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.
(Page 5 of 5)
“Ohhh,” smiles Cronkite, “I don’t know, it’s a possibility. I hope so.” He slides off the question with dexterous ambivalence, but graciously, and I don’t press it. But I do know he returns to the campus for occasional visits or business. Once he wandered through the University area looking for his old Chi Phi fraternity house. In 1970 he attended a pep rally before the Arkansas game and called hogs to help bait the Razorbacks. A man doesn’t get up and call hogs in front of 30,000 people unless he owns considerable affection for his alma mater.
Or else he’s just naturally mischievous and impulsive, which is Cronkite too. He’s forever turning up at policemen’s balls, neighborhood saloons, senior proms, walking his dime-store turtle around East 84th Street. An inveterate dancer, with a reputation as the fastest floor-man since Caesar Romero, he’s been known to entertain friends with a makeshift striptease, and his wife Betsy once referred to him as a “thwarted cruise director.” It’s no wonder that he seems so comfortable in your living room; he is comfortable in your living room.
Indeed, if Cronkite holds by any ideology at all, it is that of an optimist and a romantic. He confesses to have liked almost every politician he’s ever met, hates to get presents that are passably practical, and once described himself as a “frustrated song-and-dance man.” Or, another time: “I’d like nothing better than to be an Irish bar drunk, making friends with everybody.”
He took up sports car racing in the Fifties when he found himself one day, quite by accident, in a used-car lot with a check in his pocket for a lecture fee. He left driving an Austin Healey, later traded up to a fully bored Lancia, and pursued serious racing until he went off a 110-foot cliff in a road rally though the Great Smoky Mountains.
That’s when he took up sailing, shortly after finding himself, quite by accident again, at the New York Boat Show with another check in his pocket. “I’ll take that one,” he announced to a startled salesman, and he became a sailor. A fanatical sailor. He devours sea novels and windjammer sagas, loves sailboat lore, yacht clubs, and naval history; and his ultimate ambition is to circumnavigate the globe in a three-masted schooner. “Boy,” he sighs dreamily, “wouldn’t that be great. Just putting in wherever you felt like, staying as long as you wanted. I’d love to do it.”
Meanwhile, I press on with the interview. Not dismayed by a mere fielding error on my first question, I toss out the meanest question in my notebook (Mike Wallace would’ve been pleased): “Why do some people accuse you of being an air-hog?”
He scowls somewhat, looks into his lap. “I don’t think so,” he says slowly. “When we made the jump to a half-hour, I was the first one to allow stand-ups from the field correspondents. Hell, I encouraged using them. I didn’t see why I should sit up here and talk about something when we had people there on the spot who could see it..”
To an extent, the charge of air-hogging is a symptom of intramural jealousy in an organization where everyone wants to get on the air. It’s the whole point of television, after all. Within CBS News though, there is as much hostility toward the Washington bureau as toward Cronkite when it comes to hogging the Evening News.
The complaints about Cronkite are mainly promoted by special events coverage, such as political conventions, when correspondents have been known to snipe at CBS’ “Walter-to-Walter” format. And there is some truth to the complaint—but also rationale.
“The time he is best,” said a former CBS producer, “is when he’s been on camera so long he’s too tired to be anything except himself.” Even more than as an anchorman, Cronkite’s reputation and career have been formed in the garrulous course of his marathon broadcasts—some as long as seventeen consecutive hours, the television record he set during the 1968 election returns.
“He has the ability,” said one TV critic, “to extemporize smoothly and almost endlessly.” It is here, in the realm of live coverage—conventions, space missions, elections, A-bomb tests, national emergencies, whatever and wherever—that Cronkite has truly made his mark on broadcast journalism. Through all the manner of crisis or occasion, he has held his ground for hours on end, providing, depending on the situation, either cogent and reasoned reporting or epic-length ad-libs. As was pointed out earlier, he loves to talk.
“The more I’m on, the cooler I become,” he says. “The only time I feel nervous is when I’m unprepared, when I haven’t done enough research.” Which, judging from the record, is seldom. Cronkite is a prodigious researcher, a man who prepared for his spaceflight coverage by reading every manual available, tasting weightlessness in parabolic flight, hurtling though a centrifuge, visiting every tracking station from Florida to Ascension Island.
On the subject of marathons, I was suddenly aware that my interview had dragged on far longer than it was supposed to. I also noticed a small line had formed outside of the managing editor’s office: staff member seeking advice, assistance, or simply information. Cronkite’s role in the decision-making process for the Evening News is fairly sporadic, mostly by his own choice and depending on his interest in specific stories, but his stature is such that newly every decision is checked for his approval.
