Cronkite's War

by Walter Cronkite, IV

  ON JULY 19, 1945, Betsy Cronkite wrote to her mother-in-law, Helen Cronkite, to bring her up-to-date on plans to join her husband in Europe:

  … I haven’t done anything interesting to tell you about, except study French and try to break in a new gal at my office, which is harder than you think. I got a cablegram from Walter last night, in cablese, quote:

  Letter from Betsy Cronkite to her mother-in-law, Helen Cronkite, describing plans to join her husband in Europe

  “Although been traveling wherefore unreceived recent letters just returned London personally handle with British visa. Stop. Now seems likely issuable within month. Stop. Peck says cably can furnish transportation within week after visa issued. Stop. Will mean getting you as far England wherafter utmost get you rest way. Stop. Keep fingers crossed. Stop.”

  So it sounds as if I’ll be en route ere long … Seein’ ya!

  Love, Betsy

  CRONKITE’S DISPATCHES DWINDLED over the summer of 1945, as he took on greater managerial responsibility as chief of the United Press’s Brussels bureau. He was in the Brussels office on August 6, 1945, when he learned of the bombing of Hiroshima. Japan’s surrender followed soon after, ending World War II. Probably around mid-September, Betsy joined him in Europe, a story whose final episodes can be patched together from this letter to his mother and grandparents, sent from Brussels in December 1945.

  Brussels

  December 14, 1945

  Dearest Mom and Grandfolks:

  Well, at last, a letter from your wandering son and Grandson. It has been a long time since I’ve written but that seems to be the curse of the Cronkites. Believe me, the lack of letters is no inclination that I am not thinking of you most of the time, but rather that there just seems to be so few hours in the day and so few minutes in the hours.

  Lately I have been working from about eight in the morning until ten and ten-thirty at night. I have at last obtained another American to work in the Brussels office also, but he has had no newspaper experience and for awhile at least he takes more of my time than he pays back.

  Business has just been so-so. I don’t get to do much reporting or writing these days because I have to spend most of my time trying to sell the United Press service to the Belgian newspapers, and supervise similar operations in the Netherlands. Thank goodness most of our pre-war staff returned to the United Press in Amsterdam and I don’t have to wet-nurse them along as I do the Brussels staff.

  Because I prefer to report and write rather than sell, I am hoping for a new assignment soon after the first of the year. I don’t know what it will be yet. I would like to go to Moscow for six months or so but there doesn’t seem to be very much chance of that. [Virgil] Pinkley, the vice president for Europe, has mentioned, however, that he might send me to Moscow for a few months and then to Vienna to handle the Balkan countries. But Pinkley talks a lot of plans that never materialize so I’m not counting too many unhatched chickens. I hope that if I do go to those countries Betsy will be able to go along but there is no certainty that she would be permitted to. The Russians are very tough about issuing visas, and Vienna still is technically a military zone—which means only accredited war correspondents are permitted there.

  There is also some very, very slim chance that I might be returning to the States. The New York office has asked a couple of times—informally—if I wouldn’t like to come back to the cable desk there. Frankly I don’t know whether I would or not. There is a lot to be said for living in New York, but then there is still a lot to see and a very interesting story to write from over here …

  Of course I was terribly happy to have Betsy come over. As you undoubtedly have heard from her letters, I met her on the ship at Plymouth, England. We had about ten days in London during which I had a lot of fun introducing her to all my war-time friends—at least those of them who are still around.

