Cronkite loved the idea. In a half hour he could give TV viewers the front page, along with a bit of the editorial page, some of the features, a peek at the business section, and even some sports, when warranted. Considering that by 1962 most other television programming was packaged and sold in minimum half-hour increments, the idea would seem to have been obvious. Looking for free publicity, CBS News announced the expanded broadcast with fanfare on the Fourth of July. “To listen to [CBS],” wrote John Horn, TV critic for the New York Herald-Tribune, “the half-hour news show was a communications creation second only to the printing press.”
The typical complaint about the CBS Evening News time expansion was perplexing: Was there really that much news to fill a half hour each weekday evening? At best, TV news was merely a headline service that read viewers the condensed AP and UP wire service reports. Salant felt CBS News’ well-received coverage of the November 1962 midterm elections had generated a bit of critical momentum. This caused Paley to choose December as the ideal time to declare that its Evening News was more important—and needed to be longer—than the shallow Huntley-Brinkley Report.
Some people remembered where they were when they heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor or the D-day landings. Reuven Frank, the former NBC News producer of The Huntley-Brinkley Report, remembered precisely where he was when he heard about the half-hour CBS Evening News. As Frank told it, he had just parked his car and was walking toward the NBC News offices at Rockefeller Center when he met a friend from the same network.
“What do you plan to do today?” he asked me.
“Sit in my office and wait for [NBC News president William] McAndrew to call.”
“Why?”
“It was in today’s Times.”
“Haven’t seen it yet.”
“CBS is expanding Cronkite to a half hour.”
As Frank suspected, he was called in by his NBC bosses. They all had catch-up work to do. The Peacock Network, hungry for parity with CBS, immediately announced that The Huntley-Brinkley Report would also be expanded to thirty minutes. ABC News would eventually follow suit in 1967. The changes at each show were scheduled for the late summer of 1963, as each hired yet more staff members. The expanded broadcasts came just in time to cover the Vietnam War, Project Mercury, civil rights, and the antiwar movement. Theodore White, the author of the classic Making of the President book series, properly believed that CBS’s news expansion “revolutionized” the American political process.
After the time for commercial breaks was subtracted, CBS Evening News, in reality, was to be twenty-two minutes long. Such excellent reporters as Robert Pierpoint (White House), George Herman (State Department), Roger Mudd (Capitol Hill), and Charles von Fremd (Pentagon) girded their reports with both wire service news and original research. One of Salant’s first decisions was to devote two minutes each night to a commentary, labeled as such, by the sagacious Eric Sevareid. Cronkite saw this as a handicap. He wasn’t enthusiastic about ceding two of his precious minutes to a Murrowite like Sevareid, full of pompous ways, but he didn’t have a vote in the matter. CBS assigned Sevareid—who had been host of a weekly CBS News show called Conquest—to the close spot and built the commentary around him, even down to ending each of his essays with a graphic of his signature, larger than John Hancock’s on the Declaration of Independence.
During the first six months of 1963, CBS News staff grew excited about the start of the new thirty-minute experiment to be launched around Labor Day. Hewitt—at great pocketbook expense to Paley—had Cronkite tape a series of thirty-minute unaired broadcasts as a sort of dress rehearsal for the fall premiere. “Hewitt wanted to get all the kinks out of things,” Socolow recalled. “Harry Reasoner did the fifteen-minute live news broadcasts over the summer, while Cronkite did thirty minutes as a trial-and-error exercise.” It cost a fortune, but Paley green-lighted the shadow broadcast. Cronkite’s new writer, Ron Bonn, recalled that when the CBS broadcast was only fifteen minutes, script makers would “rip stories off the half-dozen wire service Teletypes chattering away in the corner, rewrite them as stories to be read aloud, and then hand [them] to Douglas Edwards.” Now, with Cronkite at the helm, and the broadcast thirty minutes long, CBS News changed from disseminating news to gathering news.
For Cronkite, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a large-scale political rally in support of civil rights for African Americans in August 1963, was uplifting. Having won a Peabody Award that spring for his nightly assignments on CBS, he hoped his coverage of the march would lead to repeat glory. He had no compunction about deeming Dr. Martin Luther King one of the great orators of the century. But Harry Reasoner was primary anchor for CBS’s special-event summertime coverage as an army of journalists descended upon the National Mall to document the Dr. King–dominated spectacular. On Wednesday, August 28, the evening before the speechifying began, Cronkite hosted a one-hour CBS News Special Report on the state of the African American freedom struggle. By the luck of the draw, CBS had been chosen by lot to coordinate the pooled coverage for what was being billed as a “Jobs and Freedom” march.