Endeavoring to slip in a last query, I flip quickly though my four pages of unasked questions and randomly select one: “Is it true,” I blurt, “that you once drank beer with Clyde Barrow?”
His grin dissolves as he stares back at me. “How did you know about that?” he demands.
“Uhmm,” I say, not remembering. Oh my God, I think to myself, he’s been a closet bank robber all these years, with Bonnie and Clyde!
“That’s one of the stories I’ve been saving for my own book,” he alibies, “I didn’t think anybody knew about it.” He sinks back into his chair and reestablishes his feet on the desk.
His book, eh. Well, that’s plausible, I think. I tell him I can’t remember where I came across the tip.
“I’ve only got four or five stories nobody knows about,” he says, looking a little hurt. “I’m not going to have any left for my book.”
Naturally enough, I decided to believe him. Reflex action, probably. But now I’m looking hurt for not getting to hear the story, and he’s looking wistfully into his hand. He smiles a little, thinking about his adventure.
“I’ll tell you what,” he says, grinning again. He wants to tell the story almost as much as I want to hear it. “I’ll tell you the story if you promise you won’t use it.”
“Oh sure,” I say, totally without scruples.
He looks me directly in the eye. “Are you sure you promise?”
We’re like twelve-year-olds.
“Oh, I promise, I promise.” As I say, no scruples at all.
So then he gazes off toward the ceiling and tells me about drinking beer with Clyde Barrow. It’s a good story, and, like most of his stories, he relishes telling it.
I wish I could pass it on, but I’m sure you understand the problem.. I mean, when the officially certified most trusted man alive trusts you, what else can you do?
The Other Texas Anchormen
In Sally Quinn’s book We’re Gonna Make You A Star, which is about CBS’ foolish and foredoomed effort to do just that with her, she isn’t very nice to most of her erstwhile colleagues. The one she is nicest to of all, however, is Hughes Rudd, who was briefly her co-host on The CBS Morning News, a program launched with great fanfare about two and a half years ago to compete against NBC’s Today Show.
The Today Show’s ratings, of course, have been untouchable ever since Dave Garroway inaugurated the show in 1951. In an earlier challenge, in 1954, CBS went up against Garroway with their hottest new star, the man who won national acclaim for his coverage of the 1952 political conventions (the first to be broadcast live), Walter Cronkite. But Cronkite didn’t like being a “personality” instead of a reporter, nor did he like the gag-writer they hired for him, so he was yanked in a few short months and replaced with Jack Parr.
Sally Quinn lasted about as long as Cronkite. She did, however, get a very funny, very catty book out of experience, in which she portrays Hughes Rudd as a warm, wise, sympathetic man and the closest thing to a hero in the book. During some short-lived discussions aimed at making the book into a movie, the one point that was unanimously agreed upon was that Walter Matthau should play Rudd. Walter Matthau, you should know, would be perfect as Hughes Rudd.
Born and raised in Waco, Rudd was a United Press reporter until Cronkite recruited him for CBS in 1959. He opened their Southern bureau for them, was posted to Moscow, Europe, and Viet Nam, and somewhere found time to publish a collection of first-rate stories and essays, My Escape from the CIA and Other Improbable Adventures.
“Back then you were really on your own,” he says, recalling his early days at CBS. “You told New York what you were gonna do. You didn’t have to go running all over hell because somebody in New York got up in the morning with a bright idea. You didn’t have any of this nonsense with ‘bureau managers.’ You just had a reporter—in this racket they call ‘em ‘correspondents’—and a camera crew. It was a lot simpler then and it was at least as good; maybe better.”
His cynicism is coated with a wry wit and embroidered with fascinating anecdotes, and thus emerges as a kind of earthy, affable satisfaction. He is a very mellow man. He is also a fabulous raconteur, as good as Cronkite with a little more salt, and his ad-libbing talents have begun to pay dividends at The Morning News. When they debuted in 1973, NBC held a four-to-one ratings edge which has steadily narrowed to 29 “shares” for Today against 25 for The Morning News.
Two other Texans also hold down CBS anchor slots. Bob Schieffer (Fort Worth) as recently been appointed anchorman on the Sunday night CBS news; Richard Nixon’s old adversary Dan Rather (Wharton) is co-anchorman on 60 Minutes and also presides over special CBS Reports programs like the recent two-part series on the Kennedy assassination.
My Library
