Cronkite
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Wood now had a little time to kill, so he took the crew to lunch at the Ramada Inn at Love Field. It would be a while before Kennedy finished his Trade Mart speech, so why not stop for a burger? With a little free time finally, Wood decided to check in with Rather at KRLD-TV, the Dallas CBS affiliate where he was stationed. Covering a presidential motorcade was tough for TV crews (and everyone else involved). The Kennedys had throngs of people goggling at them, full of cheers, questions, and the occasional boos. For Rather and Wood, fear that CBS wouldn’t shoot the best motorcade film footage, that NBC or ABC would one-up them, fueled their aggressiveness.
While Wood chatted with Rather about the Texas Star Hotel, Carswell Air Force Base, and Love Field events, there was an abrupt intrusion. “Hold on, Lew . . . don’t go away,” Rather said. Within a minute or two, Rather was back on the phone and said, “The president’s been shot . . . get to Parkland Memorial Hospital as fast as you can!” Hanging up, Wood rushed into the Ramada dining room, shouting pronto to his crew. CBS News cameraman Wendell Hoffman undoubtedly pestered Wood about what was happening. Wood whispered to him that Kennedy had been shot en route to the Trade Mart.
“WHAT, the president’s been shot?” Hoffman blurted out in his Kansas farmer’s voice.
Everyone in the Ramada dining room heard Hoffman’s resounding disbelief. A waiter dropped the dishes he was carrying and a woman gasped. Word was that the Secret Service had removed the bubble top on the president’s four-door 1961 Lincoln Continental convertible, which wasn’t bulletproof or even bullet-resistant, so Kennedy could enjoy the fair weather and interact more with the crowds during the ten-mile motorcade into downtown Dallas. “We figured there might be some good footage for Walter to run of Kennedy glad-handing,” Pierpoint recalled. “I thought we had a good chance of leading that Friday’s news.”
NBC News had sent a young reporter, Robert MacNeil, who started his career at ITV in London, to cover the presidential trip; he rode in one of the buses in the motorcade. Four cars behind Kennedy, ABC News’ Bob Clark rode with the two wire service reporters, United Press International’s congenial Merriman Smith and his hard-shelled Associated Press rival, Jack Bell. At fifty-one years of age, Smith was the chief Washington reporter for UPI, a job Cronkite himself had coveted after World War II. Clark and Bell were in the backseat of the limousine; “Smitty,” as Cronkite called Smith, rode up front. AT&T had supplied the car in recognition of the large amount of business the news services transacted over the telephone wires. As AT&T property, it was equipped with a car phone in the front seat. This hotline was how the world first learned that Kennedy had been shot.
About 12:30 (1:30 p.m. EST), those reporters riding in the presidential motorcade, sweating in the seventy-six-degree heat, heard loud, sharp cracks cutting through the din of the procession. They were winding their way through downtown Dallas, about to turn on Elm Street in Dealey Plaza. They couldn’t see what was happening at the front of the motorcade, but Smith was a gun collector and recognized the triple pops of a bolt-action weapon. He ignored the comments around him that a police motorcycle must have backfired. Picking up the car’s telephone, Smith called the local UPI office. All the reporters in Dallas were now operating on reflex. They would need good instincts in the ensuing mayhem and mass confusion. Someone had indeed fired three shots from an upper floor of the redbrick Texas School Book Depository building. A mortal terror was in the air, a gnawing sense of disbelief as the motorcade sped up and raced to the Stemmons Freeway to get to Parkland Memorial Hospital. A Secret Service agent leapt into the rear of the presidential vehicle to prevent the First Lady, who had climbed out of the rear seat, from crawling onto the limo’s trunk deck.
Those bullets Smith heard were very real. The first one missed its intended target. The second bullet hit the president high in his shoulder and exited from his throat—a survivable wound. But the final, third, bullet entered Kennedy’s right ear, blowing out brain tissue and skull fragments. Texas governor John Connally, riding in the same car as Kennedy beside his wife, Nellie, was shot in the chest. The First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, screamed, “My God, they’ve killed Jack. . . . They’ve killed my husband, Jack, Jack!”