Each of the Big Three networks had slated four hours of live telecast on August 29; only CBS stayed with the activities (including King’s awe-inspiring “I Have a Dream” speech) to the culmination. The Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company provided nearly thirty television station pickups to enable CBS to beam the event worldwide. “They called it the March on Washington for jobs and freedom,” Cronkite broadcast that evening. “They came from all over America, negroes and whites, housewives and Hollywood stars, Senators and a few beatniks, clergymen and probably a few communists. More than 200,000 of them came to Washington this morning in a kind of climax to a historic spring and summer in the struggle for equal rights.”
That August, while King was the hot interview to procure in TV journalism, Hewitt and Cronkite kept their focus on President Kennedy. A deal was struck with the White House for Cronkite to interview JFK on September 2 (Memorial Day) for his inaugural thirty-minute Evening News broadcast. The Kennedy family summer home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, was the venue. Cronkite was deeply grateful to the president for the exclusive, oblivious to the possibility that the White House was using him to float a new Vietnam policy initiative. Hewitt had cut a deal with Kennedy’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger: give Cronkite the exclusive, and CBS News would be able to present U.S. involvement in Vietnam front and center in a beneficial way.
Not everybody at CBS News thought Cronkite’s coming to Cape Cod was a good thing. The White House press corps felt that Cronkite wasn’t being an objective journalist, that he was in cahoots with Kennedy. “As I drove up to the motel where the White House press corps stayed,” Cronkite recalled, “our veteran correspondent was waiting at the steps. He lit into me in a show of daring disrespect for the anchorman.”
CBS correspondent Robert Pierpoint—a native of southern California who had worked at CBS News since 1951 as one of the Murrow Boys—was livid. And for good reason. The Associated Press inferred that President Kennedy was indeed using the Cronkite show to make a public policy statement on South Vietnam. Cronkite, in order to garner the attention of critics and create buzz for his new half-hour format, the story said, was essentially allowing President Kennedy to manipulate the Evening News. But Pierpoint had yet another problem with it: Cronkite’s bigfooting.
“Listen, if you’re going to break a big story,” Pierpoint fumed to Cronkite, “it seems like the least you could do is tell your own White House man about it.”
“What big story?” a genuinely confused Cronkite asked.
“That the president is going to make a major statement on Vietnam on your broadcast tomorrow night. It’s all over the AP.”
Pierpoint’s harangue unnerved Cronkite. The rumor sweeping through the White House press corps was that he had told Kennedy the questions in advance. Not only did this make Cronkite seem like a Whi
te House patsy, but it was also prohibited by CBS News guidelines. “I was getting a little fed up with the bigfoot idea, that is, an anchorman like Cronkite jumping in on my beat,” Pierpoint recalled. “Ed Murrow never would have done what Cronkite did. When Ed visited me in Korea, he said, ‘You’re going to do my broadcast tonight because you know the politics, terrain, and people better than I do.’ It was a sign that Ed respected my work. So, yeah, I resented the fact that Walter came to Hyannis to bigfoot my beat. I was ticked.”
A defensive Cronkite, wounded by the allegation that he was a conduit for Kennedy, suspected that Salinger was behind the misleading AP story. When Cronkite encountered Salinger, a supposed friend, at a Hyannis bar, he lit into him with a vengeance, driving his forefinger into Salinger’s chest. Cronkite contended that his journalistic integrity had been compromised by Salinger’s big mouth. “I promise you I’m not going to even bring up Vietnam when I talk to the President tomorrow,” an agitated Cronkite threatened, red in the face. “I’m not even going to bring it up!”
“You’ll be sorry, Walter,” Salinger told him.
