Cronkite

by Douglas Brinkley

  In the autumn of 1951, though the thought of becoming a TV newsman gave him heartburn and spine-chill, Murrow was ready for television. He had been influenced by the immediacy of certain live programming, notably the broadcasts earlier that year of the Senate’s Kefauver Committee investigation into organized crime. That riveting broadcast, which had 30 million viewers, brought Americans closer to the workings of their government than most had ever been before and made a media star of Tennessee Democrat Estes Kefauver, the chair of the committee. Other politicians duly took note of the power of TV. Murrow couldn’t help being impressed by the visual spectacle of the images of actual thugs under verbal fire. “The television performance,” he admitted about the Kefauver investigations, “has been fascinating.” He was also influenced by his working partnership with producer Fred Friendly, a gregarious Rhode Islander who found ways to translate Murrow’s style to the new television medium.

  Starting on November 18, Murrow and Friendly collaborated on a half-hour documentary series called See It Now, covering various topics in the news. “Good evening,” Murrow said on the debut show. “This is an old team trying to learn a new trade.” Early on, Bill Downs made a pest of himself (a role very much in his nature), demanding that Murrow use his new pulpit to expose the destructiveness of Senator McCarthy’s Red Scare investigations. Murrow demurred for the time being, but See It Now gained a reputation for confronting controversial subjects.

  Much further down the CBS broadcasting ladder, Cronkite continued to hone his local shows in Washington, D.C. He became the voice that warned WTOP viewers that a test pattern, a break in regular network programming, was under way. On other occasions, he interrupted entertainment shows for breaking news. His voice inflections always seemed reassuring. Cronkite also covered national stories for the network, garnering a desirable assignment as one of three hosts (the other two being Frank Bourgholtzer of NBC News and Bryson Rash of ABC News) of the first televised tour of the White House, where a renovation had just been completed. His May 4, 1952, interview with President Truman at the White House, while largely constrained to a chat about the mansion’s antique furnishings, marked his first public interaction with a president. John Crosby of The Washington Post nailed the whole White House tour as being “a real slick job.” A better phrase would have been “contrived beyond belief.” Cronkite was embarrassingly awkward and nervous. “Do the clocks run, Mr. President?” asked Cronkite with excruciating deference. “Yes, they all run,” Truman responded. “We have a special man to wind all of the clocks every Friday.”

  From that broadcast onward, Cronkite’s friendship with Truman became ironclad because of the Missouri connection. Two months after the White House tour, Cronkite got another big break. Sig Mickelson, the head of CBS News in New York, summoned him from Washington to anchor the network’s coverage of the national political conventions. Mickelson had approached others, including Murrow, but found no one willing to carry a broadcast through hours of ad-libbing. According to Don Hewitt, Stanton, the dour and formal president of CBS, “saw Cronkite as Douglas Edwards’ successor as the front man of CBS News.” Cronkite didn’t hesitate to accept Mickelson’s offer, but the network’s announcement was low-key. “Walter Cronkite was not one of the Murrow Boys,” David Halberstam explained in The Powers That Be. And other CBSers rolled their eyes in belittling envy. “Cronkite in 1952 was perhaps the one rising star within the company who was outside the Murrow clique.”

  If Cronkite found himself in a conundrum in the early 1950s it was about how to be a serious CBS News reporter when the money in television was in game shows. Mark Goodson and Bill Todman, producers of such popular quiz shows as Winner Take All (1948–1950) and What’s My Line? (1950–1967), were the hottest acts at CBS, and they offered Cronkite a job as substitute host for the game show It’s News to Me, which ran on CBS from 1951 to 1954. Cronkite could have refused to cooperate with Goodson-Todman Productions, taken a Murrow-esque stance that such mindless drivel was beneath the dignity of a true journalist. But the quiz shows were so wildly popular that he couldn’t resist. He took the job—and the extra pay. The show was a thirty-minute bluffing game in which contestants tried to discern whether an answer was true or false. The mildly popular series was originally hosted by John Daly, but Cronkite, the substitute, became the host in 1954 for its final three-month run.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Election Night and UNIVAC

