Cronkite’s narration, a patriotic gesture in 1962 when Kennedy’s New Frontiersmen were in charge, nine years later reeked of Nixonian anti-communist propaganda. Everybody knew that Cronkite was partial to NASA. But had he also been in the tank with McNamara? Was he a Kennedy patsy? The documentary left that unfortunate impression. Cronkite had lent his coveted voice to all sorts of documentary projects in the early 1960s. Every museum imaginable had asked him to narrate multimedia exhibits. Residual fallout from “The Selling of the Pentagon,” it seemed, was the price he paid for those lucrative Kennedy-era commissions. How Cronkite wished in 1971 that he could be edited out of the embarrassing documentary. “I felt that I was being singled out,” Cronkite complained. “In fact, a lot of people had done those films. It was a popular thing to do in Washington. They made it appear as if I was the only one that did it, and I didn’t think that was fair.”
Cronkite held a long grudge against Mudd for agreeing to narrate “The Selling of the Pentagon.” Andy Rooney thought it cost Mudd the CBS Evening News anchor chair when Cronkite retired. It was all beyond embarrassing to Cronkite. There he was, a civilian broadcaster, dressed in the full uniform of a U.S. Marine colonel, narrating gobbledy-gook about the “Red Threat.” Not that he was averse to the documentary’s central message: that responsible citizens should consider what the government tells them and, if warranted, take the trouble to question it. On a CBS Evening News broadcast, Cronkite delivered one of the shortest editorial commentaries on record, no doubt spontaneously. Jack Gould mockingly described it in The New York Times. “Walter Cronkite,” he wrote, “one of the anchormen most careful in keeping himself out of the news personally, on Tuesday night reported the involved, convoluted language used by the military to explain American air strikes in Indochina. ‘Oh,’ Cronkite said, after a pregnant pause.” One word shorter than his “Oh, boy” outburst when Armstrong walked on the Moon.
In a public lecture, Cronkite spoke of the widening of the Vietnam War into Laos to illustrate why TV news was an essential part of democracy. CBS News had reported on illegal U.S. military engagement in Laos. The Nixon administration, hoping these true accounts would fizzle out, denied them. Conservatives claimed that the CBS Evening News had fabricated the Laos story to embarrass the president, an accusation that left Cronkite incredulous. “There are a couple of hundred correspondents in Vietnam who have reported it,” Cronkite said in a speech to the Economic Club of Detroit. “Now does anybody seriously think they’re sitting in a back room in Vietnam somewhere . . . saying ‘Listen, let’s put Americans in Laos this week. That’ll be a whale of a story. Let’s do that.’ . . . Does anybody believe the press can sit there and dream that up? And yet people say, ‘Are we really in Laos? I mean because the administration hasn’t said we’re there.’ Well, I think we better start believing the press again.”
On five or six occasions, to soften his stock image as an Eastern establishment figure at odds with the Nixon administration, Cronkite opened his personal life to magazines and newspapers. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to spend time with Walter and Betsy. When cavorting with reporters, Cronkite preferred dining on loaded-up cheeseburgers at P.J. Clarke’s to discuss the circus aspects of American political life. His two favorite interview venues were his CBS News office or The Slate, a popular CBS News hangout on the West Side with low ceilings, sawdust on the wooden floors, and a homestyle menu. Best of all, Seymour Rand, the proprietor, allowed Cronkite to run up a huge tab. At times he’d even tell Cronkite that drinks were on the house—music to the tight-walleted anchorman’s ears.
Including Betsy in profiles, to prove that Cronkite was a family man, was the norm. But her quick wit didn’t always help his cause. Betsy’s barbs at First Lady Pat Nixon sometimes reappeared in the tabloids. One example: When a group of Republican women Betsy was with discussed Richard Nixon’s defeat by Pat Brown for the California governorship in November 1962, a sympathetic female friend cooed, “I felt sorry for Pat Nixon last night.” To which Betsy caustically responded, “I feel sorry for her every night.” Defending Betsy’s mouth, Cronkite called his wife’s comment “the definitive observation on Dick Nixon.”
