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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The Times clip he’d been holding concerned the fighting in Lebanon, and Cronkite was instructing the staff member that he wanted a map of Beirut drawn up to accompany his report. He went on and on about the various details to be included in the map. “I don’t know where the Chiyah section is, but obviously it’s a Moslem section,” he had said. “So that should be in there. And the American University. I don’t care if this Kantari Street is on it or not, but I just want to know where it is...”
So we talked about Beirut for the first half of my scheduled 30 minutes (he’d been there twice).
The thing you need to know, in case you’re ever called upon to interview Walter Cronkite (nobody ever told me), is this: he loves to talk. The man is a born talker, an old-school yarn spinner who’ll put his feet up on the desk and turn loose of some marvelous stories. He had a couple of fascinating Beirut yarns.
As for me, well, I couldn’t get over the fact that Walter Cronkite didn’t have a screen around him. I didn’t take a note.
Outside of the missing screen, he doesn’t look a lot different in three dimensions that he does in two. A little heavier, perhaps (there’s an extra chin or so that you don’t notice on television), and his nose seemed awfully red, but I’m told it was just because he had a cold that day. He was wearing a monogrammed Givenchy shirt, a fairly boisterous tie (one of his weaknesses) and the onyx ring his parents gave him for graduation from Houston’s San Jacinto High School in 1933.
After finishing off Beirut, we started discussing his penchant for visual aids, like maps and charts, which is one of the things that sets Cronkite apart as a TV newsman. Conventional television wisdom decrees that such static devices are sure death, guaranteed to drive viewers to rabid fits of channel-spinning. They are the antithesis of show biz. Cronkite, however, employs them at the drop of a hat and with amazing success. One of his landmark newscasts was a special report on the first Russian Wheat Deal, which saw him go to a blackboard and start drawing diagrams like a small-town algebra teacher. For twenty minutes he lectured until the whole convoluted grain hustle had been clarified, or at least illustrated, right there on his silly blackboard. It was terrible television and first-class journalism, and nobody but Cronkite could ever have pulled it off.
“Maybe I’m just a slow learner or something,” he says, referring to his charts, “but I like to have things laid out as plainly and simply as possible. I’m not sure people absorb rapid, newspaperese style, not on something as complicated as the Wheat Deal. I don’t think we do enough of it.”
He had the same simplifying approach to his prose. More than any other TV newsman’s, Cronkite’s scripts have the ring of the wire-service dispatch, the spare, unadorned message of “the facts.” He takes pride in their leanness (“I’m one of the best condensers in the business”), and he’s careful to tend to them himself. Oddly enough for a man who’s spent 25 years on television, he will introduce film that he’s never seen beforehand, but he won’t handle a sentence that he hasn’t tooled himself. In his heart he’s still a word-man.
Beginning in the afternoon, as stories are booked into the lineup and “the facts” made available, Cronkite will confer with the Evening News’ four writers to develop a script. It will constitute his major work of the day.
In theory, Cronkite is merely one of the 35 underlings laboring for executive producer Benjamin (who in turn labors for news director Bill Small, who in turn is responsible to an endless chain of bureaucrats leading into the corporate maze of Black Rock); but in practice Cronkite is the ultimate power in the Evenings News, the man known throughout the building and without noticeable affection as “The Star.” Regardless of titular corporate authority, his is the decisive judgment in shaping the Evening News.
On a continuing daily basis, though, he rarely exercises his prerogatives, except in fashioning his own six- or seven-minute scripts. “I know I’m fast and accurate,” he says of scripting skills. “I’m kind of egotistical about my news-editing ability.”
From here, the interview drifted naturally to the larger topic of journalism. I’d planned on avoiding this, actually, both because its hopelessly predictable and because every other Cronkite interview I’d come across dwelt painfully overlong on it, and I doubted he would tell me anything he hadn’t said elsewhere, many times over. But as I say, we drifted…
“I think the excitement of being in on everything,” he muses, “is what attracted me to it. When I was a kid reporter in Houston I used to think life just wasn’t worth living if I couldn’t be in on the action.”