  We went on over to Paris on the boat-train, landing at the war-famous port of Dieppe. We were only in Paris a few hours between trains, but we later were to return there for nearly a week’s stay, including my birthday …

  It is funny how Betsy and I are almost exactly retracing my steps of one year ago. Her first view of Paris was on September 30 (as I remember) which was exactly one year after my first view of the city. Her next trip to Paris, when she was able to stay longer, was on November 1, which was just one year after my second trip. Now she will be going to Luxembourg almost exactly one year after I first went there …

  With all my love, forever,

  Walter

  Walter and Betsy Cronkite in Brussels, Belgium, December 1945

  EPILOGUE

  MEMORIES OF

  THE WAR, 1946–2009

  In August 1963, CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite and former President Dwight D. Eisenhower spent six days together in England and France filming a CBS News special report to mark the next year’s 20th anniversary of the D-Day landings. The 90-minute special, titled D-Day Plus 20 Years, aired on CBS on the evening of June 6, 1964, and attracted millions of viewers. Time magazine’s response was typical of the rave reviews that greeted the program’s broadcast:

  Never before in history has such an immediate and permanent record been made of a general returning to the field of a great battle and describing it in his own words, while film archives supplied scenes of the actual warfare. It was something to see.

  The CBS special report included segments with Cronkite and Eisenhower revisiting famous scenes associated with D-Day, including Portsmouth (the English port from which the invasion flotilla embarked) and the Normandy beaches where the landings took place. The two men, both native Midwesterners, were obviously at ease in each other’s company. Cronkite respectfully addressed the former Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe as “General,” while Eisenhower addressed the former United Press correspondent familiarly as “Walter.”

  Walter Cronkite and former President Dwight D. Eisenhower at the American military cemetery above Omaha Beach, Normandy, France, August 1963

  The program’s final scene depicted Cronkite and Eisenhower conversing in the field of white crosses in the St. Laurent American military cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, on the bluff above Omaha Beach. At one point in their unscripted conversation, Eisenhower looked at Cronkite and said, “You know, Walter, I come here and the thought that overwhelms me is all the joy that Mamie and I get from our grandchildren. I look at these graves out here and I just can’t help but think of all the families in America that don’t have the joy of grandchildren.”

  Walter Cronkite and his wife, Betsy, did go on in the aftermath of the war to know the joy of children and grandchildren. Cronkite also experienced the satisfactions of professional success and public affection. But memories of the war in which he first established his reputation as a journalist were never far away for him. Cronkite, indeed, played a significant role in shaping the popular national memory of World War II for those who lived through the war as well as for their children and grandchildren.

  When peace came in 1945, Cronkite was not yet 29 years old. He fully expected he would make his career in the decades to come as a print journalist for the United Press. Writing to his mother and grandparents from Brussels on December 14, 1945, he contemplated his options—perhaps heading up the UP bureau in Moscow or Vienna, or returning to New York to take charge of the international cable desk. “There is a lot to be said for living in New York,” he wrote, “but then there is still a lot to see and a very interesting story to write from over here.” As it turned out, he got to tell those interesting stories from Europe for the next few years, and this time, fortunately, with Betsy as his companion. In January 1946 Cronkite moved to Nuremberg, Germany, to cover the trials of the top Nazi leaders; Betsy joined him there in May. That summer they traveled on to Moscow, where Cronkite headed up the UP bureau for the next two years. When Betsy, by then age 32, became pregnant in 1948 with their first child, Nancy, the Cronkites decided to return to the United States. Two more ch
ildren followed over the next several years, daughter Kathy and son Walter (Chip).

  With a growing family, Cronkite was no longer willing to put up with UP’s notoriously stingy pay scale and made the switch to more lucrative positions in broadcast journalism, at first as the Washington, D.C., correspondent for a group of ten midwestern radio networks. Following the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, Cronkite switched to CBS Radio, with the expectation that he would be sent to Korea as a war correspondent. Edward R. Murrow, who had failed to recruit him as one of the “Murrow Boys” in London during the war, was instrumental in bringing him to CBS in 1950.

