Cronkite's War

by Walter Cronkite, IV

  Also I told him you had done news and women’s continuity for KCMO for a year. I told him flatly that your experience on a news desk or in writing straight news had been meager, but he seemed personally sold on the idea of meeting you when he passed through Kansas City and then suggesting you to New York as an addition to the London staff. Although we didn’t have time to go into the matter at length before he shoved off, I imagine that his idea would be to accredit you to the Army as a correspondent so that the United Press could bring you over here, then use you as a sort of part-time, piece-work helper on the desk here. This foreign newspapering always seems to have been a sort of happy-go-lucky sort of thing, with wives pitching in to help husbands when the work got heavy, and I suppose it is somewhat in that sort of role that Virgil pictures you.

  I know you could do the job, and do it better than some are doing it now. The desk work here is mostly routine which takes anybody and everybody only a few weeks to absorb. As far as outside assignments go, you could whip most of these pretending to be writers here now.

  I don’t know how sincere Virgil was, or how likely is his selling the idea to New York. One difficulty may be that Virgil’s brainstorm comes on the day after a ticklish situation with Reynolds and Eleanor Packard. Reynolds is in Italy, Eleanor in Ankara, and they are trying by frantic cables all the way up to Hugh Baillie to get together on the same assignment.

  As I wrote regarding the Star idea I had, it seems there is not the slightest chance now of my going to any other theater but this, although I’ll probably cross the Channel whenever the invasion comes. But even so, that will mean frequent—perhaps as much as twice-monthly—returns to London. It also probably will presage a rapid reopening of Continental bureaus, which would mean our being permanently together again.

  I’m trying not to get excited about the plan, because I’m afraid it is too good to be true. But by now you have met Virgil, I hope—or at least will be meeting him within a couple of days or so. I’m waiting anxiously to hear from you, and for Virgil’s return here to get his side of the story.

  There isn’t much else that is news. No parties or anything lined up for Christmas and with that dread day only six days away I’m beginning to feel more lonesome every minute—if such is possible. I miss my two red-heads so much. I told you, didn’t I, that I got the other one of the pictures taken at the office? They are both wonderful. Everyone likes them and I’m now looking for twin folders for them. I worship you, honey. I love you, Walter

  CRONKITE MARKED HIS second lonely Christmas without his wife in his December 25, 1943, letter.

  V-MAIL Saturday, Christmas December 25, 1943

  My darlingest wife:

  This is a lonely day, brightened only by the stack of wonderful gifts you all sent me and, perhaps later, by a drink or two at Sam’s. The flat looks a little more Christmas-like this morning with the wrappings from my presents scattered over the floor. The only decoration Jim and I have are our Christmas cards displayed on the mantle. I got one from the Moorheads and one each from two bomber groups besides all those you sent me. I know you were just trying to make up for all those years when Betty kidded me about the few cards I got compared to the more popular members of the family.

  I had to go up to a bomber base yesterday and I got back about eight o’clock completely worn out. But since Jim had opened the one or two packages he received upon their arrival weeks ago and had none to open Christmas day, I thought it would be better if I opened mine in solitude while he worked last night. So after I got home I changed into comfortable clothes, got a fire going in the fireplace, piled all my packages (and there were dozens, honey) alongside the easy chair, and dug in. Everything was perfect—exactly what I needed, things impossible to get here, luxury items I’d never have bought for myself, and wonderful surprises. I think I got the biggest single kick out of the Mixture 79. It was so unexpected and so wanted. You were a darling to remember it as my favorite. Mixing it with the big box of Bond Street Judy sent me, I’ll have my favorite pipe smoke again … That Wolferman fruit cake was a godsend too. I opened it early this week to make the week a little more of a holiday one. It is delicious, darling, and I bet you didn’t have anything like it yourself. I wish you could be here to share it with me. Or even without a fruit cake, I wish you could be here. I miss you so much, my darling, and need you so …

  Walter

  CHAPTER FOUR

  INVASION JITTERS

  JANUARY-MAY 1944

  In a mid-May 1944 letter, Cronkite mocked himself for the state of nerves he had displayed a few nights before in a crowded London restaurant. Following his meal, he had “sauntered” up to the bar, where he found himself in casual conversation with an acquaintance. “I was standing there chatting … when Mrs. Gaston, wife of the owner, lit the gas heater in the fireplace. It went PUFF as gas heaters have a way of doing. I jumped a foot and threw my beer half way across the room. That amused everybody—U.S. war correspondent with invasion jitters.”