There’s no mistaking his commitment. You can criticize Cronkite as a journalist—his premise, his performance, those marshmallow interviews—but you cannot argue his devotion to journalism. He’s a man who decided at age twelve that he wanted to be a reporter, and for close to 50 years now he’s faithfully marched to that curious bystander’s drum. During that time he’s amassed enormous potential power, yet he’s spent all his life trying to deserve it rather than use it.
With few exceptions, in fact, the only times he’s actively sought to influence public policy or opinion have been in behalf of his profession. Whenever the Fourth Estate has come under attack, Cronkite is usually among the first to the barricades. He’s fought with four presidents, including Eisenhower—the one he was closest to—over various incursions upon freedoms of the press; and when John Mitchell’s Justice Department began willy-nilly seeking reporters to subpoena in 1969, Cronkite privately declared his intention to go to jail before answering any—a thought which no doubt mortified John Mitchell almost as much as it did CBS.
“It’s ultimately the most important freedom we’ve got,” he observes, waxing pedantic. “Press freedom is what makes our other freedoms possible. We need to be jealous of it, we need to be vigilant.” He enjoys talking about journalism: those soft, empathetic eyes brighten several watts as he warms to the subject. He’s said it all endless times before, probably, but still he’s interested, into it, his rhetoric freights real emotion. “I don’t think there’s ever been a president, Republican or Democrat, who thought he was being covered the way he should be. I’d start worrying about our coverage if they like everything we said about them. An adversary relationship is the only kind we can have with government.”
Fred Friendly, one of the pioneers of television documentaries and a former president of CBS News, once remarked that “Walter’s a success because he cares so deeply for the news,” an observation Cronkite readily accepts.
“Once you begin broadcasting a story the old adrenaline starts flowing,” observes Cronkite. “I just love working with the news, the way farmers love working in the black dirt of Iowa, for example.” When Cronkite refers to “the news,” he means “hard news,” the daily contribution to the historical record. Cronkite’s enthusiasm for (or fealty to) hard, objective facts has caused him to reject the numerous urging of CBS that he enter the “pontificating racket,” as one newsman referred to the business of interpreting the news.
“I think I could blast the hell out of an issue,” says Cronkite, “and it wouldn’t affect my objectivity in presenting both sides to it; but I think it would hurt my credibility with the public. They wouldn’t understand that I could still be unbiased and objective.”
There is something troublesome about this view of news, this total commitment to objectivity. Taken to its extreme, objectivity is little different from impassivity; it becomes nothing more than indiscriminate transmission of facts without regard to the original context that made them seem important in the first place.
The news comes to be viewed as just so much unrelated data rendered similar and significant simply by being chosen to appear on the News. The result is that the journalist who weds himself to total objectivity is easy prey for managed news like the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, the source of presidential power to intervene at will in Viet Nam. It became one of the most significant news stories of our time, despite the fact that it was cut from whole cloth in the Pentagon and never really happened.
Still, Cronkite insists on a strict concept of the reporter’s role. “Our responsibility is just to report the facts and let the public weigh their importance,” he says.
It occurs to me, somewhere along in here that I have overstayed my allotted 30 minutes. Nobody seemed to mind, though, so we talked about Houston for a while, about the abortive deal he was involved in, albeit peripherally, to buy the Houston Chronicle in the late Sixties (“Could be a great newspaper,” he says, “shame it’s not”). He recalled the days when he and Stuart Long, now the dean of the Austin press corps, were part-time reporters in the Texas Legislature (“We were the two most eager guys around the Capitol, there was nobody who could keep up with us”), or covering Lyndon Johnson’s maiden congressional race in 1937, when Johnson was the farthest left of a seven-man field (“That fact always colored my evaluation of him; years later when a lot of people were calling him a Southern conservative, I remembered that race”).
I began to realize, about this point that my interview has degenerated into a conversation and me into a marshmallow. It’s unavoidable. Cronkite emits this infectious, exuberant sort of friendliness that tends to compel conversation. Fascinating strategy, I say to myself, and revolve to ask at least some of my original questions.
“Is there any truth to the rumor that you might retire in Austin and teach journalism at the University of Texas?”
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