Once Cronkite arrived at the Kennedy compound on September 2, still bickering with Salinger, he had an epiphany. The problem, he decided, was that the president controlled the interview because he was able to talk about Vietnam if he pleased. A tactical change of plan was made by Cronkite: he would ask Kennedy about Vietnam late in the interview, as a ploy designed to torment Salinger. When Cronkite and the president got seated in their lawn chairs, waiting for the CBS News camera crew to set up, Cronkite chatted with Kennedy about Newport and Martha’s Vineyard. He told him how covering the America’s Cup for Eyewitness had transformed him into a yachtsman. Then it was camera-ready-action. A full ten minutes into the interview, Cronkite—following questions about the effect of civil rights on the 1964 election, unemployment, and the nuclear test ban treaty—indeed turned to South Vietnam. “It is their war,” Kennedy told Cronkite. “They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them; we can give them equipment; we can send our men out there as advisors . . . but in the final analysis it is their people and their government who have to win this struggle. All we can do is help.”
The entire CBS interview with JFK ran thirty minutes, but it was edited down to twelve minutes for the 6:30 p.m. broadcast. This proved to be a problem for the White House. Salinger complained vehemently to CBS News that the way Cronkite and Hewitt edited the video made Kennedy seem more dovish than the reality. But in truth, the blockbuster interview illuminated that the Kennedy administration was distancing U.S. policy from the South Vietnamese president, Ngo Dinh Diem.
Because Diem would be assassinated on November 2, 1963, the theory that JFK had thrown Diem overboard in the Cronkite interview gained credence. Salinger later published the book With Kennedy, in which he accused CBS News of “partial distortion.” Cronkite was forced to admit that CBS had indeed edited out the JFK line “I admire what the president [Diem] has done.” But Cronkite charged that Salinger was overstating the whole Hyannis episode to protect the New Frontier from seeming culpable in the assassination of Diem. “My assumption,” Cronkite wrote in his own defense, “is that Salinger was preparing a preemptive defense should history, as it has since, uncover the American part in the anti-Diem coup.”
Minus the controversial backstory and editing flap with Salinger, Cronkite’s first thirty-minute CBS Evening News broadcast was a ratings winner by any standard. (It caused CBS to end the Eyewitness show so that more resources could be put into the Cronkite show.) The features unfolded like articles in a glossy magazine: the interview with President Kennedy; a report on racial violence in Louisiana; a tour of Saigon with Henry Cabot Lodge (then the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam); and a segment on the musical My Fair Lady, as produced by a theater troupe in Japan. But the initial excitement over the thirty-minute news format died down in a hurry. Media critics were disappointed, though not surprised, to see that both CBS News and NBC News petered out of fresh ideas rather quickly. After the first few weeks, the shows didn’t seem to offer anything more, in terms of substance, than the fifteen-minute editions had. However, the long-term impact of the expanded news shows would prove integral to the pace and texture of the rest of the 1960s and beyond. Segments about civil rights and Vietnam got much more airtime because of the extended broadcast.
Besides the Kennedy exclusive and a chrome-spangled newsroom set, Cronkite received a lot of hype for what became his signature sign-off statement at the end of the half-hour broadcast. Lowell Thomas had “So long until tomorrow,” and Edward R. Murrow had “Good night and good luck.” Cronkite thought it appropriate that he have a tagline as well. At the end of each thirty-minute broadcast, the CBS Evening News was now closing with what Cronkite called a “quirk of fate” segment. It could be as sad as a cancer death or as happy as spring wildflowers. Either way, Cronkite needed a sign-off, and one that, depending on inflection, could work for both circumstances. After a great deal of thought, he came up with “That’s the way it is,” a modified poach of Murrow’s “That’s the way it was,” said during his famous C-47 bombing mission over Germany during World War II.