  MICKELSON CUTS A DEAL—ANCHORMAN AS NOUN—CRONKITE SCHOOL FOR POLITICIANS—CHICAGO GOES HOLLYWOOD—CONVENTION EVE PARTY—BUGGING THE CREDENTIALS COMMITTEE—SELLING OF THE CANDIDATE—PALEY DREAMS OF 35 MILLION TV SETS—GETTING DRUNK WITH CRONKITE—EISENHOWER V. STEVENSON—THE BRAVE NEW WORLD OF UNIVAC—BONDING WITH THOMAS, STRUGGLING WITH MURROW—ERNIE LEISER TO THE RESCUE—THE CORONATION OF QUEEN ELIZABETH II—THE UBIQUITOUS WALTER CRONKITE—CBS VIPER NEST—TOO STRONG FOR SECOND FIDDLE

  The rise of Cronkite as America’s first TV anchorman had started in 1951 under Sig Mickelson, the first president of CBS News. It was Mickelson, an even-keeled Minnesotan approaching his forties and considered a pioneer in early television, who negotiated an agreement on behalf of all three networks for the 1952 political conventions to be covered live. The specter of television cameras on the convention floors left print reporters cold. Both CBS and NBC had experimentally televised parts of the 1948 conventions, but nothing remotely like the grand gavel-to-gavel production planned for 1952. Once Mickelson successfully negotiated on behalf of all the networks, he went about figuring out how CBS could do the best job. “It seemed then that a revolution with far-reaching implications had begun, that politics would never be the same again,” Mickelson explained, “that the television camera would dominate the action and the television tube the voter response.”

  When he first befriended Cronkite in 1940, Mickelson was teaching at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, and Cronkite was at the UP bureau in Kansas City. Whenever Mickelson found himself in Kaycee, which was often, he’d invite Cronkite out for brisket and baked beans. But they lost contact with each other until Cronkite was hired by CBS. “I used to see him fairly frequently when he was doing the 11 o’clock news for WTOP television in Washington, D.C.,” recalled Mickelson of being an early booster of Cronkite’s career at CBS. “I would go down to Washington often and watch the show and sometimes have a drink with him afterwards. He was not under my jurisdiction until 1954 when I became head of news for both radio and television. Until then he remained on the radio payroll, but all he did was television. Actually, he worked for me, but technically, he was not on my payroll.”

  Every broadcast communications student eventually becomes acquainted with the life and legend of Mickelson, who during World War II was news director at WCOO Minneapolis (the farm club for CBS News in New York). His two memoirs about television news gathering—From Whistle Stop to Sound Bite and The Electric Mirror—are often an integral part of Journalism 101 curricula. In his CBS years, from 1949 to 1961, Mickelson was the person most responsible for morphing CBS Radio and CBS TV into what became CBS News. When Mickelson, serving as Cronkite’s rabbi, tried to get his old friend the CBS anchorman gig for the 1952 political conventions, he was met with stiff resistance from Hubbell Robinson, a program vice president. Robinson wanted dependable Bob Trout, a CBS radio legend like Lowell Thomas, whom he deemed a far more enduring, essential, and telegenic reporter. Murrow feigned interest in taking a few steps in the TV convention direction, then held back. Refusing to cross the threshold, he grumpily removed himself from the competition; stoking the egos of politicians just wasn’t his stew. An argument ensued. “We had several conversations about it and I held to my [pro-Cronkite] position,” Mickelson recalled. “I do not remember whether it got to the Stanton/Paley level before it was finally decided, but I held firm for a month or six weeks and finally Cronkite got the job.”

  Within the TV context, a running debate ensued over who coined the term anchorman. Sig Micke
lson and Don Hewitt both made claims. But, in truth, the label had been applied to other, less successful news presenters before being famously applied to Walter Cronkite. Mickelson had indeed thought about using the term when Cronkite was CBS’s host for the 1951 San Francisco conference that yielded the Treaty of Peace with Japan. But the dynamic didn’t feel right. “I am not sure if that term was ever used in radio,” Mickelson recalled. “But the concept was definitely in place. The way it got some notice was when the press information department at CBS asked ‘what’s Walter Cronkite going to do?’ I said he is going to ‘anchor for us.’ Then they started thinking about it and started describing him as an anchorman and that seems to be where the idea really took off.”