At 1:34 p.m. in the CBS newsroom in New York, Bliss, a veteran Murrow writer and editor who started his journalism career at the Bucyrys Telegraph-Forum in Ohio, was glancing through the Teletype rolls from the wire services when the bell on the UPI machine rang five times. A bell always attracted an editor’s attention; five signaled an “urgent story.” The only higher designation was a fifteen-bell “flash.” Bliss studied the “BULLETIN” story as it was typed out on the machine ticker tape scroll:
UPI A7N DA
PRECEDE KENNEDY
DALLAS, NOV.22 (UPI)—THREE SHOTS WERE FIRED AT PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S MOTORCADE TODAY IN DOWNTOWN DALLAS.
JT1234PCS.
The UPI New York bureau immediately forbade other bureaus from filing stories and issued the highly unusual instruction: “DA IT YRS NY” (“Dallas, it’s yours. New York”). Cronkite rushed to the UPI machine at the sound of the bells. He and Bliss together read Smith’s convoluted dispatch, slightly dizzy with disbelief. For just two or three seconds Cronkite was numb with trepidation. “Got a shooting in Dallas!” he shouted authoritatively to the newsroom. Nothing further was coming over the other Teletypes. Had the gunfire been serious or not? Frenzy ensued as CBS News quickly tried to garner more information from Texas. When word of the shooting reached Dan Rather at KRLD-TV, he sprinted toward Dealey Plaza. At 1:36 p.m. EST, ABC News radio reported the shooting of Kennedy. Rather was trying to get the lay of the land. Although Rather’s version of events has changed over the years, with an aim of placing himself nearer the site of the shooting, Lew Wood swears he was actually holed up inside KRLD-TV.
Workaday competition among the news outfits didn’t melt away as the Dallas tragedy took its inevitable course. On the contrary, it intensified. Rather, a native Texan, wanted to own the story. Immediately, he ordered a search for home movies from someone in the crowd—wanting to document the president’s visit—might have taken of the shooting. Dick Salant, up in New York, put together a special unit to investigate the crime ASAP. The AT&T “pool car” broke from the motorcade route, rushing instead to Parkland Memorial Hospital. UPI’s Merriman Smith, dean of the White House correspondents, who had been an Eisenhower favorite, knew the story was only beginning to unfold and kept the car phone in his hands. Jack Bell demanded the phone so he could file a story to AP, but Smith mumbled that he had a bad connection. Bell knew this was a lie. With the car speeding through the Dallas streets at seventy miles an hour (and probably more), Bell pounded on Smith with both fists, determined to get the damn phone. As the car reached Parkland Memorial, Smith, having filed with the Dallas UPI office, finally tossed the phone to his rival and leapt out of the vehicle, sprinting inside the hospital.
The Kennedy assassination was two massive stories rolled into one: the shooting mystery and a larger question of whether the U.S. government was under siege. Smith of UPI, still pushing to outrun Bell of AP, spoke to a Secret Service agent at the hospital, who told him the president was dead. Smith chose not to report it without further confirmation. After hospital employees leaked more bleak information, Smith phoned another dispatch to his office. It was becoming more and more apparent that the president might be dead. Smith’s clumsily written scoop went over the wire, and at 1:39 p.m. in New York, fifteen bells rang on the Teletype at CBS.
FLASH
FLASH
KENNEDY SERIOUSLY WOUNDED PERHAPS SERIOUSLY PERHAPS FATALLY BY ASSASSINS BULLET
JT1239PCS
One UPI man (Smith) was passing the story on to another UP veteran (Cronkite). The wire service bells were ringing worldwide. Cronkite, who was managing editor in addition to being CBS’s on-air anchorman, read Smith’s dispatch and pounced. “Let’s get on the air,” he called out, unfazed. “Let’s get o
n the air.” The network was then broadcasting a popular soap opera, As the World Turns. Cronkite was already in the main studio, the CBS newsroom, but the cameras needed ten or fifteen minutes to warm up. The studio lights just weren’t “hot” for broadcast. Refusing to be derailed by the lighting delay, Cronkite rushed to an empty radio studio adjacent to the TV studio. Hewitt called the network’s master control and arranged for a patch into the television broadcast. As the World Turns—with a love-warped family Thanksgiving dinner plot—was replaced with a generic graphic slide reading, “CBS News Bulletin.” Cronkite’s clear and modulated voice, live from the radio booth, went out over the airwaves at 1:40 p.m. EST. Cronkite’s words, “We interrupt this program,” could be heard. But only the CBS eye logo was displayed on-screen:
Here is a bulletin from CBS News. In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas. The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting.
