Cronkite

by Douglas Brinkley

  On November 25, 1969, Cronkite countered the image created by Agnew of a parochial New York–Washington point of view in the networks by speaking before the Chamber of Commerce in St. Joseph, Missouri. The Midwest venue was just a couple of miles from the Grey Lying-In Hospital where he had been born in November 1916. Cronkite, enthusiastically embraced by his hometown audience, spoke for two hours and answered myriad questions about broadcast journalism (the first half hour of the St. Joseph event aired on 60 Minutes). With an American flag as his backdrop, he called Agnew’s Des Moines speech and chairman of the Federal Communications Commission Dean Burch’s vocal support of it “a clear effort at intimidation.” One of the residents of St. Joseph, seemingly sympathetic, asked Cronkite if the networks weren’t overreacting a tad bit. “Perhaps we didn’t react enough,” Cronkite replied. “We reacted to an implied threat to free speech, and when there is that, we must react tough, we must react hard.”

  Coinciding with Cronkite’s inspired public forum in St. Joseph, CBS president Dr. Frank Stanton likewise vented his frustration with Agnew in a scathing letter to the White House, claiming the vice president’s ugly Des Moines address had the “gravest implications” for American democracy. Cronkite and Stanton were willing to go toe-to-toe with the White House to defend the fourth estate.

  A deeply offended Cronkite was vocal in decrying what he called the Nixon administration’s “implied threat.” To Cronkite, the vice president was playing a blackmail game “dangerous to democracy in America.” This was open warfare.

  The Nixon crew grossly miscalculated how protective Cronkite was of his profession. He wasn’t really avuncular at all. You didn’t lock Murrow out of the CBS anchor booth, as Cronkite did during the 1960 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, if you weren’t a rumbler. Instead of rolling over, Cronkite repeatedly criticized the Nixon White House. To the consternation of Stanton, he even testified at a congressional hearing, charging the White House with conspiracy against the press. A pretty heavy accusation. “Some of my colleagues, even those at CBS, thought I had gone too far,” Cronkite recalled. “They said I had no proof that the campaign was centrally directed and was in fact a conspiracy. I think I used the old duck theory: If it swims, walks and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck.”

  Back on October 15, 1969, President Nixon fumed over the way Cronkite enthused about Moratorium Day, when two hundred thousand protesters arrived on the Mall holding candles in vigil, pleading for the end of the Vietnam War. Television coverage had given credence to the protest. Cronkite, after listening to Coretta Scott King speak at the event, said in a CBS Special Report that the protest was “historic in its scope” and that “never before had so many demonstrated their hope for peace.” For that act, a clearly irked Nixon wrote in the news summary next to Cronkite’s name the kind of snarky language expected from Holden Caulfield: “A nothing!”

  Coinciding with Agnew’s frontal attack on the Big Three, the FBI started investigating Cronkite. The bureau long denied that it monitored him, but it changed its story in 2006 to say his records had been destroyed. A Freedom of Information Act request nevertheless managed to uncover proof of the Nixon administration’s surveillance of Cronkite. The FBI unearthed at least one informant who claimed that Cronkite was collaborating with anti–Vietnam War activists beginning in 1969. The documents, publicized in 2010 by Yahoo! News, attest that an FBI informant infiltrated a protest group known as Youth for New America. When Cronkite was at WKMG, the CBS affiliate in Orlando, he spoke with the informant for about forty-five minutes, full of sympathy for the antiwar cause.

  The files suggest that Cronkite encouraged the informant to hold a “Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam” rally at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. Nixon would be in Florida on November 14, 1969, for the launch of Apollo 12, and the group wanted to embarrass POTUS by holding a rally near Cape Kennedy on November 13 and 14. On November 15 a huge antiwar march was scheduled for Washington. The FBI learned that Cronkite, the supposedly neutral newsman, had told the informant that if the Youth for New America held an anti-Nixon rally in Florida at Kelley Park, CBS News would rent a helicopter to transport Senator Ed Muskie of Maine in from a fund-raiser to speak at the event. Cronkite allegedly promised that CBS News would then extensively cover the rally in Florida and the subsequent march in the District of Columbia. To Cronkite, getting Muskie—perhaps the leading antiwar senator—guaranteed that the protest would qualify as big-time news. Whether the informant was telling the truth will never be known.

