Cronkite's War

by Walter Cronkite, IV

  My grandmother, too, was extremely well dressed, always choosing, with help from her personal shopper at Bergdorf’s, classic styles. According to my mother, my grandmother loved Adolfo, and my grandfather gave her an Adolfo suit every year. She wore Ferragamo shoes, and her winter coats were lined with fur. She had beautiful red hair that stayed red until she was in her 90s, and she liked emerald green clothes because they complemented her green eyes. For the same reason, my grandfather always gave her jade jewelry. She wore the jade engagement ring he bought for her in Kansas City until the day she died, along with her platinum wedding ring. My grandfather wore his San Jacinto High School ring until the day he died. They were a glamorous couple who enjoyed living well in New York, but they never forgot where they came from. All who knew them well were aware that they remained in personality and values a down-home middle-American couple.

  Nowhere is that better reflected than in the humor that appears in so many of their wartime letters. My grandparents till the end of their lives were constantly ribbing each other and sharing jokes. My grandfather’s letters to her are full of puns, and he never lost his taste for the art. It’s a shame that Betsy’s wartime letters to my grandfather didn’t survive, because I suspect they would reveal a similar sense of humor. Every time someone told her, “Mrs. Cronkite, please walk this way,” she would respond tartly with the old vaudeville line, “If I could walk that way, I wouldn’t need talcum powder.” And when she walked into some public event, she’d say skeptically, “Ballroom? There’s hardly elbow room.”

  My grandfather was a favorite target of her jokes. He became hard of hearing in his old age, but instead of regarding his infirmity solemnly, my grandmother treated it as just another foible to laugh about. She would silently mouth words at him from across the dinner table, causing him to pop out his hearing aid to check the batteries—to the delight of the grandchildren in attendance. In his memoir, A Reporter’s Life, my grandfather wrote that he attributed the duration of their marriage to “Betsy’s extraordinarily keen sense of humor, which saw us over many bumps (mostly of my making), and her tolerance, even support, for the uncertain schedule and wanderings of a newsman.”

  Her humor was one of the things he loved about her. The letters show, however, that he suffered the most at Christmastime; they spent three Christmases apart between 1942 and the end of the war.

  He never forgot how deprived he felt during those lonely holidays. In later years, my grandfather was an enthusiastic and sentimental celebrator of Christmas. He always went all-out. The whole family would gather at my grandparents’ town house on East 84th Street on Christmas Eve to sing Christmas carols around the piano (“Good King Wenceslas” was a favorite), and then we would have a lavish dinner followed by stollen, the traditional German cake, in homage to my grandfather’s maternal German ancestry.

  On Christmas Day we would open the door to find the living room filled wall-to-wall with presents. My grandfather took a childlike delight in unwrapping presents, and he instituted a custom of elaborately wrapping a great many trinkets in order to have as many gifts to open as possible. My grandmother loved filling the stockings with tangerines and marzipan and other penny-shop gifts.

  Apart from what my grandfather’s wartime letters tell us about his personal life, they reveal a great deal about his professional life. Friends, family, and colleagues alike knew that he was an extremely competitive man who loved to win. The letters reveal many instances of this. Later on, he would proudly tell his grandkids stories of scooping the competition—Chet Huntley and David Brinkley at NBC in the 1960s, and Barbara Walters at ABC in the late 1970s. During summers on Martha’s Vineyard, he loved playing board games such as Monopoly, Risk, and Diplomacy.

  Unlike many celebrities, WC never grew tired of accepting awards, great or small. He was genuinely thrilled to be honored at the most obscure and humble institutions. His dining room in Martha’s Vineyard was furnished with the chairs he had been awarded along with his honorary doctorates.