  Invasion jitters were common that spring. Millions of Americans, Britons, and captive peoples in Nazi-occupied Europe anxiously awaited the cross-channel invasion of France. “The whole world knew that the invasion was imminent,” Cronkite recalled in A Reporter’s Life. “The secret being guarded to the very death was exactly where and when.” Everyone also knew that D-Day would start the western Allies’ decisive phase of the struggle against the Nazi foe—a series of battles whose outcome would, without exaggeration, determine the fate of the world.

  In those last months before the invasion, Cronkite’s professional star continued to rise. His expertise in covering the air war in Europe was unrivaled, within the United Press and the broader community of war correspondents in London. He wrote the leads for most of the air-war stories, making his byline a regular feature on the front page of American newspapers. He had excelled as an administrator as well as a reporter, overseeing a stable of other UP reporters, including, at various times, Collie Small, Bill Disher, Phil Ault, Jim McGlincy, Sam Hales, Ned Roberts, and Bill Higginbotham. UP management had marked him for great things in the future, promising that after the invasion he would be given a position as bureau chief for the Low Countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg), as a stepping-stone to a top bureau chief assignment like London, Paris, or Berlin in a few years’ time.

  The new assignment would come none too soon, for Cronkite was heartily sick of the bombing beat. He was taking German lessons, anticipating scoops and exclusives once the ground fighting began in western Europe. No wonder he was jittery as the prime invasion season arrived in May 1944.

  The one constant in his life was the ache he felt for his wife. He wrote in a letter at the end of March 1944, on the eve of their fourth wedding anniversary: “Two whole years out of our lives. It makes this war with Hitler a pretty personal matter. I want to take out on him and all those responsible the months that we have missed and the hundreds of days that we never shall be able to regain.”

  In his January 1, 1944, letter to Betsy, Cronkite marked his second New Year without her.

  Wilmott Ragsdale, part of the crowd of correspondents with whom Cronkite saw in the New Year, reported for Time Life. Cronkite’s description of him as “a real life Hiram Holliday” is a reference to Paul Gallico’s 1939 novel, Adventures of Hiram Holliday, whose title character is a mild-mannered newspaper proofreader who travels around the world fighting criminals and Nazi spies. Ragsdale doesn’t seem to have battled any spies, but he had spent much of the 1930s seeing the world as a merchant seaman.

  Walter Cronkite, right, stands with the crew of the B-26 Martin Marauder U.S.O. On February 9, 1944, Cronkite flew with the crew to bomb a V-1 rocket site in France.

  Geoffrey Parson, mentioned in the second half of the letter, was chief editorialist of the New York Herald Tribune and had won the 1942 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished editorial writing. Cronkite also mentioned Joe Evans, Newsweek’s London bureau manager, and Ed Murray, Bob Richards, and Ned Ru
ssell of the ever expanding United Press London bureau, along with names by now familiar to Betsy, including Sam Hales, Ed Beattie, and Jim McGlincy.

  Dudley Ann Harmon and Joan Twelftrees are worth noting because they numbered among the rare female UP correspondents of the era. Harmon’s case is particularly interesting. Both of her parents were journalists, and after graduating from Smith College in 1934, she went to work for the Washington Post as a society columnist, one of the few regular newspaper positions open to women. In 1941 she traveled to North Africa as a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor and then to London, where she was hired by United Press. The United Press made her add her middle name, Ann, to her byline so that readers would know the author was a woman. As she wrote to her father in late July 1943, three days after starting to work for the UP, “I am not getting a corroded idea about treatment of women, but I think you’ll agree with me it is a well-known fact that newspapermen are prejudiced against them.” That generalization did not apply to Cronkite, whose own wife was a journalist.

  Apparently, Cronkite’s description the previous summer of his letters as a form of war “diary” had not pleased Betsy; he began his first letter of the New Year with an apology.

