And That’s the Way It Was
And That’s the Way It Was by Walter Cronkite, published by Random House, Inc., New York
Long before he narrated our nation’s milestone events as the anchorman of the CBS Evening News, Walter Cronkite was a cub reporter in Houston. In these excerpts from his forthcoming memoir, A Reporter’s Life, the eighty-year-old recalls his early days in the newspaper business—and the dark days of segregation.
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He was a stickler for that kind of accuracy, but most editors were in those days. They understood a fundamental truth about newspapers and how the public perceived them. One mistake—“y” or “i,” “1412” or “1414”—standing alone didn’t make that much difference perhaps. But for each such mistake there was a given number of readers who recognized the error and whose trust in the paper was diminished thereby. And each of them probably told their friends, and the circle of doubt grew.
Regrettably, there isn’t that sort of accuracy today. There can’t be, and that may be a contributing factor to the distrust in which a portion of our population holds the press. There can’t be because competitive newspapering is dead. Only in a few and diminishing number of American cities are there newspapers going head-to-head, edition by edition. Elsewhere, no matter how devoted to accuracy the editors may be (and most of them are), they have no mechanism with which to monitor the accuracy of their reporters. The Roussels of today don’t have the luxury of spreading the competition out on their desks and checking item by item. Clearly the transitory broadcast competition is a useless resource for fine-tuning a printed report. The result is a generation of reporters who have escaped the discipline of accuracy and have left the rest of us with newspapers just a little less reliable, in this regard at least, than they used to be. There was a frightening day when Roussel called me to his desk and there was no Chronicle spread out in front of him. The matter concerned the previous day’s bank clearing, for which I was responsible.
We carried a little two-line item on the front page of each day’s final edition under a standard head “Bank Clearings.” The item simply said, “Today’s Houston bank clearings were”—for instance—“$3,726,359.27.”
“You had the bank clearings wrong yesterday,” the city editor said. The brows were hanging very low, the strong jaw was clenched.
“You said twenty-seven cents. It was seventeen—seventeen! What happened?”
A ten-cent mistake on a multimillion-dollar number? Surely he was kidding. His countenance warned me that I had that assumption wrong too. I returned to my desk in a blue funk of despondency—afraid that perhaps I was not going to make it in this profession I had chosen.
My mood was not alleviated by the older reporters’ comments:
“Kid, you’re in the soup now.”
“How you going to fix this one, kid?”
“Have you thought about getting out of town?”
The whole thing bore heavily on me as I dropped into the Press Lunch for the end-of-the-day beer. Paul Hochuli, clever writer and local columnist, greeted me.
“Where’s your bodyguard, kid?”
My frustration—and my innocence—burst forth.
“What’s this all about? A ten-cent error on a three-million-dollar number! What’s the big deal?”
Paul and the others around him looked at me in amazement—an amazement that quickly turned to pity.
“Kid, don’t you know why we print those bank clearings? Do you think anybody really cares about bank clearings? Kid, the numbers racket pays off on the last five numbers of that figure. They paid off yesterday on a bad number—and they don’t much like the idea that somebody might be tampering with their numbers.”
The next few weeks were a fear-filled time. I knew what it was like to be a marked man. If there had been a witness-protection program available, I would have applied. Every car that paused alongside my jalopy at a stoplight was filled with hoods casing me for the hit. Kid Cronkite was about to die at an even earlier age than Billy the Kid. . . .
The newspaper competition was hot, heavy, and healthy in Houston, and in our daily effort to beat each other, there were no holds barred. We resorted to all the dirty tricks ever devised in the game.
There was the day that screaming sirens brought Bill Collier, my Chronicle opposition, and me to the open window of the police press room. We watched as two ambulances approaching on different streets met at the corner in a horrendous collision. From the back of one, the gurney, with a patient aboard, flew out and went rolling at considerable speed halfway down the block before upending as it hit the curb. One of the ambulances smashed into a storefront. The other turned over. It was a dandy wreck.
As Collier and I grabbed the phones to our offices, he said, “Hey, don’t say you saw this thing. If you do, you’ll end up in court as a witness the rest of your life.”
The advice seemed well taken, and I took it. My story was strictly a routine third-person report. Collier’s first-person, eyewitness report was spread all over the Chronicle’s front page.
Newspaper competition led to a little practice called picture snatching. The idea was to get a picture of the victim by whatever wiles one could employ. Families were frequently reluctant to loan out photographs of loved ones at their time of bereavement, and perhaps having given a photograph to one paper, they had none to spare or they weren’t inclined to let their last picture out of the house.
In Houston this was a particular problem for us on the Press. The Chronicle was the old-line, conservative paper. We were more flamboyant newcomers and owned by a distant—and Northern—chain.
I was rather honored to get the picture-snatching assignment from time to time. I assumed that this was in recognition of my resourcefulness, but upon later reflection, I’m afraid that the attributes from which my city editor was profiting were youthful innocence, a certain touch of diplomatic blarney and a willingness to engage in larceny in the splendid cause of the people’s right to know.
I was remarkably successful, partly because I reached the home of the victim faster than the opposition man from the Chronicle. This was achieved through breakneck driving that would rival the kind seen in one of—any of—today’s television films.
My success was also achieved, usually, by convincing the grieving that a picture in the Press was just as prestigious as one in the Chronicle or the morning Post.
But sometimes other methods were called for, and it was an imaginative use of these that caused my downfall. A young lady had died in an automobile crash with a prominent married citizen whose wife she did not happen to be. Upon arrival at her modest cottage home in one of the city’s poorest sections, I found no one there. In keeping with the law-abiding nature of the times, the door was unlocked. Through the screen door I could see on the mantel a picture of a young woman. If I left it there, the man from the Chronicle would surely filch it. Defensive journalism was called for. So I filched it, and a delighted city desk made over the home edition to splash it on the front page.
There was just one little hitch. I had gone to the wrong address. The picture was of a next-door neighbor. Surprisingly, I was not arrested nor fired for the incident. I deserved both.
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