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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And last, but most important, there is CBS’ historical preeminence in broadcast journalism, dating back to Edward R. Murrow’s electrifying dispatches during the Battle of Britain (“This,” whispered Murrow, pausing awesomely as buildings crumpled and bombs rained, “is London”). It was Murrow, probably the greatest journalist of his generation, who recruited one of the finest reportorial stables ever assembled — including a United Press reporter named Cronkite, who’d been something of a war correspondent himself.
From the Forties, when TV news was born, CBS has nearly always spent more money, hired more (and better) people, given them freer (comparative) rein, and taken greater (relative) risks on its news operation than either of the other networks. CBS has gotten most of the credit for the major innovations in TV news (e.g., documentaries, live coverage, stand-up remotes, etc.), and all have been effected by one of two people: Murrow or Cronkite.
This is all on a very relative scale, of course, restricted as it is to a mere three networks. There are serious drawbacks to television news, particularly the scarcity of information it provides, the appalling lack of depth. The entire script of the Evening News, in one famous experiment, covered less than two-thirds of one page from the New York Times. “In too many cases we’re still a headline service,” admits Cronkite, characteristically candid. “We can’t possibly supply the wealth of detail the informed citizen needs to judge government performance. I think most of us will acknowledge that we’re not an adequate substitute for the daily newspaper. I wish people didn’t rely on us so heavily.”
Like most older TV newsman with a background in print journalism, Cronkite has a firm distaste for “show-biz gimmicks and nonsense”—those “happy-talk” formats with breezy, chatty, ever-grinning commentators who swap pale witticisms while they’re on the air. The Evening News, under his tutelage, is strictly a no-nonsense enterprise, devoted, for the most part, to presenting the unembellished news as simply and straightforwardly as 27 minutes will allow. “I think you should just tell it the way it is,” he says.
“And that’s the way it is,” says Cronkite.
“Cut it,” says the director.”
Visitors to the CBS Broadcast Center, a converted dairy known to its denizens as “the cowbarn,” are greeted not by a receptionist but by a brusque guard. They are required to sign in at the desk and wait for an employee, usually a hastily summoned secretary, to escort them into the maze of corridors to their destination; and then back again; or from office to office; wherever visitors go, it is always with an escort. Surveillance is continuous: even the streets outside are monitored by closed-circuit TV cameras.
Many of the corridors weave through the west wing of the second floor connecting the offices of the 800 employees of CBS News, a division of the CBS Broadcast Group, which is a subsidiary of CBS Inc. This largest entity, however, involving such diverse endeavors as Bob Dylan and Pentagon contracting, is headquartered across town in a monolith aptly referred to as “Black Rock.” One of the corridors at CBS News empties into the room housing the 35-member staff of the Evening News.
A small sign on the door discreetly proclaims THE WALTER CRONKITE NEWSROOM: a warren of cramped, fiberboard cubicles encircling a messy plateau of disarrayed, mismatched desks. From somewhere to the left comes the frantic rattle of Teletype machines; strewn over everything are the files, folders, books, newspapers, press releases, bureau reports, reams of yellow wire copy—all the daily flotsam that conspires to form “the news.” Except for the thick tangle of lights and wires descending from the ceiling, it could easily pass for the city room of a big metropolitan daily. There is even the harried ambience, the inspired, semi-organized, shirt-sleeved bustle of the city room. It does not feel at all like a television studio.
By midmorning, everyone has dutifully scrutinized the New York Times and the wire-service “daybooks”—voluminous calendars of scheduled events, press conferences, meetings, debates, and appearances. Drawing on these two sources for the majority of their suggestions, the producers and editors have made their assignment decisions and issued “blue sheets,” the assignment forms that, barring conflict with another CBS News department (the Morning News, say, or Documentaries), denote an exclusive for the Evening News.
Their judgments are based upon the weighing of two factors, the potential news value of the story and the ease with which it can be delivered—a factor encompassing time and budget questions, the availability of correspondents, the whereabouts of camera crews (the Evening News can utilize one of twenty-plus crews belonging to CBS News), and the personal predilections of the judgment-makers. The remainder of the day, then, will be devoted to executing the decisions of the morning.