  January 1, 1944

  My darlingest wife:

  A new year, started in the typical fashion. I just wrote “1943” instead of the correct year on the line provided for same above this letter. I’m starting the daily letters to you again, honey, effective with this letter. They are letters to YOU and not diary pages as I crudely suggested last fall.

  I’m at home today and not in the least hung-over. I worked at the office yesterday until about eight-thirty getting out the lead on the day’s USAAF activities—a lead which had to be held for the communiqué and as a consequence didn’t move until this noon. I suppose the Eighth Air Force communiqué writers took the evening off. There could be no other excuse for the long delay, which just serves to botch every thing up on our desk and also cut the Eighth out of getting any play in the afternoon papers at home. From the office I went to Sandy’s, which was pretty dead. By the time I got there Ed Beattie and date and Drew Middleton (of NY Times) and wife were almost through eating, so I joined Wilmott Ragsdale (of Time, Inc.—the guy I told you was a real-life Hiram Holliday) and wife. We had some wonderful soup, shoulder of lamb, huge baked potato and cauliflower, topped off by celery and cheese.

  New Year’s Eve among the newspaper colony here is an excuse for playing at diplomatic intrigue. Each clique has its own party, and it is strictly declasse (for God’s sake, don’t look that up) for members of one group to let on to members of another that a party is being held. So when it came time for the Ragsdales to leave, there began quite a session at conversational parrying while we tried to determine where each other was going. Slowly I got the Ragsdales pinned down to the Marble Arch area. Then I closed in rapidly and, catching them off guard, determined that they were going to the Park West, a block of flats. Then came the showdown. I bowled them over with: “Not by any chance Sam Hales?” They were trapped. So we went out to seek a cab together, since that was where I was going. We failed in our quest, naturally, so wandered three blocks through drunken American soldiers to the Piccadilly Underground station.

  Sam’s was mostly a UP party—or, I should say, the Middlewest clique of the UP. Besides the Ragsdales and me and co-host Tom Wolf (at his most boring) were Bob Richards who before coming with the UP was with the Memphis Press-Scimitar, Dudley Ann Harmon who before joining the UP over here was with the Maritime Commission and originally stems from Milwaukee or some such hole, a Canadian army captain whose name I never caught, a girl named Joan from Exchange Telegraph (British news agency), Joan Twelftrees who works for UP and BUP [British United Press] filing to Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal and other neutrals. (More)

  Page Two January 1, 1944

  Later Ed Murray, who is from Minnesota somewhere and used to be in the Chicago bureau, joined the party. I was supposed to go also to a party at Geoffrey Parsons’ (NY Her-Trib) where Ed Beattie and Ned Russell of the UP, Joe Evans of Newsweek, and others were gathered. So I called Jim [McGlincy], who was working—and getting a bit tightish—to hold on to the hire car driver who nightly picks up our late workers. (Transportation on the calmest evening is impossible here. New Year’s Eve, although I only had that one run-in with the situation, I’m sure was worse than impossible.) First of all the driver was late getting to the office, and, second, when he and Jim got to Sam’s they were bosom buddies and the driver came right along to the flat to have a drink. An hour later the driver was the middle of the little conversational group. Only by promising the driver that Parsons’ party would be better than Sam’s could we get him to leave at all. By that time it was 3:30 a.m. and I was terribly sober with not the slightest desire to become a belated entry in the Parsons’ brawl. By this time everyone had left Sam’s and he invited me to use his normally empty twin bed, which I did.

  Summary: It was a dull but nice New Year’s Eve. Nothing hilarious, but that was the way I preferred it. It could have been gay if you had been here—or if we have been together anywhere. I was thinking of you at midnight and giving off with a silent little prayer that not too many months would go by before we were in each other’s arms again. I love you and hope you know …

  Incidentally, darling, Give my love to Judy, Walter

  THE JANUARY 3, 1944, letter contained Cronkite’s first reference to the “big push,” wartime slang for the forthcoming cross-channel invasion of Europe—the anticipation of which became a continuing theme in his letters that winter and spring.

  Over Christmas, Cronkite’s United Press colleague Bill Dickinson, on leave in the United States, met Betsy in Kansas City. He was scheduled to return to London when news arrived that UP correspondent Brydon Taves had been killed in a plane crash in New Guinea on December 27, 1943. Dickinson was reassigned to take Taves’s place as UP’s point man in the southwestern Pacific, where he wound up covering Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s liberation of the Philippines.