  Murrow found the noun anchorman repugnant, but he also thought televised conventions were a horror show where no hard news was made. To Murrow, television was all part of a public relations game, and CBS’s coverage of the 1952 conventions was essentially free advertising for the Democratic and Republican parties, not true journalism. His invective against CBS televising political carnivals became legendary in broadcasting circles (“political shell-game . . . rigged, traded, bought and bargained for. . . . There is more freedom of choice . . . at a track, where the horses run”). To Murrow’s point, the Republican Party chairman, Guy Gabrielson, had offered to purchase the broadcast rights; the idea was nixed as an illegal corporate contribution. “I had little contact with Edward R. Murrow,” recalled Mickelson. “To him I was a representative of management, and management was absolute anathema to Murrow, except for Paley.”

  Mickelson understood well how to drum-roll CBS News’ personnel leading into the 1952 conventions. To promote the coming summer convention coverage, CBS News set up a “school” to teach politicians how to behave on the Tube. With Cronkite as the teacher, the how-to-look-good-on-TV school attracted media publicity and at least a few politicians, who learned what to wear (the color blue showed up well), how to speak (briefly, whenever possible), and what not to do (pound the table). Both Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn and Congressman John F. Kennedy enrolled as Cronkite’s pupils to learn the art of TV makeup, dress, and diction; Cronkite taught them that “getting across” on television was “all in the eyes.” The 1940, 1944, and 1948 conventions had been seen by a very limited audience, but as Mickelson said, that was “horse-and-buggy” television. The 1952 coverage of both Chicago political conventions—as Rayburn and Kennedy understood—would open the era properly, with a combined workforce of two thousand people for all the networks and at a cost of $7 million.

  CBS News pulled out all the stops to turn the 1952 conventions into programming showcases. Paley was able to pressure Westinghouse to pay $3 million to sponsor the coast-to-coast coverage of the political events. According to Don Hewitt, the volcanic TV news pioneer who tended to monopolize conversations with his strange combination of bug-eyed humor and the backhand, the Chicago conventions transformed television almost overnight, making the medium more popular than radio. “TV had been radio’s little brother,” Hewitt recalled. “Radio could go anywhere. TV was stuck in a studio. Then we said, hey, let’s cover a convention. We can stake it out like a football game. We know when it’s going to be played, we know where the rostrum is, we know where the delegates are going to sit. For the first time television could flex its muscles and say, ‘We can do anything radio can do, and we can do it better.’ ”

  Leaving no promotional opportunity unexploited, Mickelson scheduled a “Convention Eve Party” on the night before the Republicans convened. Cronkite was to interview the major candidates as they arrived for dinner. Unfortunately, both the dinner and the candidates were still a long way off when the show began. Cronkite was facing his first potential disaster and the convention had yet to begin: a gaping half hour of airtime to fill. He was ready. He interviewed Howard K. Smith, one of the CBS roving correspondents covering the convention, as though it had been planned from the start. “Those 1952 conventions were not only the first but also the last time the American public would have an opportunity to see our neat political conclaves in pure, undiluted form,” Cronkite recalled. “By 1956 the parties had begun to sanitize their proceedings.”

  The key to CBS News’ success at the 1952 conventions in Chicago proved to be a combination of logistics melding with weighty analysis. Hewitt and Robinson had rented out both the sixth and eleventh floors of the Conrad Hilton (extra camera crews were ensconced at the Blackstone and Congress hotels). Seventeen cameras were installed on the convention floors. An additional five pool cameras were used. A team was also assigned to Washington, D.C., to get the reaction to both conventions from President Truman, who wasn’t running for reelection. The print media, however, didn’t like the growing perception that the Big Three networks were glorifying the stresses and strifes of the Chicago conventions. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal alike were up in arms about it. CBS told them all to stick it. “We were young,” Mickelson recalled, “and aggressive.”

  Unlike its rivals, CBS News anticipated barren stretches during the conventions and placed much of the burden of filling them on Cronkite’s shoulders. He coordinated reports from correspondents on the floor, and when there were no reports, he simply talked to the viewers. He had done his research in advance and had a lot to say. Still, he constantly worried about the precise level of his discourse. For a while, CBS planned to find a “common man” and seat him in front of a monitor during the convention broadcasts. Whenever the rube didn’t understand something, Cronkite would be notified. The plan fell apart, though, when CBS recognized that it didn’t know where to find a common man. But the network had clearly found the right anchorman in Cronkite.