The two—Walter and Betsy—saw a dull New York evening as a shared tragedy. The gregarious couple often took in shows at the Copacabana and dined at hotel restaurants such as the Café Carlyle and the Waldorf-Astoria. Elaine’s on Second Avenue became one of their favorite spots. They sometimes arranged for all three of their kids—or just one of them—to swing by the CBS News studio to watch Dad’s nightly broadcast live. If they made so much as a peep during taping, they would be quickly ushered away, barred from the studio for months as punishment. Some nights, the family would then go out to dinner at Gallagher’s Steak House or the 21 Club or Sardi’s post-broadcast. Broadway plays were also a great family night out, and after CBS bought 80 percent of the Yankees baseball team in 1964, Cronkite would take Chip on the subway to the stadium for the games.
Nancy, Cronkite’s eldest child, had been a student at Syracuse University, but she left early to marry. Younger daughter Kathy was a sophomore at Prescott College in Arizona and married a fellow student there in June 1970. Chip, at thirteen, lived at home and attended private school in Manhattan. Perks came with having a famous father, but there were downsides, too. The three Cronkite kids often bemoaned the fact that their world-beat dad wasn’t home enough. “When I was little, I always used to sit in front of the television and scream, ‘Daddy, out of the box!’ ” Nancy Cronkite recalled. “ ‘Daddy, come home!’ ” One time, Cronkite sat little Nancy down to try to explain what CBS News did, how TV was a miracle of modern communication. “Dad explained to me all about how television works,” she said. “I was just a little tot, and he went on and on about how the airwaves go out. I was nodding and agreeing, and at the end of this explanation, I asked him, ‘But, Daddy, how do you get in the box?’ ”
During the early 1970s, Cronkite cut a deal with Pan Am airlines to fly the entire family to a series of international vacation spots. His friend Louis Player, a vice president at the airline, made the arrangements. Other families who went along were James and Mari Michener, Art and Ann Buchwald, and Bob and Millie Considine. Together they island-hopped the South Pacific, and Michener took them to Papeete (the region that inspired his Pulitzer Prize–winning Tales of the South Pacific). Michener was a Quaker and a pacifist; Cronkite saw himself heading down the same spiritual highway. On a different junket, The Group, as they called themselves, journeyed to Haiti. They were like a gigantic National Geographic field trip around the globe. “Dad loved to snorkel and swim,” Chip recalled. “He had a Leica with him and took all sorts of family photos. Sometimes the adults would drink doubles of whatever they could find. Dad and Art liked playing chess. Michener and I played Frisbee together all the time. He wrote about it in his book Sports in America.”
When Salant heard about the Pan Am junket, he was understandably upset. The trips were a conflict of interest. It was the first time Salant had seen Cronkite display bad ethical judgment. Cronkite defended himself, saying it had just been something between friends, but Salant wouldn’t buy it. “Walter had broken a ‘no, no, no’ rule,” Bill Small, Washington bureau chief, recalled. “He caught flak over it. But Walter was the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the CBS room. You couldn’t fire him.”
Cronkite was earning about $250,000 a year in 1970 as anchorman of the CBS Evening News. The U.S. median income that year was $8,730. After he won the prestigious William Allen White Medal for Outstanding Journalistic Merit, honors continued to pour in, so much so that a competition ensued between Cronkite and the economist John Kenneth Galbraith and the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. over who could win the most honorary doctorates. And Cronkite didn’t rest on his cascade of laurels. He continued to dig out stories and gossip by telephone with his old Washington sources, which were, most often, at the Cabinet and congressional committee chair level.
In
the spring of 1970, Cronkite sparred with the Nixon administration yet again. The Justice Department had brought charges against New York Times reporter Earl Caldwell, who had refused to provide grand jury testimony on his reporting on the Black Panther Party. “Walter Cronkite was one of the first people to come forward,” Caldwell recalled in 2002, “to issue a statement that we would take into court arguing why you can’t [force journalists to reveal sources] and why it was wrong what the government was forcing me to do.”
Once again, Cronkite had spoken out to defend journalism. With Brinkley under siege from the Nixon administration, Cronkite assumed Edward R. Murrow’s mantle, worried that television was usurping newspaper readership. “In doing my work, I (and those who assist me) depend constantly on information, ideas, leads and opinions received in confidence,” Cronkite wrote in a letter to the editor of The New York Times. “Without such materials, I would be able to do little more than broadcast press releases and public statements.”