  Plans for Betsy to meet Virgil Pinkley, London bureau chief, when he briefly stopped by Kansas City fell through when neither recognized the other in the city’s train station. Cronkite rued the missed opportunity, because he was hoping that Pinkley would find a way to bring Betsy to London to work for the United Press.

  Monday, January 3, 1944

  My darlingest wife:

  I got your air mailer of December 23rd today—in the remarkable time of ten days. That is getting down to an almost bearable time span. I had been waiting anxiously to hear about your visit with Bill [Dickinson]. I’m so glad you had a good time and liked him. He is really a great guy … As far as we in the London bureau are concerned, we got some bad news last Friday. Bill is not coming back here but is going to Australia to take Brydon Taves’ job. Taves was our Southwestern Pacific manager. He was killed last week in a combat plane crash somewhere in New Guinea. We haven’t figured out yet whether the change means a promotion or something not so good for Bill. We know darned well it is tough in one way: He sat it out over here two years waiting for the big push, and now that it is about to come, he gets transferred to another “waiting” job. I’m particularly grieved because, first of all, Bill was a close friend of mine, and, second, I had been looking forward to getting a first-hand report about you—how you look and what you’re doing and if you still say marvelously witty things and still giggle hysterically. And I had planned on Bill’s corroborating for me the stories I’ve been telling of my beautiful wife.

  As happy as I am about your seeing Bill, I’m equally sorry you missed [Virgil] Pinkley. It was stupid of all of us—me, Pinkley and you—not to take into account the fact you two wouldn’t know each other. I should have been the one to think of that and to have done something about it over here, and right now I’m kicking myself in the pants. It must have been horrible for you, honey, standing around that dreary station and worrying your head off. (Maybe that is why he
didn’t recognize you? Are you sure you hadn’t lost your head?) …

  I’m glad you liked the little bracelet. I hope you have gotten by now a Christmas letter I sent airmail-special to be read Christmas day which explains partially the gifts.

  This is moving day, again, for Mac [Jim McGlincy] and me. We are moving upstairs into a larger flat in the same building. I haven’t even seen it yet. I have just gotten here from a busy but routine day and the porter is coming in a minute to help move. Love, always,

  IN RETROSPECT, CRONKITE and McGlincy seem to be an odd couple. The former tried to assemble around himself some measure of domestic normalcy while pining away for absent Betsy, while his wayward colleague made the most of the bachelor’s life in London. But somehow the relationship worked for both of them, as they shared close quarters in a succession of apartments for more than a year.

  Wednesday, January 5, 1944

  Darlingest:

  Well, Monday we started moving, and things have been in such a godawful mess that when I finally finish a full day’s stint of work I just haven’t had the energy to clear them up enough to get this portable out from under the debris. (I told you, didn’t I, that I held up the office for a Hermes, one of the tiny Swiss typewriters that operate with some degree of efficiency and weigh just half what my Royal and other portables do?) We have moved up to the sixth floor of this somewhat ramshackle late nineteenth century building. We now have two bedrooms and two sitting rooms and, of course, a bath. One of the sitting rooms should be a dining room but Jim [McGlincy] and I talked them into making a study of it, and it is not bad now. It has a fireplace (with electric heater), dormer windows (leaded) and paneled walls. They have put a huge, oaken, carved desk in it with small library table (suitable for our lonesome meals) to match and leather chairs and sofa with velvet cushions. It doesn’t make such a bad room. The other living room is typical rococo turn-of-the-century. Enough said. By this time next week I should start missing things, inasmuch as the staff moved my stuff up here and I have never yet had a hundred percent operation on that basis. Just one bit of luck have I had: One of the bedrooms is larger and a little nicer than the other and, in the flip with Jim, I won. That really is only fair since he had the larger bedroom on Deanery street. (By the way, did you see in one of the late November or early December issues of Time a mention of the Deanery? It said something like: “From the politely raffish Deanery to the Grosvenor Hotel, there was moaning at the bars last week as the United States Army cut officers’ per diems.”)