  Amid all the slow stretches, there were a number of exciting TV moments for Cronkite to cover at both Chicago conventions. The Democrats nominated Adlai Stevenson, governor of Illinois, a home-state favorite, on the third ballot; the hoopla was deafening. The 1952 Democratic Convention is remembered in the annals of U.S. political history as being the last brokered convention and the last to have more than one roll call. The GOP Convention, however, had a lot more TV appeal, especially with General Douglas MacArthur, commander of the U.S. Army Forces in the Far East during World War II, delivering the impassioned keynote address. And there was a kingdaddy fight between former general Dwight Eisenhower and Senator Robert Taft for the Republican nomination. It got so fierce that the credentials committee, overseen by Taft, tried to ban TV cameras from covering the proceedings. The Eisenhower team took the opposite approach, as NBC News’ Reuven Frank recalled, “proclaiming that they favored television, they loved it, they wanted it, and barring it was an outrage, a denial of the American way.”

  Just how hungry Cronkite was to excel in CBS’s coverage of the conventions became readily apparent when he orchestrated the secret tape recording of the Republicans’ credentials committee meeting. Long before the Nixon administration bugged the Democratic National Committee office at the Watergate in 1972, Cronkite, after much deliberation, had a CBS technician wire the committee room under the shady rationale that the covert act was good for democracy. “He ran a wire,” Cronkite recalled, “up the outside of the hotel and into a broom closet several floors above. There one of our newspeople listened through earphones and rushed notes . . . to me downstairs. The sources of these reports baffled both the Republicans and my broadcast opposition.”

  While Cronkite later told the story with folksy charm, his act was a dastardly invasion of privacy that could have landed CBS in serious legal trouble. But it was Sig Mickelson who approved the bugging, so Cronkite wasn’t in jeopardy of being fired for the crime. “At this early period in television history,” Mickelson said in shrugging explanation, “ethical considerations did not deeply disturb us.” Cronkite and Mickelson pulled off the bugging with the consummate skill of veteran safecrackers. They embarrassed Taft’s credentials committee into allowing the Republican Convention to be televised “gavel to gavel.�
� The exclusion of cameras—which the print media wanted—was averted. The cameras played perfectly into the Eisenhower-as-folk-hero scenario. TV viewers liked Ike, not the pinch-faced Robert Taft of Ohio, hoping to ride to power on the gold-plated family name. Cronkite had, in a brazen way, helped Eisenhower, one of Paley’s close friends, obtain the nomination. It was the beginning of a mutually beneficial friendship between Walter and Ike.

  The response to Cronkite’s hours of on-air work at the conventions was overwhelmingly positive on the part of critics, viewers, and CBS executives. CBS’s convention coverage ran for 13.9 hours, with Cronkite as star. John Crosby, a syndicated television columnist known for snark, was an instant fan of the tough, warmhearted, fact-hungry anchorman. “Walter Cronkite,” he wrote, “the slot man for CBS, has done a magnificent job—providing commentary for as long as seven hours at a stretch.” And the longer Cronkite was on the air, the more time there was to run Westinghouse commercials. “Television,” David Halberstam wrote of early 1950s journalism, “was about to alter the nature and balance of American merchandising.”

  What concerned Cronkite about his convention performance was viewer mail accusing him first of partisanship for Eisenhower and then the same for Stevenson. “Then I came to a marvelous revelation,” he wrote his friend Don Michel of WRAJ-AM (Anna, Illinois) in 1968. “They were about equally divided between those who thought I favored the Democrats and those who believed I favored the Republicans! Since then, this has been my rule of thumb: If the charges stay in reasonable balance, I consider that I am succeeding in maintaining objectivity.”

  After the convention, Cronkite and Mickelson went on a drinking binge to drown the unending strain of the past month. CBS had done a bang-up job at both Chicago conventions, proving that television was a gargantuan new tool of mass communication. The emphasis at CBS regarding live news coverage shifted from radio to TV. It was, Cronkite believed, good for democracy. The TV camera would end up exposing disingenuous U.S. politicians as flimflam artists and charlatans. More Americans would end up voting that November for either Eisenhower or Stevenson, Cronkite believed, because CBS’s coverage had turned politics into the biggest theatrical drama of all time. “We thought,” Mickelson recalled, “we had really pulled off a revolution.”