When Salant heard Cronkite deliver that line of schmaltz ending the first historic thirty-minute CBS broadcast—derived from an evergreen Murrowism, no less—he was ticked off. He immediately called Cronkite and told him that his sign-off was ridiculous. To the literal-minded Salant, it seemed as if Cronkite was bragging that CBS News never got stories wrong; they did, weekly. The next day at work, Salant pulled Cronkite aside, instructing him to come up with something more suitable. But as fate would have it, the critics loved “That’s the way it is.” The CBS switchboard was bombarded with supportive telephone calls. Within about forty-eight hours, Salant recognized that he was the odd man out; Cronkite had prevailed. As Cronkite later boasted in an Archive of American Television interview, his nightly catchphrase “caught on instantly.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Kennedy Assassination
STAR OF NEWSWEEK—EATING COTTAGE CHEESE AND PINEAPPLE—WIRE-REPORTING FROM DALLAS—MERRIMAN SMITH OF UPI—FLASH HORROR—STAYING CALM—NATIONAL PASTOR—IRON PANTS—BLOWING HIS COOL OFF THE AIR—FOLLOWING THE FUNERAL—THE BROADCASTING PERFORMANCE OF A LIFETIME—TRYING TO SOLVE THE MYSTERY—BACKING THE WARREN COMMISSION—PERHAPS IT WAS A CONSPIRACY—STILL NUMBER TWO
Walter Cronkite was at his desk in the CBS broadcast newsroom at a little after 1:00 p.m. on November 22, 1963, eating a low-calorie cottage cheese and pineapple salad—a meal he never finished; Betsy had brown-bagged it for him. Most of his colleagues were enjoying the Friday Manhattan ritual of white-collar lunch at a decent restaurant to close a humdrum news week. Cronkite was in shirtsleeves with his tie loose, reading some incoming dispatches from Europe and Southeast Asia. Hewitt was floating around the building, plotting the 6:30 p.m. broadcast. Just down the hall from Cronkite’s desk, the CBS Evening News news editor, Ed Bliss Jr., a New York Herald Tribune veteran, was at the Teletype machines, glancing through stories about President Kennedy speaking at a breakfast in Fort Worth, Texas. Afterward, Kennedy was due to fly to nearby Dallas in Air Force One before a downtown motorcade took him to the Trade Mart for an international affairs speech.
Piled high on Cronkite’s desk were recent Newsweek issues, one with his photographic profile on the cover; the image conveyed reportorial suaveness and an all-encompassing decency. When, in 1961, the chairman of the FCC, Newton N. Minow, declared television a “vast wasteland,” he clearly did not have this forty-six-year-old Newsweek cover star in mind. Cronkite’s “Golden Throat” act, as Newsweek put it, carried a steadily growing heft as the year wound down. Americans liked rooting for the underdog. Cronkite was perfectly positioned: he was the suppertime staple on 169 TV stations across America; Huntley-Brinkley aired on 183. The photograph’s accompanying cover line read, “The TV News Battle” (an allusion to the wildly competitive audience-share rat
ings dance between CBS and NBC). CBS News was poised to win the ratings war over NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report (which Cronkite later called “H-B”). “Hell, yes, there’s a battle,” Cronkite was quoted as saying. “I don’t feel at a disadvantage with two against one. Let ’em put up four in there if they want to. I’ve taken on two. I can take on four.”
That Friday afternoon, everything was also calm at the Washington bureau on M Street. Bill Small had CBS News White House correspondent Robert Pierpoint following Kennedy on his November 21–23 swing through four Texas cities: Houston, San Antonio, Fort Worth, and Dallas. When Kennedy had hopscotched around Florida a few days earlier—making stops in Miami, Palm Beach, Tampa, and Cape Canaveral all in one day—Lew Wood of CBS News’ southern bureau (based at WWL in New Orleans) found it impossible to keep up with the off-and-up Air Force One. Flummoxed by his Florida experience, Wood recommended to Bliss, who agreed, that for the Texas trip three CBS crews—those of Dan Rather, Nelson Benton, and himself—be dispatched. A fourth crew from Chicago was even added. “We were,” Wood recalled, “loaded for bear.”
With Rather, Pierpoint, Benton, and Wood broadcasting from Texas, CBS News had the president’s whirlwind trip well covered. Pool reporting would also enhance the coverage. Wood was assigned to report on a Kennedy fund-raising dinner for a Texas congressman at Houston’s Rice Hotel. As Air Force One whisked POTUS away to Fort Worth, the Wood crew drove the 250 prairie miles to catch up with him. Wood caught up with Kennedy on the morning of November 22 at the Texas Star Hotel in Fort Worth. As the president shook hands with his adoring fans, his wife, Jackie, was dressing in their oversized suite with original Picassos and Monets hanging in all five rooms. Wood then followed Kennedy to nearby Carswell Air Force Base, where the president worked an appreciative receiving line of military families before flying to Love Field in Dallas. “We drove back to Love Field for our next assignment after Kennedy’s Dallas motorcade and speech at the Trade Mart,” Wood recalled. “Dan Rather was downtown to cover the motorcade itself, and remained at KRLD, monitoring the event.”
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