Cronkite’s Times letter was repeatedly entered into the proceedings as the Caldwell case made its way through the courts. It served as a reference for all reporters in need of legal protection. It was Murrowism without Murrow. Moreover, in interviews, Cronkite, keeping his fingers crossed, swore that if he were ever in Caldwell’s position, he would go to prison before he’d reveal confidential sources. His outspokenness lent solidarity to journalists and restated a standard, one that many reporters would act upon. The Supreme Court decided against Caldwell—that is, against the right of reporters to keep sources secret. Now the specter of prison did loom for investigative journalists. Cronkite lamented the court’s retrograde radicalism. More than any other journalist of the early 1970s, Cronkite absorbed the Nixon administration’s anti-journalism punches without getting a scratch. Long before the term was applied to Ronald Reagan, Cronkite was “Teflon.”
In May 1971, Cronkite received the Broadcaster of the Year Award from the International Radio and Television Society at a Waldorf-Astoria Hotel ceremony. Hundreds of people from the upper echelon of the media world were in attendance. Cronkite graciously accepted the coveted award and then surprised his audience by eviscerating the Nixon administration’s assault on TV journalism. Speaking as a private citizen, he accused the Nixon-Agnew cabal of being perpetrators of an unwarranted “anti-press policy . . . a grand conspiracy to destroy the credibility of the press.” Cronkite was the Muhammad Ali of American journalism and every verbal punch he threw was greeted with hoots, hollers, and cheers. “Nor is there any way,” he continued, “that President Nixon can escape responsibility for this campaign. He is the ultimate leader. He sets the tone and the attitude of his administration. By internal edict and public posture, he could reverse the anti-press policy of his administration if that were his desire. As long as the attacks, overt and subtle, continue, we must even at the risk of appearing to be self-serving, rise to defend ourselves against the charges by which the enemies of freedom seek to influence a divided and confused population.” Murrow would have been proud.
At the 1972 Radio and TV Correspondents Dinner, Pat Buchanan was talking amiably to a friend over cocktails when he was unexpectedly introduced to Cronkite—an archenemy of the Nixon’s administration. “Hello, Pat, how are you?” Cronkite asked, hand extended.
“Fine, Mr. Cronkite,” Buchanan said with deference, “how are you, sir?”
For days, Buchanan was disgusted with himself for having kissed up to Cronkite. He treated the CBS Evening News anchorman as if he were royalty. “I was beside myself for giving the appearance of having truckled,” Buchanan recalled. “Both the ‘Mr.’ and the ‘sir’ had come out automatically, reflexively, because Walter Cronkite was an older man, and because of those years of indoctrination.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Reportable Truth in the Age of Nixon
CHANNELING MURROW—THE PENTAGON PAPERS—TRACKING DOWN ELLSBERG—DR. STANTON GOES BEFORE CONGRESS—MAGRUDER PLAYS DIRTY—THE NEWS TWISTERS—COLSON STAKES NIXON—BUNDLING UP—THE GREAT OPENING OF CHINA—TOURING WITH BUCKLEY AND MICHENER—STIFFING BARBARA WALTERS—TABLOID FODDER IN SAN FRANCISCO—POLITICAL CONVENTIONS—MCGOVERN’S VP—THE STANHOPE GOULD FACTOR—RUSSIAN WHEAT DEAL—WATERGATE BRAVERY—THE MOST TRUSTED MAN IN AMERICA—COLSON AGONISTES—DISSED FROM THE ENEMIES LIST
Cronkite’s verbal barrage at the Waldorf-Astoria was merely opening day of the fourth estate’s hunting season on Nixon, a season in which almost every big-city newsroom was loaded for bear. Nixon had failed to heed the oldest and truest cliché in journalism: never get into a pissing match with folks who buy ink by the barrel (or air hourlong special reports on prime-time TV). When Cronkite spoke out against Nixon’s ham-fisted intimidation at the Waldorf-Astoria, it was as if the ghost of Murrow hurled a lightning bolt from the podium. It didn’t hurt that Cronkite’s close friends included Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, and Katharine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post. Nixon, of course, wasn’t wrong about a liberal media elite disapproving of social conservatives. But unlike Eisenhower—who simply ignored his bad press—Nixon wanted blood. “Seventy-five percent of those group hate my guts,” he confided to White House press secretary Ron Ziegler on Christmas Eve 1970, about the Big Three network reporters. “They don’t like to be beaten.”