  That summer Cronkite’s career took a dramatic new turn when he was asked to make an appearance on CBS’s brand-new television station in Washington, WTOP, and give a chalkboard-illustrated talk about the Korean War. The origins of electronic television date back to the late 1920s, and by the Second World War there were stations in five American cities that were broadcasting to a tiny audience of television viewers. Commercial television did not emerge as a significant competitor to the newspaper and radio industry until 1947. By the following year, the Big Three television networks—the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), and the American Broadcasting Company (ABC)—were all on the air with regular programming, including daily 15-minute news broadcasts on CBS and NBC. The number of television sets in use jumped from fewer than 10,000 in 1946 to more than ten million a half decade later.

  Cronkite still hoped to be sent to Korea as a radio correspondent, but one thing led to another, and soon he was delivering the entire daily 15-minute news broadcast for WTOP. He was both the reporter and what would soon be described as the “anchorman” of the news program (the term “anchorman” was occasionally used to describe newsmen before Cronkite joined CBS, but it first gained widespread currency when applied to Cronkite’s role in reporting from the Republican National Convention in Chicago in 1952.)

  Cronkite projected a naturally reassuring screen presence, at one and the same time plainspoken and authoritative, a man of the people and a man of the world. He could effortlessly ad-lib commentary if need be, and his Midwest-inflected baritone usually conveyed the excitement of events without carrying any hint of personal emotional involvement (those few occasions in later years when he did display emotion on-screen immediately took on iconic status in the folklore of television journalism). There was certainly a good deal of craft involved in his nightly performance before the camera, but unlike some celebrity newsmen, his screen persona was not at significant odds with his character off-camera. At his memorial service in 2009, fellow CBS newsman Bob Schieffer recalled that when Cronkite was approached on the street by strangers asking to talk about something he had said on-screen, “he was never rude, he wanted to talk about the news.” “Right from the beginning,” Cronkite told interviewer Don Carleton many years later, “I took the attitude that I was talking to one person when I was in front of the camera,” rather than thousands or millions of viewers. “It was always on a one-on-one basis.” In time, he matured into the avuncular “Uncle Walter,” a familiar and welcome presence in millions of American homes.

  In addition to anchoring CBS’s coverage of national political conventions, Cronkite became host of the network’s Morning Show in 1954. Although that turned out to be a short-lived assignment, it was the occasion for Cronkite’s move from Washington to New York City, his home for the rest of his life. In 1961 he succeeded Edward R. Murrow as senior CBS correspondent, and in 1962 he became anchorman and managing editor of CBS Evening News. The dramatic events of the early 1960s, including cold war confrontations over Berlin and Cuba, and the rise of the civil rights movement, suggested to network executives the need for extended news coverage, and in 1963 Cronkite oversaw the expansion of the CBS Evening News broadcast to a half hour, an innovation soon copied by the other television networks.

  Cronkite remained as anchorman of CBS Evening News for the next 18 years, during which he reported on such major stories as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War, the race to the moon, the Watergate crisis, and the Iran hostage crisis, famously closing each show with the line “And that’s the way it is.” In the process he became, as a 1972 poll recorded, “the most trusted man in America.”

  Beginning in the 1950s, along with his established on-screen roles as reporter and anchorman, Cronkite was the host of a number of popular television series and special broadcasts that introduced CBS viewers to the history of their country and the world. CBS was in some ways the original (and superior) “history channel,” with Cronkite as the preferred narrator for all things historically consequential. From 1953 to 1957, Cronkite hosted the series You Are There. Produced by CBS’s entertainment division, each episode of the Sunday evening program featured real CBS news correspondents “reporting” on dramatized historic events as if they were breaking news. As host, Cronkite opened the show by providing the appropriate historic setting, and he capped each week with the line “And all things are as they were then, except you are there.”

  Many episodes were devoted to events in the pre-film era, such as the assassination of Julius Caesar, the Boston Tea Party, and Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, but the series also included a fair share of re-created moments from World War II—from Pearl Harbor to the surrender of Wake Island to the liberation of Paris.

