd for being a fine reporter, a gentleman, and a great American. Cronkite deeply regretted not having pushed for Mudd to replace him back in 1981.