There was an interlude of stillness, then CBS returned to As the World Turns, which was taking a commercial break for Nescafé coffee. Cronkite, using the UPI report, had beaten NBC in announcing the Dallas event on the air by nearly a minute. Even as Cronkite was making the announcement, slowly and emphatically filling out the terse phrasing of Smith’s 1:39 p.m. EST report, a staffer slipped into the studio and handed him another wire service dispatch. He scanned it quickly. “More details just arrived,” Cronkite said on-air with grim determination, clearly disturbed by the update. “These details, about the same as previously: President Kennedy shot today just as his motorcade left downtown Dallas. Mrs. Kennedy jumped up and grabbed Mr. Kennedy; she called, ‘Oh, no!’ The motorcade sped on.” Cronkite returned to Smith’s report. “The United Press says that the wounds for President Kennedy, perhaps, could be fatal. Repeating, a bulletin from CBS News: President Kennedy has been shot by a would-be assassin in Dallas, Texas. Stay tuned to CBS News for further details.”
Cronkite was nothing if not rivalrous. Years later, he shamelessly bragged about CBS’s scoop over NBC and ABC, a boast that, if written by anybody else, would have seemed ghoulish. (“We beat NBC onto the air by almost a minute,” he proudly recalled in his memoir.) Taken without an understanding of the TV news industry, such statements were callous. But hypercompetitiveness, especially in the realm of historic breaking news like the JFK assassination, remains a powerful reality in the TV news world. In American journalism, being first, and right, has always brought the critics’ accolades. After that, you own the story for days to come. Smith had beaten Bell by the luck of sitting near the pool car phone. It was also Smith who first used the term grassy knoll in a dispatch; the label has become part of the American lexicon when discussing the Kennedy assassination.
After returning to the soap opera broadcast, for about ten minutes CBS started regularly interrupting As the World turns with updates from Cronkite about President Kennedy and Governor Connally. By now some CBS staffer was handing him an update every minute. As the crisis deepened, Eddie Barker, news director of KRLD-TV, the CBS affiliate in Dallas, offered the best on-the-ground reporting, for he spoke directly to a Parkland Memorial Hospital doctor. A mass of ominous details, such as the arrival of two priests at the hospital, kept dribbling in from Dallas. As a commercial for Friskies puppy food ran, Cronkite assembled the puzzle of the Dallas story in the CBS radio studio. Friskies would be the last commercial CBS would run for many hours. When the broadcast returned, Cronkite again took over the microphone, and he was the CBS network incarnate from that point on for the next five hours. CBS News stayed on the air under direct instruction from Bill Paley. Cronkite wasn’t allowed to return to regular programming, a decision that obviously pleased the anchor. “Because of Barker and Rather,” Cronkite asserted, “we were on top of the story throughout.”
Perhaps because Cronkite had spent time in the 1930s working out of Dallas’s UP office, he felt ideally suited to discuss that city’s downtown grid. He knew the bus lines. Because the Dallas tragedy came without a warning flare, the coverage of the Kennedy assassination on November 22 was entirely different from any major story that Cronkite, Hewitt, or even Bliss had ever grappled with. More than 175 million traumatized Americans tuned in to the three major networks for updates—the largest audience in TV history until then. CBS stayed live for fifty-five hours (with Cronkite carrying the bulk of the burden), ABC-TV for sixty hours, and NBC-TV for seventy-one hours and thirty-six minutes.
Like a trapeze artist without a net, Cronkite was on his own that November 22, anchoring only by his wit. He had the ability to smoothly amalgamate three or even more jobs at once with ease. He had a teacher’s desire to share knowledge with an audience. Just like any other emergency worker, when a crisis occurred, “the adrenaline pumps,” Cronkite said; a professional has a “job to do and you do the job.” He was a sort of multidimensional synthesizer, spinning order out of chaos, doing his editing, producing, and announcing while on air that Friday. What the CBS audience heard was not a series of dispatches but a dramatic story of remarkable roundness and clarity unfolding in real time. He was communicating to viewers that they were now witnesses—secondary ones, for sure—but witnesses nevertheless to an epoch-defining event. “The details would come in and it would build up in me,” Cronkite later reminisced. “I don’t even recall the spots.”
Cronkite had help from loyal lieutenants in Dallas, New York, and Washington, to be sure. CBS was the largest news organization in television, yet in the Kennedy assassination drama, Cronkite’s raw ability to communicate would make or break the network’s coverage. At first, he struggled to find the right words, as if cautiously making his way through a thicket of brambles. But before long, he had created a modulated rhythm for the broadcast that remained poignant for days. The grotesque surrealism of the Dallas chaos brought out his professional best. Never putting on his suit jacket, remaining in shirtsleeves for the duration of the epic broadcast, Cronkite brilliantly balanced his composure with skillful interludes of raw emotion. He was memorable without swamping the story. “Walter ate all of this up,” Socolow recalled. “He loved the excitement of the Dallas story. Don’t get me wrong, he didn’t like the president being shot. But he loved the frenetic newsroom utility.”
No one handled his TV duties during the Kennedy assassination ordeal with the high grace notes of Cronkite. NBC was on the air as the local WNBC-TV (New York) anchorman, Bill Ryan, broadcast the Dallas news. He was soon joined by Chet Huntley and Frank McGee, that network’s first-string anchor for live events (including space reporting). ABC started its coverage with reporter Jim Hagerty, former president Eisenhower’s press secretary, who was then replaced by the regular anchor, Ron Cochran, and reporter Ed Silverman. Howard K. Smith, then on a jet returning from Europe, became a mainstay on ABC almost as soon as the plane landed in New York. All the networks reported details of the shooting as they came in, but the key was Kennedy’s condition. Was he dead or alive? CBS News’ Robert Pierpoint was at Parkland when he made a call to Barker of KRLD-TV, who had spoken to a doctor who knew (for sure) that Kennedy was dead. Barker announced the death on KRLD at 1:18 p.m. EST, before anyone else, later regretting he omitted the detail of Jackie Kennedy’s pink Chanel suit being saturated with blood. “I was in shock,” Barker said. A few well-intentioned people suggested that Jackie change out of the suit. “No,” she replied, “let them see what they’ve done.”
CBS Radio went with Barker’s KRLD-TV story and announced nationally that the president was dead, but CBS Television wouldn’t follow suit. Cronkite urged caution. He felt a “chill” when he heard Kennedy’s death had been reported on CBS Radio. What if Kennedy weren’t dead? What if Barker had reported bum information from a Dallas doctor?
At 12:40 p.m. CST, Merriman Smith sent a lede on the UPI wire that quoted a Secret Service agent confirming that the president was indeed deceased. A correspondent for KRLD-TV made reference to such repor
ts while the affiliate was on a feed into CBS, but Cronkite still refrained from airing it. NBC was also cautious, awaiting firm confirmation from Parkland Memorial Hospital. No one was certain who had killed the president or whether it was part of a larger attack on America. A hell’s stew of conspiracy theories would eventually bubble forth, blaming the murder on Fidel Castro, Lee Harvey Oswald, LBJ, the Mafia, the CIA, the Dallas Police Department, and the Kremlin. Television was the fastest way to deliver news—words and pictures—and likewise, the fastest way to spread mere conjecture. As the afternoon spun forward, even the most aggressive television veterans were daunted by the task at hand: making sure they didn’t accidentally feed the conspiracy.
From CBS News headquarters in New York, Hewitt anxiously called Rather and Pierpoint down in Dallas. Who were Barker’s sources for the report that Kennedy was dead? Rather told Hewitt about a priest and a doctor, but Cronkite wanted more specifics before he could break the news definitively. “Even if you are right (and God help you if you are wrong),” Rather later explained of Hewitt’s wise hesitation, “you are not going to go with a story of that proportion as confidently on television as you would on radio. It’s just the different intensity of the two mediums, the size of the audience, the weight of the news.”
Hewitt handed his conversation notes with Rather to Cronkite, who was talking on the air. Although Cronkite had been more cautious regarding false starts and piecemeal reconstructions, he now chose to use the Rather ledes from Dallas. “We just have a report from our correspondent Dan Rather in Dallas,” Cronkite said, “that he has confirmed that President Kennedy is dead. We still have no official confirmation of this, however. It’s a report from our correspondent Dan Rather in Dallas, Texas.” Cronkite’s punctuated delivery was bracing. Covering his own back, Cronkite used Rather as his potential fall guy if the Barker report proved false. Cronkite wasn’t yet ready to attach his own mint Newsweek cover name to a possibly untrue announcement of Kennedy’s passing. Hesitation was his ally of the moment. Confirmation from Parkland—not Rather—was the ultimate best source from Cronkite’s cautious perspective. If Kennedy had survived, then Rather would have gotten thrown under the bus.