  That wasn’t the only revelation coming out of Cronkite’s seventy-two-page file. The FBI had also monitored Cronkite’s work with civil rights activists in Mississippi and had kept surveillance files on environmentalists who participated in his CBS News forum on Earth Day. “There was a battle between the Nixon White House and CBS that developed,” Buchanan recalled. “About two-thirds of the American public relied on the network news. We knew that going after CBS wasn’t risk-free. Nobody was going to cover for us. We were entering a hostile environment. War. Nixon truly saw the press as the enemy.”

  During the last half of 1969, Buchanan coordinated a study of network news to quantify the perceived liberal bias. His opinions took shape in a White House travesty called “The Enemies List,” a paranoid tabulation of Nixon’s perceived political critics and opponents. Compiled by Special Counsel to the President Charles Colson, the list’s purpose was to “screw” Nixon’s political enemies via tax audits from the IRS and the denial of grants, visas, et cetera. CBS News correspondent Daniel Schorr found himself perched at number eighteen on Nixon’s “screw” roster. “For reasons I never quite understood,” NBC News’ David Brinkley later wrote, of being named in the Agnew speech, “Nixon thought I was his number-one enemy. I never liked him much but never attacked him on the air.”

  History has vindicated Cronkite’s belief that Nixon himself—not surrogates—wanted to destroy the Big Three. When the Watergate tapes were released in July 1974, there was President Nixon giving the marching order: “The press is the enemy.” Throughout the Nixon tapes, Cronkite’s name is mentioned on numerous occasions. The White House was indeed bent on intimidating reporters. “Was there a conspiracy, as Walter Cronkite of CBS once solemnly charged, on the part of the Nixon administration to discredit and malign the press?” former Nixon White House speechwriter and future New York Times columnist William Safire rhetorically asked. “Was this so-called ‘anti-media campaign’ encouraged, directed, and urged by the President himself? Did this alleged campaign to defame and intimidate Nixon-hating newsmen succeed, isolating and weakening them politically? The answer to all those questions is, sadly, yes.”

  Nixon’s offensive unleashed a pent-up response from millions of what he called the “silent majority,” conservatives and libertarians frustrated by what they perceived as the unpatriotic liberal tone of the evening news. All riled up by Agnew, they suddenly found themselves part of a chorus of pro–White House voices who wanted to burn the House of Cronkite down. The issue of television news bias became a Republican rallying cry and gave the divided country yet another issue for bitter argument. Both Time and Newsweek ran cover articles on the Big Three anchormen under siege by the White House, legitimizing the question of whether they had too much power. Agnew, a former Maryland governor, was transformed from an obscure vice president into the party’s most popular fund-raiser. Wherever he was scheduled to speak, especially about the media, his appearances were certain sellouts. It was like a Coney Island freak show: Come hear Agnew whip on the press! Red meat guaranteed! Nobody knows where his tongue shall go! The networks received hundreds of thousands of letters, telegrams, and telephone calls denouncing them as un-American. CBS News reported in December 1969 that it had never received so much feedback on an issue, and that the messages were running five to one in favor of Agnew’s position.

  Under Colson’s leadership the White House investigated Cronkite’s public
utterances, hoping to expose him as a Kennedy liberal masquerading as an objective journalist. When Colson analyzed Cronkite’s CBS Evening News broadcasts, he struggled to strike gold. But when Colson read transcripts of Cronkite’s CBS Radio News broadcasts, which he had started doing in the early 1960s, the anchorman lit up like a Christmas tree. President Johnson had once quipped that if Cronkite had the audacity to say on TV what he said on his radio program, “there would be revolution in the streets.” Colson was on the hunt, his rifle scope aimed at Cronkite’s back.