Just before 1 p.m., Evening News executive producer Burton Benjamin and his two senior producers, Ron Bonn and John Lane, will go to lunch together. From their meeting will emerge the tentative lineup, the roster of stories most likely to appear during the show’s twenty-four minutes (the twenty-seven minutes of the Evening News minus three minutes for Eric Sevareid’s impenetrable colloquy). Actually, they are really dealing with between fifteen and eighteen minutes, since the rest is given over to Walter Cronkite’s summation of those lesser occurrences that couldn’t merit film reports.
The total time to be consumed by Cronkite is known at CBS as “the magic number.” The producers have fifteen or sixteen minutes left, and the entire worldwide apparatus of CBS News is concentrated every day on filling this time, on fighting for shares of it, on making it greater; holding it down is the weighty presence of Walter Cronkite, the putative managing editor of the CBS Evening News.
The managing editor’s office is tucked in a corner and partitioned with glass, the standard arrangement for managing editor’s offices. Efficiently small, it contains a cluttered desk, a couch too short to lie down on, two walls lined with nonfiction books, and an odd assortment of rocket models, spaceship models, race car models, sailboat pictures and minor personal mementos; all exactly as it should be. Cronkite is behind the desk holding a clip from the morning’s New York Times and conferring with a staff member. Seeing him through the glass reminds me that I still haven’t figured out how to launch my interview.
Those first questions often decide the tone and course of a whole interview, so they naturally form a crucial element in one’s “interview strategy”—a wishful design similar to the game plan of a football coach. I’d spent three weeks preparing for this one: studying previous interviews, sketching out topics, refining notes, plotting strategy; and now, eavesdropping from the doorway, I was at a dead loss for where to begin.
It wasn’t that I didn’t have questions; I had two weeks’ worth of questions and was only scheduled for half an hour. The problem was I didn’t have any openers. You can’t jump right in and ask a man if he’s really an air-hog. Not even Mike Wallace would do that, and Mike Wallace is the meanest interviewer since Cotton Mather. An interview is something you slip into gingerly, like a canoe: you don’t push off until everyone’s settled in.
Cronkite, for instance, is a master of the slowly launched interview—some of his interviews never seem to escape the shoreline. He’s frequently been criticized as a “marshmallow” interviewer, as too soft and easy-going; it’s the single widespread criticism there is of him. Sensitive to the charge, he gets quite testy if you ask him about it. “I don’t believe in these headline-hunting interviews,” he growls. “That’s just not my style.” Period.
His “style,” such as it is, is basically a mixture of old-fashioned wire-service and down-home Good Ole Boy: rambling, discursive, spontaneous, more like Johnny Carson than Mike Wallace. It’s genial and deceptive, and it can even be effective. By relaxing and drawing out his subjects, he sometimes gets them to reveal more of themselves though expression and nuance; they may occasionally, if sufficiently disarmed, say something really foolish. In the classic wire-service model, the reporter scribbles dozens of pages of notes and reviews them later to see if anything was useful. In the Cronkite television variation, he gets hours and hours of loquacious film, then edits it down to whatever was interesting.
Another consideration here is that Walter Cronkite simply isn’t nasty enough to be a very aggressive interviewer. During his lengthy, three-part Lyndon Johnson interview, billed as “a memoir,” Johnson still (this was after LBJ’s retirement) resolutely maintained that landing the Marines at Da Nang was one of the great moments of Christendom, and it was obvious that Cronkite was frankly astonished. He gently pushed the subject a little harder, without success, but he just didn’t have it in him to get tough, to tell Johnson flat-out that he was misstating the facts, as indeed he was. What Cronkite did instead was insert film clips into the broadcast interview that presented the rebuttal that he couldn’t bring himself to make in person.
And besides that, talking to Mike Wallace probably isn’t as pleasant as talking to Walter Cronkite. Which, by the way, I had finally begun to do. I’d produced an opening question that seemed relaxed, sensible, certain to get us off on the right track.
“Have you ever been to Beirut?” I ask him.
The question did not seem as ridiculous at time as it does looking back on it.
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