Just how appreciative other journalists were that Cronkite stood up for his profession became apparent when he won the George C. Polk Award (named for a CBS correspondent killed during civil strife in Greece in 1948) for resisting White House attempts to discredit the CBS Evening News for its disclosure of the Bau Me atrocity. The Polk Award coincided with Paley’s announcement that CBS was bringing back You Are There, the dramatic historic reenactment series of the 1950s, as a Saturday morning children’s show, with Cronkite once again serving as host. Not only was Cronkite winning over converts in his battle with the Nixon crowd, but he was now courting a future generation of children with the beloved Bugs Bunny as his lead-in. Sick of all things Cronkite, the White House kept looking for clever ways to undermine his sterling credibility with the public.
It was a document leak, in the end, that turned the White House attack on CBS News into trench warfare over journalism’s enduring role in the American republic. In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg, a Harvard-educated military analyst with the Rand Corporation, absconded with a photocopy of a Pentagon report titled United States–Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of the Defense. It was classified top secret, with only fifteen copies printed. Ellsberg described the Pentagon Papers, as the report became known to the public, as “seven thousand pages of documentary evidence of lying by four presidents and their administrations over twenty-three years, to conceal plans and actions of mass murder.” The report charted decades of Department of Defense misinformation, focusing most on the mendacity of the Johnson administration, which dictated Pentagon policies at the time the report was written. “I decided I would stop concealing that myself,” Ellsberg wrote. “I would get it out somehow.”
After serving in the Marine Corps from 1954 to 1957, Ellsberg had received a doctorate in economics from Harvard in 1962 while working for the Rand Corporation. An authority on decision theory and behavioral economics, he began work in 1964 as special assistant in the Defense and State departments. He returned to Rand in 1967 to work on the top-secret Pentagon Papers. What Ellsberg learned was that the Vietcong weren’t going to collapse soon, that they were stronger than ever. When the upbeat Johnson administration hawk Walter Rostow, LBJ’s national security advisor, gave Ellsberg an insanely optimistic account of imminent victory in Vietnam, the strategist balked. “I don’t want to hear it,” Ellsberg scolded Rostow. “Victory is not near. Victory is very far away. I’ve come back from Vietnam. I’ve been there for two years. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to see charts . . .”
“But, Dan, the charts are very good.”
Ellsberg had first turned aga
inst U.S. policy in Vietnam in early 1967. Too many American troops were being slaughtered for a gargantuan Johnson administration policy mistake now being exacerbated by the Nixon crew. “A line kept repeating itself in my head,” he recalled in his memoir, Secrets: “We are eating our young.” Ellsberg was also galled that the Nixon White House, spinning a web of distortions, had manipulated decision making in Congress and among the American people. Offered a first look at the Pentagon Papers, New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan and his legendary editor Abe Rosenthal made the courageous decision to publish excerpts from them, beginning on June 13, 1971. If it meant the end of the Vietnam War, Ellsberg was ready to go to jail. He went into hiding to escape the long arm of the FBI. Cronkite thought Ellsberg brave; others concluded he was a little nuts. Charles Colson, special counsel to President Nixon, started spreading rumors that Ellsberg was a sexual pervert who shot children from helicopters in Vietnam for sport—real ugly stuff. “Colson is a liar,” Ellsberg argued in his defense. “Years later, after he went to prison and wrote Born Again, he claimed to have apologized to me. That was a lie. I tried to reach him on four or five occasions. His secretary would take down my number. But he wouldn’t get back to me.”
Nixon was not implicated in the Pentagon Papers (which were written before he took office), but his administration struck back hard, obtaining a court order to force The New York Times to cease publication of the illegally obtained documents—the first time the U.S. government had gagged a newspaper in more than a hundred years. The classified documents contained shocking proof of deliberate government malfeasance. But there was a shrill disagreement over the ethics of Ellsberg’s action; some argued that the leak potentially aided the enemy, but others that the First Amendment protected a free press. During the second half of June 1971, the Pentagon Papers became a lightning rod in an already charged and polarized America. CBS Evening News covered the story heavily, with Cronkite interviewing many people about the explosive government documentation of the Vietnam War.
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