  The most controversial transcript Colson read was Cronkite’s CBS Radio News broadcast in December 1969 that criticized the U.S. government for the 1968 My Lai tragedy, in which hundreds of South Vietnamese civilians were brutally murdered by U.S. Army soldiers belonging to Charlie Company, Eleventh Brigade, Americal Division. Cronkite editorialized aloud why more Americans weren’t livid with the U.S. Army for trying to cover up the massacre. Discontented with the narrow confines of the CBS Evening News, Cronkite sowed his wild oats, as Friendly had suggested back in 1966, on his radio broadcasts. It was sort of the five-minute broadcast version of I. F. Stone’s newsletter. Sensing that the CBS Evening News wasn’t the place to praise reporter Seymour M. Hersh for breaking the news of My Lai, Cronkite could nevertheless lend support for his impeccable research on his radio soapbox.

  Decades later, Cronkite admitted that Colson wasn’t wrong to interpret his CBS radio commentary as profoundly antiwar analysis. “I was certainly always amazed by what I got by with on the radio and why it never caught up with me,” Cronkite reflected, “because I lashed out on the radio.” Not only was Cronkite liberal on his radio show, but he also attacked the Nixon administration with some regularity for abandoning the poor, race-baiting, and violating the U.S. Constitution—not lighthearted stuff. “I thought that some day the roof was going to fall in,” Cronkite laughed years later. “Somebody was going to write a big piece in the newspaper or something. I don’t know why to this day I got away with it! We just got deeper and deeper and went further and further testing the waters and I never got called on it.”

  The horror of Nixon’s continuation of the Vietnam War obliged Cronkite to become a left-leaning CBS Radio editorializer, which raises the question: how did he get away with such over-the-top commentary full of pro-Democratic partisanship? The “fun part of it,” Cronkite maintained, was taunting Nixon and Colson to come after him. They tried. But after reading a batch of Cronkite’s radio broadcasts, it became obvious to Colson that the anchorman used generic qualifiers to protect himself from slander. Lines like “people feel that” or “it is believed by some people” were routinely used by Cronkite to provide plausible deniability.

  The war between the White House and CBS News had deteriorated into litigation. CBS News reporter Daniel Schorr accused Pat Buchanan’s brother, Henry, of laundering money on behalf of the Nixon administration. That was no small story. In May 1973, Cronkite ran this as the lead story on the Evening News. Henry Buchanan brought a libel suit against Cronkite. Following the money was complicated; there was never sufficient evidence against Buchanan to prove his guilt. CBS News assembled a hotshot legal team to flog the Buchanans in court and clung to The New York Times Co. v. Sullivan case (in which the Supreme Court held that libel or defamation could be proved only if a publisher had prior knowledge that printed information was false or otherwise acted with a reckless disregard for the truth) as its defense. Henry Buchanan was a de facto public figure, and therefore malice had to be proved for Cronkite and Schorr to be guilty of libel. The whole lawsuit ended in a stalemate. “The Cronkite-Schorr charge against my brother was false,” a still-irate Pat Buchanan maintained over forty years after the case had disappeared. “History proves it was false.”

  In February 1970, the White House, newly incensed by a perceived slight by David Brinkley on TV in regard to the defense budget, returned to its original plan of maligning the Big Three. “Concentrate on NBC,” White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman ordered Jeb Magruder, working under the umbrella of Nixon, “and give some real thought as to how to handle the problem that they have created in their almost totally negative approach to everything the Administration does.” It appeared Nixon was gaining the upper hand, but not on Cronkite. Many journalists were timid about not ruffling White House feathers. They didn’t want to get slimed by Agnew. The New Yorker printed a rare, five-page editorial denouncing the new journalistic environment. “In hundreds of tiny ways,” the esteemed magazine charged, “news coverage now seems to reflect an eagerness to please the people in power.” In March 1970, Cronkite agreed in an on-air interview with The New Yorker’s premise. “I feel that perhaps subconsciously,” he said, “things are happening, but I’m trying to rise above it. But I think the industry as a whole is intimidated. Yes, I think that was the intention and I think it worked.”

