Cronkite

by Douglas Brinkley

  While Cronkite had been cognizant of Commoner as a serious antinuke scientist, it was the professor’s 1966 book, Science and Survival, which he read to prep for Earth Day, that further startled him out of a stupor. Commoner was remonstrating against what happened when the industrial order spun madly out of control, when society so fully believed in technology that it arrogantly treated nature as its slave. “Science can reveal the depth of the crisis,” Commoner concluded, “but only social action can resolve it.”

  Only after Commoner had laid out the crisis did Cronkite say, “Good evening.” It was clear that Cronkite was riding on the side of the Earth Day organizers demanding ecological balance in the country. Earth Day was the nationwide “environmental awareness day” that Commoner had long called for. In cities all across America, millions of citizens took part in teach-ins protesting the poisoning of Mother Earth. In New York City much of Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street were closed to traffic. Cronkite wandered all around New York, watching Americans improvise Earth Day with Frisbee contests, folk music, and pure-oxygen breathing exercises. Union Square became a beehive for the environmentally aware to wave placards and chant “Save the Planet,” creating what the New York Times called an “ecological carnival” for pedestrians. A leading organizer of Earth Day, Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-Wisc.), thanked Frank Stanton and Cronkite for “devoting extensive time and energy to the task of educating the nation on the problem.”

  It’s hard to measure the precise impact Cronkite had on the first Earth Day. As a commentator, he was brilliantly colorful in describing Earth Day on air as the opening salvo in a battle to protect from destruction the blue-green planet photographed by the Apollo astronauts from the Moon. To hear him bemoan the “littered Earth” and “filthy waters,” calling the desecration a “crime against humanity,” certainly seized viewers’ attention. Cronkite—along with executive producer Ernest Leiser and Ron Bonn—had helped legitimize Earth Day as the major news event of the spring. In his CBS News Report commentary, Cronkite perhaps overreported the day’s arrests and police altercations and Earth Day’s extreme activists, who looked more like disaffected hippies than up-and-coming biologists. But merely by taking a deeply personal interest in Earth Day and treating the grassroots event as serious news, he lent his credibility to the environmental cause. “Whenever he mentioned it on the air,” Sam Love, an Earth Day organizer, noted, “I noticed that the mail increased. I always thought CBS and Cronkite helped make the events because they gave it validation.”

  On the heels of Cronkite’s Earth Day broadcast came the Kent State University shootings. On May 4, the troops of the Ohio National Guard opened fire on five hundred college students, some of whom were protesting against the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, which bordered South Vietnam. Gunshots killed four students and wounded nine others. Cronkite was at Century City in Los Angeles that afternoon, to attend a meeting with the owners of CBS affiliates. That evening, he delivered the Kent State news in a disapproving way, which had the net effect of infuriating the affiliates’ conservative station owners. “The affiliates went crazy on Walter,” Socolow recalled. “They thought he had treated the Ohio National Guard as criminals, not law enforcement professionals. Dick Salant, a real hero, absorbed all of their complaints. Boy, it was nasty. They thought Walter had turned hippie.”

  As with many other American tragedies, it fell to Cronkite to break the news to viewers that evening. Thomas and Colette Grace had settled into their living room to listen to Cronkite as usual. When the anchorman started talking about bloodshed at Kent State, they sat straight up. Their son was a sophomore at the Ohio university. It turned out that he had been wounded. They found out about this from watching CBS News. The Graces weren’t the only ones to learn from the Cronkite broadcast about their sons or daughters being killed or maimed by the Ohio National Guard.

  With Ike Pappas and Harry Reasoner assigned to the story by Leiser, Cronkite reported for the next week on the fallout from Kent State, which included more than one hundred college strikes and closures, spontaneous memorials for the dead, and criminal prosecution of the guardsmen. With sympathy and concern, he interviewed leftist critics of the National Guard such as pediatrician Benjamin Spock, civil rights icon Coretta Scott King, and folk singer Phil Ochs, all of whom demanded that Nixon be impeached.

  Five days after the shootings, a hundred thousand people demonstrated in Washington, D.C. Cronkite covered the gathering like a cub reporter. On May 14, just ten days after the Kent State shooting, two students were killed by police at Jackson State University. Cronkite led the call for Nixon to establish the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest at once; the administration heeded the advice. Although the semantic shift wasn’t commented on by media critics, Cronkite, along with CBS reporter Ike Pappas, began referring to Kent State as a “massacre.” It was clear he sided with the college students protesting both the Cambodian incursion and the Kent State killings. The anchor even went so far as to encourage his friend, the novelist James Michener, to get to the bottom of the Ohio National Guard story. According to Cronkite, the American public needed answers, and he didn’t trust the Nixon administration to provide them. Michener, with Cronkite spurring him on, published Kent State: What Happened and Why in 1971.

  Because of CBS News’ coverage of Earth Day and the Kent State massacre, Cronkite became popular on college campuses. The World War II generation had long trusted him, but by the spring of 1970 so, too, did the Vietnam generation. He now helped define the youth zeitgeist of America. He had given it his imprimatur. Cronkite delivered the commencement address at the University of Missouri at Columbia, where Betsy had graduated. The anchorman shocked the board of trustees by defending antiwar and pro-environment youth movements. “We must not reject those among us who dissent,” he intoned. “We must assist, not resist.”

  Cronkite was flying high with his Apollo 11 and Earth Day coverage, and his accolades for journalistic integrity were stacking up. The National Academy of Arts and Sciences honored him for two years in a row: 1970 and 1971. His CBS News special “The Flight of Apollo 13”—about how the lunar module Aquarius “lifeboat-rescued” Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise—had earned him an Emmy Award. In acceptance speeches, Cronkite credited NASA with preserving American can-do greatness at a time of widespread discontent. “The 1960s, when we first launched humans into space and went to the Moon, were in other ways a drain on our spirit,” Cronkite said. “The civil rights battles, the frightening divisiveness of the Vietnam War, the horrible assassinations—they drained the American spirit. It’s no exaggeration to say the space program saved us.”

  Just how fervent an environmentalist Cronkite had become was apparent when, on December 3, 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was founded. Cronkite stood in happy disbelief as President Nixon, the reluctant environmentalist, signed into law a whole host of legislation aimed at curbing air, water, and pesticide pollution and ocean dumping. The first EPA administrator, William Ruckelshaus, whom Nixon called Mr. Clean, was astounded that Cronkite visited him just a couple of days after assuming office. “I was surprised,” Ruckelshaus recalled, “how deeply interested Walter was in the environment, that he prioritized it in such a public way.”

  Cronkite had a pantheistic philosophy about life that came straight out of the transcendentalists and was captured by “Earthrise”: how can humans stop the violence and destruction of the planet? He told millions of TV viewers that the ravaging and raping of the Earth had to end. If Americans turned their backs on the problems of radiation, air pollution, water pollution, bulldozing the wilderness, draining wetlands, killing estuaries, filling the skies with noise, there would be no tomorrow. The U.S. government needed to regulate polluting corporations and force them to prioritize environment over profit. That was the Cronkite view of Earth Day, and it placed him in the vanguard of the ecology movement. He embraced young people, most of them in the same generation as his three ch
ildren, in promoting the essential idea that all citizens had to be good custodians of the Earth. “Can the world be saved?” Cronkite regularly asked CBS viewers. “That is not doomsday rhetoric; it is, rather, the central question of our epoch.” A full-page photograph of the Statue of Liberty jutting out from a garbage dump, a discarded TV with a shattered screen on top of the refuse heap, was shown by Cronkite on both CBS News and in his book Eye on the World, published in May 1971.

  Never before had Cronkite been so daring about promoting public policy as in Eye on the World. The book is a clumsily constructed omnibus of CBS News’ reporting on the major trends and stories of 1970, with an emphasis on ecology. Cronkite edited it and provided analysis and commentary. He had been coached by Yale law professor Charles Reich, whose book The Greening of America advocated “choosing a new life-style” undergirded in a new ecological consciousness. This was a stark departure from NASA boosterism, and it positioned Cronkite as a man of the left. Republicans had always liked the idea that Cronkite, even if liberal leaning, was pulling for the United States to whip the Soviets in the space race. But Nixon was now in the White House, and Cronkite’s promotion of the 1970s as the Decade of the Environment was a slap at petroleum companies, forest product industries, auto companies, and corporations seeking minerals. All his heroes in Eye on the World—Senator Ed Muskie (D-Maine), Dr. Barry Commoner, biologist Dr. Paul Ehrlich, and consumer activist Ralph Nader—were left-of-center political figures.

  The Big Four villains of Eye on the World were Dow Chemical, the Florida Power & Light Company, Consolidated Edison, and Chevron Oil Company. It seemed that Union Carbide caught a break for sponsoring The Twenty-First Century for so long, as Cronkite took aim squarely at corporate polluters. With uncanny prescience, he scolded them for the damage carbon dioxide was causing the planet’s health. Long before Al Gore made global warming household words in his 2006 Academy Award–winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Cronkite sounded the alarm on CBS Evening News and in Eye on the World. “Every year American power plants pour more than 800 million tons of carbon dioxide into the skies,” Cronkite warned. “Some scientists suspect that carbon dioxide can turn the planet into a kind of greenhouse, sealing in heat so that temperatures gradually rise until the polar icecaps melt and a new deluge covers the lands of the earth.”

  Cronkite became personally involved in two save-the-coast conservation initiatives in 1970 and 1971. When an oil slick marred the waters off Edgartown, he became engaged with the Martha’s Vineyard Eco-Action and Catastrophe Committee. While Cronkite himself didn’t carry a “Don’t Oil Our Ducks” placard, he did run a picture of his young environmentally minded friends on the Vineyard and he helped them raise money. Furthermore, he lent his prestige to a grassroots effort to stop heavy industrial users—such as oil refineries and bulk shipping stations—from damaging coastal areas in Delaware and Maryland. Deeply involved with the nonprofit World Wildlife Fund, he grew determined to learn how to identify the numerous species of water fowl. On a couple of occasions, he claimed that Roger Tory Peterson’s Guide to the Birds, which went through six editions, was his favorite book. Whenever Cronkite went on his twice-annual trip to Austin to see his daughter, he brought with him Peterson’s Field Guide to Texas and Adjacent States. In 1980 he would get to collaborate with Peterson on the book Save the Birds. Cronkite’s message in the manifesto was that if the birds die, we all die.

  CBS Evening News won an Emmy Award for its “Can the World Be Saved?” segments. After that, all CBS reporters were anxious for environmental assignments; the airing of occasional “Can the World Be Saved?” segments lasted until 1980. By the twenty-first century, Earth Day had grown into an unofficial calendar holiday almost like Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day. To commemorate its twentieth anniversary, the René Dubos Center for Human Environment presented Cronkite with its prestigious Only One Earth Award; his citation touted his promotion of environmental literacy. It was an honor he treasured. At the New York Hilton gala, more than one thousand environmentally minded citizens stood up to toast the man who helped put Earth Day and the New Environmentalism on the TV media map.

  For the rest of his life, Cronkite would cite “Earthrise,” Silent Spring, and The Closing Circle with opening his mind to the planet’s peril. But it was sailing on Wyntje, a galaxy of stars overhead, that led him to worship God as the master of the universe. “It’s about your own relationship with Mother Nature,” he said. “At sea you are in league with her. But she’s watching you with that cocked eye.” When a Texas teenager asked Cronkite in 2000 what was the most significant event of his lifetime, without hesitation he said, “The conquest of space,” adding that he still dreamed of walking on the Moon for the cosmic experience of seeing Earth, “this little lifeboat floating out there in space.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The Nixon-versus-CBS War

  WARRING WITH PAT BUCHANAN—COLSON GONE HATCHET—AGNEW UNLEASHED—FBI ON THE TRAIL—NOT ON THE ENEMIES LIST—CHALLENGING THE NIXON ADMINISTRATION FROM ST. JO—CBS RADIO ATTACK DOG—THE IMPLIED THREAT OF HERB KLEIN—THE SILENT MAJORITY TURNS ON CRONKITE (A LITTLE BIT)—DEFENDER OF ELECTRONIC JOURNALISM—“THE SELLING OF THE PENTAGON”—YANKEES, BROADWAY, AND PAPEETE—DEFENDER OF EARL CALDWELL—MAKING MURROW PROUD

  On November 13, 1969, Cronkite became flabbergasted by Vice President Spiro Agnew’s blistering tirade—“On the National Media”—to a group of enthusiastic Republicans in Des Moines, Iowa. The ardent address, written by Patrick Buchanan (then a thirty-one-year-old White House staff writer for President Nixon), focused specifically on the liberal bias of TV network news programs, the dominant communications medium on the national front. Buchanan recalled being summoned to the Oval Office to discuss his writing of the overbearing first draft of the Agnew speech. President Nixon “was enjoying himself immensely,” cackling out loud with glee over the hard-hitting prose. Unleashing Agnew on the Big Three in such an ad hominem way was a blood sport of great amusement to the boss. “Nixon had his glasses on and was editing it by hand,” Buchanan revealed in a 2011 interview. “ ‘This will tear the scab off those bastards!’ ” Buchanan remembered Nixon saying. “Usually, White House speeches got watered down. But not this one. Nixon liked the sting of it all.”

  Practically waving a tomahawk as he spoke in Iowa, Agnew excoriated the Big Three networks (“this little group of men who not only enjoy a right of instant rebuttal to every Presidential address, but more importantly, wield a free hand in selecting, presenting and interpreting the great issues of the nation”). Agnew’s indignation, vivid and surprising, was aimed at Cronkite’s tribe, that “small group of men, numbering perhaps no more than a dozen ‘anchormen,’ commentators and executive producers [who] settle upon the 20 minutes or so of film and commentary that is to reach the public.” The small elitist group, Agnew caustically charged, was based in New York and Washington and didn’t represent real America. With a final deft, sharp stab, Agnew implied that programs like the CBS Evening News bolstered radical elements in society and were prejudiced against President Nixon. It was inferred that if the Vietnam War was indeed a stalemate, the blame rested on liberal reporters such as Safer, Schorr, Rather, and Laurence because they had steered public opinion leftward with their gruesome field reports from the jungles of Vietnam. “It is time,” Agnew warned, “that the networks were made more responsive to the views of the nation and more responsible to the people they serve.”

  President Nixon wasn’t the first president to feel persecuted by the fourth estate, and to fantasize about browbeating it into lapdog obedience. But he brought the president-versus-the-press friction to radioactive levels. John F. Kennedy, a media darling, had carped regularly about unfair coverage back in the 1960 presidential campaign, believing that Cronkite was a Republican. At the beginning of Nixon’s first term, as Cronkite recalled, “This administration’s antagonism had been about like the antagonism shown by previous administrations.” Cronkite
actually judged Democratic presidents more combative with the press than Republicans. But Nixon had brought his overweening anti-press baggage with him when he moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Early in his first term, he wrote in a memo that the majority of journalists had a “negative attitude” toward him and that “their whole objective in life is to bring us down.” It became a self-fulling prophecy.

  A preview of the distrust that developed between the CBS Evening News and the White House first flared on May 6, 1969. Cronkite hosted a CBS News Special called “The Correspondents Report,” to analyze Nixon’s first one hundred days in office. Dan Rather gushed about the “great vigor” Nixon showed in overseeing an enlightened foreign policy. Just three days later, the press found out about the secret bombings of Cambodia (a display of raw presidential power that sickened Cronkite).

  Although President Nixon had anger burning in his breast toward journalists, he didn’t lash out at the media himself. But Agnew—who had ironically enjoyed an amicable relationship with the press—could. When the vice president delivered Buchanan’s speech (which Cronkite said “dripped with vitriol”), the Big Three networks—in lockstep—carried the speech live from Des Moines. Agnew charged that these New York–based networks, elitist bastions, were in conspiracy with The New York Times’ editorial page. This was untrue. What Agnew failed to mention was that the top CBS, NBC, and ABC anchors hailed from North Carolina, Montana, Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota, and Louisiana—and that they didn’t take marching orders from the same management. “To people in broadcasting, the picture of Chet Huntley, Frank Reynolds, Walter Cronkite, and the rest ‘talking constantly to one another,’ ” Ed Bliss Jr. of CBS wrote in Now the News, “was laughable.”