  Competitive as my grandfather was, he didn’t care as much about the amount of money he was paid. The letters tell the story of how he was offered the chance to work for CBS Radio by Edward R. Murrow, at a higher salary, but turned it down to stay with the United Press because he liked his job. My grandfather later became well paid by CBS as a reporter and an anchorman, but it was only after he had retired that anchors’ salaries skyrocketed. Given a choice of negotiating terms, he would always ask for more time off (especially in the summer) rather than for more money. He even had a joking competition with Johnny Carson to see who could get more time off from his respective network. At the funeral of Dick Salant, president of CBS News, Mike Wallace told the story of going to ask him for a raise, and Salant saying, “So, you think you should get more money than Cronkite gets?” Wallace responded, “Oh, I guess not.” So in a way, he held down all the other broadcasters’ salaries.

  Like many people who grew up during the Depression, WC was thrifty, an inclination reinforced by the scarcity of World War II. I remember he would say, “Use it up and wear it out. Make it do or do without.” He would keep a car on the road until it fell apart. Whenever I rode in the backseat of one of his cars with my cousins, we would fight over who would get to sit next to the one window that still rolled down; the window on the other side was permanently stuck.

  My grandfather could make do with less because material goods didn’t matter to him. What drove him was the zeal to be the best reporter around. He had no illusions, however, about the difference between him and the heroic soldiers he was covering. During the war he took numerous risks as part of his job as a correspondent. But as he made clear to my grandmother, flying in bombers, landing in a glider, and coming under enemy fire were not adventures he enjoyed or intended to repeat if he could avoid it. WC told me wryly that the only time he was ever wounded in the war was during the liberation of Amsterdam: The joyful citizens were throwing tulips bound in wire at their liberators, and one bunch struck him in the cheek and drew blood.

  Still, in peacetime he continued to be a risktaker. In the early 1950s he began driving race cars. As his family grew and CBS needed to provide him with life insurance, my grandmother and his bosses at the television station finally convinced him to take up the less dangerous sport of sailing.

  Starting in the 1960s, he kept buying bigger and fancier cabin sailboats. The first three were all named Chipper, after my father, and his later sailboats were all called Wyntje, the name of the first woman living in New Amsterdam in the 17th century who married a Cronkite. (The Cronkites trace our ancestry back to the Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam.) Before the days of GPS, he could figure out his nautical position by charts and dead reckoning. He kept a cool head when sailing, even during several hair-raising storms. He was out sailing with his buddy Mike Ashford in October 1991 in the waters off Martha’s Vineyard when they ran into the famous “perfect storm.” They made it back through the violent waves to harbor safely, and I remember Ashford, who had been an Air Force bomber pilot, saying it was one of the most terrifying outings of his life.

  World War II made my grandfather the man he was. He was already smart, competitive, and driven, but the war made him tough, worldly, and thoughtful. He was catapulted from a promising but obscure wire service reporter in the Midwest to an internationally famous war correspondent. In the early days of the war his greatest ambition was merely an overseas assignment. By the war’s close he was discussing with my grandmother which European capital he would be assigned to as United Press bureau chief. When I read these letters between my grandparents, I am reminded of how young they were when they were separated. My grandfather was 25—only a year older than I am now—when he left for the war. People in that generation had to grow up fast, and he handled the chaotic wartime situation adeptly.

  I knew Walter and Betsy as grandparents who were always a joy to be around—smart, fast-paced, funny (at times outrageously hilarious). They were also both incredibly kind pe
ople who were still very much in love. In reading the letters I can hear their voices still, only refracted through the distance of time. Back then they were two young lovers torn apart by the greatest war the world has ever known.

  —WALTER CRONKITE IV

  Walter Cronkite, Jr., and grandsons Peter Cronkite and Walter Cronkite IV raising the flag on Martha’s Vineyard

  CHAPTER ONE

  A PRETTY

  PERSONAL MATTER

  Tomorrow is our fourth anniversary … The first two years seemed to go so quickly, and the last two have dragged so horribly. Two whole years out of our lives. It makes this war with Hitler a pretty personal matter.

  —Walter Cronkite to Betsy Cronkite, March 29, 1944

  On March 30, 1940, a 23-year-old reporter named Walter Leland Cronkite, Jr., married fellow journalist Mary Elizabeth “Betsy” Maxwell in Grace and Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Kansas City, Missouri, following a four-year courtship. Their marriage lasted happily for 65 years until her death in 2005. Shortly after the young couple celebrated their second anniversary, Walter Cronkite was credentialed as a war correspondent for the United Press wire service. They spent many weeks apart in the summer and fall of 1942, as Cronkite twice sailed on convoys across submarine-infested waters, first to Britain and then to North Africa. After a brief reunion in New York City in early December, Cronkite shipped out on an overseas assignment.

  This time the two were not reunited until 28 months later. Cronkite consoled himself in the meantime by writing Betsy long, detailed letters, sometimes five in a week, narrating his experiences as a war correspondent, his observations of life in wartime Europe, and his longing for her. For Walter and Betsy Cronkite, as for millions of other young men and women in those years, the war with Hitler was “a pretty personal matter,” as well as an event of world-historical importance.

  Betsy Cronkite carefully saved her husband’s letters, copying many to circulate among family and friends. More than a hundred of his letters from 1943 to 1945 survive and are archived in the Walter Cronkite Papers at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin.

  For the rest of his life, during which he served for 19 years as anchorman for CBS Evening News, Walter Cronkite reflected on his experiences reporting from Europe on the Second World War. In addition, by producing and narrating numerous television series and specials about the war, Cronkite helped shape, and in the process became thoroughly identified in the American mind with, historical memories of “the good war” and the “greatest generation.”

  Walter Cronkite, Jr., was born on November 4, 1916, in St. Joseph, Missouri, the son of Walter Leland Cronkite, a dentist, and Helen Fritsche Cronkite. The family moved to Kansas City in 1918, when Walter Cronkite, Sr., returned from his military service in World War I, and then to Houston in 1926. Walter Jr. graduated from San Jacinto High School in 1933, entering the University of Texas at Austin that fall as a journalism major. (His parents divorced soon afterward, and both remarried.)

  While a student at the University of Texas, Cronkite cut his teeth as a journalist by working on the campus newspaper, the Daily Texan, and taking part-time jobs with a number of local and state newspapers. His favorite and best-paying job was the three hours a day he put in as an assistant to the Houston Press’s political correspondent in Austin. As Cronkite wrote to his parents in an early 1935 letter, preserved in the archives at the University of Texas:

  The five dollars I collect from the Houston Press tomorrow for the past week’s work is going into a bank fund as is each week’s salary. If I can keep said funds in bank, then by the end of school I should have quite a sum accumulated. Possibly this new job with the Press will give me the influence to get some sort of world trip out of Mefo [Marcellus E. “Mefo” Foster, editor of the Houston Press from 1927 to 1937]. I would like to sell them on the idea of getting me a job on a boat, then giving me five dollars a week to write experiences as a young man sees the world.

  BORED BY HIS classes and eager to begin making his way in the world of professional journalism, Cronkite dropped out of the university following the spring semester of 1935 and went to work, first in the Austin bureau of the International News Service, and then in the Austin Scripps-Howard bureau, which provided coverage for the chain’s newspapers in the state. In the fall of 1935 he moved to Houston to take a full-time job with the Houston Press. Over the next few years he moved from job to job, sometimes working for newspapers, sometimes for radio stations, and including one stint in the public relations office of Braniff Airlines. While he was working as an announcer with radio station KCMO in Kansas City in 1936, he met Betsy Maxwell, his future bride. In 1937 he joined the wire service United Press as a reporter, and although he left for other positions, he returned in 1939. He spent the next ten years as a UP reporter, six of them as a foreign correspondent.

  As his 1935 letter to his parents suggests, Cronkite was a young man with big dreams. He would get his chance to see the world while still a young reporter, but not in the way he expected.