  Six months previously, the CBS Evening News had broadcast footage of a South Vietnamese soldier stabbing an unarmed Vietcong prisoner to death in the hamlet of Bau Me. It was powerful stuff, showing the soldier knifing the prisoner in the side, laboriously pulling the blade out and then stabbing the prisoner’s stomach. Cronkite had made a real commitment to the story. In spring 1970 a sudden spate of newspaper columns charged that the incident was staged and that fakery was a common practice on the network news shows. Cronkite considered this “an undercover campaign to discredit CBS News.” He suspected the Nixon administration was trying to build support for its latest commitment to the South Vietnamese army and had fed themes and half-truths to columnists. White House director of communications Herb Klein, a former reporter for The San Diego Union-Tribune, was the troublemaking culprit for CBS News.

  Under Cronkite’s marching orders, CBS News reinvestigated the Bau Me footage and located the South Vietnamese soldier who had killed the prisoner. The soldier admitted to knifing the Vietcong guerrilla but claimed it was an act of self-defense, as the man was reaching for a gun lying nearby. The CBS News film showed that another prisoner had been reaching for the weapon. The Evening News reran the original story. Afterward, Cronkite did not try to disguise his attitude. “We broadcast the original story,” he said starkly, “in the belief it told something about the nature of the war in Vietnam. What has happened since then tells something about the Government and its relations with news media which carry stories the Government finds disagreeable.”

  In late 1970, CBS president Frank Stanton received a letter from Senator J. William Fulbright (D-Ark.), who informed him that the Pentagon itself was guilty of the very artifice the White House had accused CBS News of: “fraudulent press practices.” Fulbright described incidents staged by the Department of Defense to provide film supporting its war policies. Determined to embarrass Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, Fulbright detailed his charges in his 1970 book The Pentagon Propaganda Machine. CBS News subsequently produced a CBS Reports documentary, titled “The Selling of the Pentagon,” about the Defense Department’s propaganda activities. Its investigation exposed how the Pentagon wasted huge sums of taxpayer money to promote what President Eisenhower had called the military-industrial complex. CBS News had acquired from DoD’s public affairs office all the anti-communist propaganda films made by the department in the cold war.

  One segment included a clip from a U.S. military film espousing a Red Scare ethos that smacked of McCarthyism (or so it seemed to the 1970s youth). Called The Eagle’s Talon, the 1962 Pentagon propaganda film warned that “an aggressive Communist tide has spread in Europe and Asia to engulf its neighbors. Communist China even now has plans to dominate Asia by mass murder—destroying ancient civilizations.” The narrator for The Eagle’s Talon was none other than Walter Cronkite. His distinctive voice lent a measure of credibility to the harsh anti-communist opinions delivered in the DoD film. This uncomfortable fact was going to be highlighted in “The Selling of the Pentagon,” narrated by Roger Mudd and scheduled to air on February 23, 1971.

  Wit
h the documentary a lock, someone had to inform Cronkite that this old footage was going to be aired . . . and that he looked and sounded like an idiot in The Eagle’s Talon. But no one jumped up to volunteer. The problem was discussed at some length, and finally Gordon Manning, vice president of the CBS news division, was assigned the task of telling Cronkite during a long overseas trip the two were taking. But somehow, Manning never found the right time to bring it up.

  Dick Salant, CBS News president, then stepped up. He screened the CBS Reports documentary with Cronkite and Peter Davis, its producer. “Fine job,” Cronkite said to Davis afterward, as the lights were turned on. “All right,” Cronkite then said to Salant, in self-defense, “get that piece out of there.”

  Recognizing the frangibility of CBS News’ position, Salant replied that The Eagle’s Talon clip had to stay in. Cronkite, to put it mildly, wasn’t a happy camper. “It seemed to some,” recalled Bill Leonard, “Walter included, that we were going out of our way to inflict damage on ourselves in public if we included a clip from that film in ‘The Selling of the Pentagon.’ ” The reason Cronkite’s 1962 flacking for anti-communism couldn’t be excised, Salant maintained, was that the Nixon White House would come roaring back at them for hypocrisy. After all, the Pentagon had provided a print of The Eagle’s Talon to CBS in its shipment of propaganda films. The die was cast. “You can be sure,” Leonard wrote, “it would have been a part of the ammunition hurled at CBS if we had suppressed it.”