  In 1956–57 Cronkite hosted a series titled Air Power, which focused mostly on the Second World War and was inspired by the success of NBC’s documentary series on World War II naval warfare, Victory at Sea. Cronkite revisited some of the stories he had reported on during the war in episodes like “Schweinfurt” and “Target Ploesti.”

  After Air Power ran its course, Cronkite narrated his most popular CBS documentary series, The Twentieth Century, several hundred episodes of which were broadcast Sunday evenings between 1957 and 1967. Some Twentieth Century episodes were written by Andy Rooney, Cronkite’s old comrade from the “Writing Sixty-Ninth.” As with the You Are There series, The Twentieth Century covered varied topics, but the Second World War accounted for about a quarter of the shows, including episodes devoted to Winston Churchill’s wartime leadership, D-Day,

  Gen. George S. Patton and the Third Army, the capture of the Remagen Bridge, the Battle of the Bulge, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

  Scenes from the You Are There series, which ran from 1953 to 1957. The show re-created great moments in history, including many from World War II.

  There is no question about Cronkite’s personal favorite among the historical programs with which he was involved over the years. As he wrote in A Reporter’s Life:

  The 1963 trip to England and Normandy with Ike to prepare a documentary on the 20th anniversary of D-Day was sheer delight—a lot of hard work but sheer delight.

  Mamie Eisenhower and Betsy Cronkite accompanied their husbands on the trip. At one point, on Omaha Beach, CBS executive producer Fred Friendly set up a sequence where Cronkite and Eisenhower were to drive slowly along the beach in a jeep, with Eisenhower providing commentary on the desperate battle that had taken place there. The idea at first was for Cronkite to drive the jeep, “but then,” as Cronkite recalled, “it occurred to Fred that it was Eisenhower who was showing me the area and that he should be driving.” So they switched places. The result, visible in the segment when it aired, made for a jerky ride.

  Watching this drama unfold from a little knoll behind the beach were Mamie Eisenhower and Betsy. Mamie gasped and reached over for Betsy’s hand. “Betsy, your Walter has never been in greater danger. Ike hasn’t driven in thirty years, and he wasn’t any good at it then.”

  Although Eisenhower had been back to the Normandy beaches several times since the end of World War II for commemorative events, Cronkite realized that this trip was the first time Eisenhower had been there without having his views constricted by crowds of onlookers and officials:

  Ike stood in a German bunker, looking
out to the English Channel through a gun slit, and he said he couldn’t imagine what those Germans thought that morning, looking out there at the Allied armada. He was really dumbfounded by the sheer cliff at Pointe du Hoc. He said to me, “How could we have ordered those soldiers to climb this thing?”

  And as he recalled the chaos and bloodshed of the early hours of June 6, 1944, Eisenhower saluted the common soldiers who made the difference in the day’s outcome:

  It had to be the local commanders, the platoon leaders and the squad leaders. That was not a general’s battle after all. We’d all done all the planning. We’d thought we’d made the best plan that would save the most lives and get the most benefit out of it, but they were the people who had to do the job, and we must never forget that. It was just the G.I. and his platoon, and company, and squad leaders.

  For Cronkite, as for most Americans in the postwar era, World War II had become a touchstone of national pride and sense of mission. The United States had not sought war, but when war was forced upon it in 1941, the nation had risen to the occasion, and its citizen-soldiers had prevailed in battle on two fronts against the forces of aggression and fanaticism.

  Even as Cronkite and Eisenhower filmed their anniversary report in Normandy, another and very different war involving young Americans was escalating on the opposite side of the world. On September 2, 1963, the night that CBS Evening News moved to its new half-hour format, the program featured Cronkite’s interview with President John F. Kennedy at the family compound at Hyannis Port on Cape Cod. They touched on a number of topics, but the interview is best remembered for Kennedy’s comments on the Vietnam War, which had not been going well over the past year. The President took the opportunity to put a little distance between the United States and the increasingly unpopular government of its ally, South Vietnam, led by President Ngo Dinh Diem: