The Secret World of Walter Cronkite
A day in the life of the most trusted man in America: a day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our time.
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“Dissolve the r.p.,” orders the director, and the yellow background and elaborate map follow Bob Schieffer into the limbo of used news.
“This one’s a minute twenty-six.”
Cronkite leans back in his chair and stretches his arms, tells a joke to one of the newsroom writers. In the control room, a call comes over the intercom from the newsroom. “We’re taking the last sentence off Portugal,” directs a voice. “Also the last sentence off Franco.” The director, assistant, and producer all flip quickly through their scripts and note the changes.
The phone rings. “That’ll be Washington,” predicts the producer. The scripts were cut because Fred Graham’s scheduled report from Washington concerning Supreme Court nominees had to be lengthened by twenty seconds. There was interesting late-afternoon footage, it seemed, of Betty Ford urging the appointment of a woman to the High Court.
Rarely does late afternoon footage make the Evening News. It takes several hours to process and edit film for broadcast. Only from a city like Washington, where CBS keeps virtually duplicate equipment linked to New York by permanent cable, can afternoon film be readied in time. Of the six to eight film reports aired nightly on the Evening News, almost a third are a day old or more — Tom Fenton’s desert visitation occurred two days ago — the time it takes to fly raw film to New York for processing and editing. Had his findings been more urgent (for example, instead of peace), Fenton’s report might have merited the price of satellite rental in order to be shown the same evening. The reason Jerusalem was simulated on a map instead of portrayed on film is that to have it otherwise would have cost $8000 in satellite fees, and the Evening News producers didn’t think the story was worth the difference.
The dual restrictions of time and budget are the principal reasons why network news often appears to be overly fascinated with the Eastern Seaboard, especially Washington. Another third of the Evening News’ film reports invariably originates from Washington, and even CBS’ own correspondents — excepting those in Washington, naturally — complain that this is far too much. But besides being in the eastern time zone, Washington’s permanent cable means that footage from there travels “free,” and those are both powerful advantages.
During a working day in the CBS newsroom, the critical point of decision is always whether to “order a line” — to lease a remote cable from AT&T — to bring in a story. Since the largest single expense in the Evening News’ weekly budget (excluding overhead) is the cost of these “remotes,” every producer with an eye on his job will think very cautiously before orodering a line to San Antonio, say, to retrieve film that might not prove useable.
“Ten seconds left,” calls the engineer.
“It’s yours,” answers the director.
Cronkite is watching his monitor as Tom Fenton signs off from the Spanish Sahara. Together with fifteen to twenty million other viewers, he is seeing it for the first time. Unless it’s his own, Cronkite only previews film when a producer or an editor asks him to, and that’s not a very frequent occurrence.
“. . . three, two. . .”
“Take it.”
A jovial man appears on the MASTER screen, apparently talking about gasoline. He is trying to sell it.
Though he likes to think of himself as simply a journalist — “just an old wire-service reporter,” allows Walter, “a pretty good desk-man” — there is clearly more to him than that. One does not command the attention and confidence of a nation with merely efficient desk-work. Without getting mystical about him (“I don’t believe in God,” went to the Jack Paar line, “but I do believe in Walter Cronkite”), I’d suggest that he comes closer to fitting Saint Augustine’s definition of God — as a borderless, ubiquitous Being whose center is everywhere at once — than he does any ordinary notions of a journalist.
For the better part of the last decade, whenever some pollster has attempted measuring the “trust” or “respect” we bestow on our national leaders, Walter has captured top honors with no exceptions and little trouble. He’s also been rated “the best-liked” figure on television, comfortably ahead of Johnny Carson and four times better-liked than Cher. He’s been called the “definitive centrist American,” the “epitome of the average guy,” our “national security blanket,” the new “father figure to a country in need of one,” and “everybody’s uncle.” A pretty good desk-man? — now, really.
Uncle Walter, then. It’s appropriate, I think, as those Bicentennial ironies loom ever larger, that Uncle Sam’s replacement should be a television figure; the line of succession reflects our altered society. And the truth is, it’s not a bad choice. Who else is there, after all, that we can all trust and respect, even admit a touch of affection for? Afer Viet Nam, Watergate, and the CIA, it sure isn’t Uncle Sam. As Walter puts it himself, while dismissing his “trust-index” championship with predictable self-effacement, “I think it’s just because the threshold of trust is so low these days” — which of course it is, but that’s precisely the point.
By now, Walter must have alighted in billions of living rooms to announce the way it was, and he’s never once been caught as a liar. Never in all those opportunities has he tried to put over a fast one. Why, the very concept of Walter’s lying is preposterous. His whole person seems to radiate sincerity, a kind of innate, Calvinist honesty that can’t be manufactured or affected, and certainly not perverted.
Which isn’t to say that he’s never been wrong — he has — but rather, and far more important, to observe that he’s never avoided the burden of our trust or cheapened the honor of our estimation. If we trust him as we do, it’s perhaps because we sense that he’s trying so hard to live up to it. His occasional lapses from character — those random tears and ecstatic cheers (“Hot-diggity-dog!” was his reaction to Apollo 11’s lunar lift-off) — have allowed us to gauge the depth of his façade, to judge his substance. For all his efforts at ponderous dignity, Walter is simply too transparent to prosper as a con man or a modern politician (if there’s any difference).
He’s also an absolute fanatic about “objectivity,” which he takes to mean telling it straight without preconceptions or personal emotions. Talking to Walter Cronkite about objectivity is akin to discussing salvation with Billy Graham. His breath gets short and his sentences faster, his cheeks heat up and his eyes turn even bluer. He makes it sound like the Holy Grail. No matter that it’s an unattainable ideal: the nature of objective reality has been the prime topic of Western philosophy for the last two centuries, and I can’t honestly say that Walter contributes much to the dialogue. He’s just so damned earnest about it that you have to believe him.
Integrity, in the long run, is more telling than veracity, and harder to come by.
“Roll it.”
“. . . go to Detroit,” Cronkite is saying, “for a report by . . .”
“Roll it!”
The picture on screen 9, of a test pattern surrounding the number 6, does not move.
“Roll, you bastard!”
The tape rolls.
“Well, crap, it got hung up.”
Cronkite is staring solemnly into the camera, having completed his scripted introduction. He sees that the camera’s tiny red cue-light reis still on, and, having scarcely missed a beat, he adds, “. . . on yet another kidnapping.” A four-word ad-lib.
“Hit it,” instructs the director, and the MASTER screen suddenly offers a kidnap story from Detroit.
The delay caused by the hung tape amounted to less than two seconds, easily covered by Cronkite’s brief ad-lib, and undoubtedly it went unnoticed by every viewer in the country. It sufficed, though, as a neat demonstration of smooth professionalism.
Due partly to that professionalism, The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite has been America’s top-rated news program ever since June 1967, when it finally surpassed NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report after a closely matched four-year ratings war in which NBC held the nominal edge. Cronkite, who was stung by NBC’s constant promotion of its earlier lead, almost never refers to his own current supremacy. “I think people make way too much of ratings,” he mumbles uncomfortably when asked about it.
Generally speaking, however, the people who make the most of those ratings are Cronkite’s employers at CBS, who never cease talking about them — and also, in a sense, Cronkite himself, who’s become the world’s highest-paid newsman (around $300,000 annually, with three months off) as a result of them. In October of last year, the Evening News was shown on approximately 200 stations to an estimated fifteen million people daily, drawing an average Nielsen rating of 13.4 (as compared to NBC’s 13.1 and 9.4 for ABC). Excluding Chet Huntley, who attracted far more than his half of the Huntley-Brinkley audience (a fact NBC belatedly discovered after his retirement), no one in television news has ever approached Cronkite in the ratings.
At the same time, however, the extent to which he’s responsible for his own ratings is open to question. For one thing, the CBS Evening News is carried on more stations, in more markets, than either of its competitors, which means it’s simply available to more viewers. There’s also the phenomenon of “audience-flow”: CBS, until this year dominant in daytime programming, has been able to deliver a far greater portion of already-tuned-in viewers at the outset of the news hour. It’s like following Mark Spitz on a relay team.
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