  The United Press assigned Cronkite to the night shift of its Kansas City bureau. He was in the UP office the night of September 1, 1939, when news arrived that Germany was attacking Poland. Within days, Britain and France declared war on Nazi Germany. The war settled into months of watchful waiting on both sides—a period referred to at the time as the “phony war.” But the war turned deadly in April 1940 when Hitler launched his blitzkrieg assault on western Europe, conquering Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France in short order. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain stepped down from office in disgrace in early May 1940. His successor, Winston Churchill, oversaw the evacuation of the British army from the French port at Dunkirk in the first days of June. The Nazis were now undisputed masters of Europe, from central Poland to the English Channel.

  In August the Luftwaffe launched a concentrated bombing assault on Britain, in preparation for an invasion across the English Channel. The stiff resistance of the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain, however, forced Hitler to postpone his invasion plans. Instead, the following summer the führer vastly increased the scope of the war by invading the Soviet Union.

  In the United States, isolationists and internationalists debated how to respond to the threat of Nazi aggression. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt cautiously but steadily increased U.S. aid to Britain (and after June 22, 1941, to the Soviet Union). The Lend-Lease program, enacted in March 1941, authorized shipment of American military supplies to Allied nations. Within months, American destroyers were accompanying merchant vessels carrying supplies to Britain. By the fall, the U.S. Navy was engaged in an undeclared shooting war with German U-boats. On December 7, 1941, on the other side of the globe, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, provoking an American declaration of war the following day. Germany and Italy declared war on the United States in solidarity with their Axis partner Japan, and the United States responded in kind.

  In the last months of peace, Cronkite and his wife had enrolled in the newly established Civilian Pilot Training Program, designed to create a pool of trained pilots. Betsy Cronkite got her pilot’s license; her husband, it turned out, was color-blind, and was thus disqualified. The disability also meant that Cronkite would not be drafted. But after Pearl Harbor he was eager to get as close to the war as he could, requesting an overseas assignment. His bosses at the United Press, recognizing his potential, transferred him from Kansas City to New York City in May 1942—a first step toward becoming a military correspondent. Shortly after his arrival, he wrote to his mother, Helen Cronkite, to say that he was putting in ten-hour days rewriting the cables that foreign correspondents sent in to the New York office. His own future remained uncertain:

  I still have absolutely no conception of what the United Press intends doing with me. Joe Alex Morris, the foreign news editor who had me brought into New York, admits that he is confused by the return of all our correspondents who had been interned in the Axi
s countries, and he adds that he may not know himself what to do with me for another couple of weeks. I’d still like to go abroad but I like this town so well that I wouldn’t mind too much being told to just stay here.

  SOMETIME IN THE next few months, Cronkite received the necessary credentials from the U.S. Navy to accompany a convoy across the North Atlantic to Britain. The Battle of the Atlantic was raging, as German U-boats sank a sickening number of Allied merchant and troop transport convoys and their naval escorts. It was vital to the Allied cause to secure their lines of supply and reinforcement from the New World to Britain. Yet Allied air patrols, crucial to the detection and destruction of marauding packs of U-boats, were unable to operate in mid-ocean, leaving an exposed gap in which the Germans concentrated their attacks. More than a thousand Allied merchant ships were lost in the North Atlantic alone in 1942. (Later on in the war, new long-range patrol planes, equipped with radar and other electronic detection devices, turned the tide of battle; the number of Allied ships sunk in the North Atlantic the following year was reduced to just over 300; in 1944, it was just over 100.)

  In the late summer of 1942 Cronkite got his first chance to realize his youthful dream of seeing the world as a reporter when he was assigned to accompany Task Force 38, a troop-transport convoy voyaging from New York to Greenock, Scotland. He traveled aboard the U.S.S. Arkansas, a 32-year veteran of the Navy’s battleship fleet. The convoy set sail from New York on August 6, 1942, and reached Greenock on August 17, returning to New York on September 4. Two days later, Cronkite wrote home to his mother to report on the adventure: