An obliging Cronkite wanted to play by the rules established by the Nixon administration in China. It was a matter of living up to his word. “It was very much like landing on the moon,” he recalled. “Westerners hadn’t been there for years. We were a source of wonderment for the Chinese.” Dan Rather, in contrast, ready to break with stricture, was eager to interview the everyday people of Beijing. He was being too much the renegade for Cronkite’s taste. Some CBSers trace the beginning of Cronkite’s disapproval of his then forty-one-year-old protégé to Rather’s aggressive grandstanding in Beijing and Shanghai. China, Cronkite believed, wasn’t the place to tick off the Nixon crowd. Nevertheless, Rather did the best stories of any TV journalist in China, stories in a class of their own.
Cronkite’s job in China as anchorman was to set the scenes of Nixon’s historic trip. The White House froze out all reporters—Cronkite included—from the more serious diplomatic meetings. Much of Cronkite’s time was spent with Stanhope Gould, ensuring his broadcast script was constantly fresh and accurate. CBS’s makeshift base of operations was the Minzu Hotel, near Tiananmen Square, and after morning meetings, the CBS correspondents fanned out to report from the square, the Forbidden City, or the Great Wall. Bernard Kalb’s expertise on China was extraordinary, and Cronkite made great use of it. Whenever Cronkite had a free moment, he spent time with his literary friends James Michener and William F. Buckley. Weighed down with cameras, enjoying each other’s company, they goofed around like tourists looking for a giant panda. A competition occurred to tell the worst Barbara Walters stories known to mankind.
The February weather was bitter, snow sometimes swirling about, and Cronkite caught a cold. Guzzling codeine-infused cough syrup, he regularly hit up Bleckman for batteries to keep his socks heated. After wandering along the Great Wall, taking notes in a daybook, Cronkite joked that the greatness of the 2,300-year-old ruin was self-evident: few structures could sustain such a barrage of shutter-happy, historically ignorant Western photographers. Although Cronkite had boned up on Communist China in advance of the trip, he was nevertheless surprised to see what a deity Mao Tse Tung had become, his face plastered on billboards around every bend. “Cronkite spent a lot of free time with Sevareid,” CBS cameraman Izzy Bleckman recalled. “That was unusual, but they went together to see the Forbidden City.”
CBS News coverage of the trip was solid. But Cronkite knew that Nixon had turned the entire China trip into a staged guided tour cum cocktail hour for the press. By keeping such ironclad control of the schedule, the White House got what it wanted: TV reporters doing soft-news segments on how to use chopsticks, the beauty of Mao jackets, and why bicycling was healthy exercise. Ironically, it had been Cronkite’s night in San Francisco, before he flew to Hawaii, that grabbed tabloid attention. Away from Betsy’s watchful eye, he had cut loose like a sailor on leave. The rumor mill claimed that he had gone out with a floozy he’d found at a Geary Street strip club. Columnist Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle saw Cronkite’s partying and wrote a comical dispatch on February 17, 1972. The news raised eyebrows at Black Rock. Cronkite’s wild evening out with Manning chasing skirts wasn’t great for the serious-news brand. Not only did he and Manning hang out at the Condor, an infamous topless bar, but Cronkite was also later spotted dining with a go-go dancer clad in a miniskirt and barely there crop-top. “I’m a very quiet fellow in New York,” Cronkite said in response to the Caen report. “But something gets into me every time I come to San Francisco. It must be the water.”
News about Cronkite, the night owl, started appearing in tabloids. Instead of trying to cover up his love of strip clubs, he played up his penchant. Robert F. Kennedy once said, “The wise man hangs a lantern on his problem,” an adage that Cronkite understood completely. He already knew what Nixon would learn the hard way during Watergate: the cover-up is often worse than the crime. Half of all European businessmen, Cronkite weakly offered in his defense, enjoyed strolling around Amsterdam’s red-light district. To him, San Francisco’s Condor was the Carnegie Hall of Sex—it didn’t hurt to soak up the art once in a while.
To Manhattan socialites, Cronkite letting his hair down was old news. He drank with reporters at Elaine’s on Second Avenue; table number six was often reserved for him. Whenever he entered a Manhattan bar, people cheered. Along with Salvador Dalí, Lauren Bacall, and Woody Allen, Cronkite was one of the most easily recognized celebrities who didn’t have a bodyguard with him at the Stork Club. But there was a backlash from feminists over Cronkite’s San Francisco escapades. Was Uncle Walter a misogynist? While Betsy didn’t mind her husband’s cruising the Tenderloin district from time to time, Gloria Steinem did. Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman would claim a few years later that Cronkite didn’t understand the vocabulary of feminism or even how to interview women properly. “On a sexism scale of one-to-ten,” Goodman wrote, “Cronkite is only a four or so. I would label him Not Malevolent But a Bit Confused.”
Cronkite was in Martha’s Vineyard on June 17, 1972, when five men were arrested for breaking into the office of the Democratic National Committee in Washington’s Watergate office complex. The biggest political story of the era began inauspiciously. Who could have predicted, that June day, that it would lead to the resignation of a popular U.S. president? CBS News followed the Watergate story briefly, but found it impossible to keep up with Bob Woodward’s and Carl Bernstein’s aggressive coverage in The Washington Post. Cronkite left Watergate to CBS News’ Washington bureau. Consumed by election-year politics, the Summer Olympics in Munich (at which eleven Israeli athletes were killed by Arab terrorists), and sailing Wyntje to Maine, he followed Watergate in only a low-grade way.
Working closely with CBS News Washington bureau chief Bill Small, Cronkite encouraged his stable of correspondents to follow the suspicious money trail at the Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CRP, or CREEP as it came to be known). George Herman of CBS News’ Face the Nation deserves credit for airing a program on June 11, 1972 (six days before the burglary took place), questioning John Mitchell—who had resigned as U.S. attorney general to become chairman of CRP—about the undisclosed sources of the $10 million collected by the committee. Much of that money was later found to have been contributed illegally.
Cronkite urged Daniel Schorr (reporting from the Pentagon), Dan Rather (from the White House), and Lesley Stahl (the newbie) to aggressively track down the Nixon administration’s role in Watergate. Cronkite was too consumed with half-hour 10:30 p.m. specials on the New Hampshire, Florida, Wisconsin, California, and Oregon primaries to take Watergate on as yet another extracurricular activity. Nevertheless, CBS News won an Emmy for its dramatic early coverage of the break-in. “We were pinching virtually everything from The Washington Post,” Stanhope Gould recalled. “I became imbued with the spirit of the Watergate thing. I was in bed with The Washington Post.”
With Watergate simmering in the background, the Big Three struggled to maintain their traditional gavel-to-gavel coverage of the 1972 political conventions, both held in Miami Beach. Political conventions were still Cronkite’s favorite assignments after NASA; it was unbeatable exposure. But with the Republican Convention set to call on Nixon-Agnew for a second term, and the Democrats certain to nominate front-runner Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, the conventions didn’t promise much suspense. CBS looked hard for subplots, forgoing speeches from the rostrum for possible drama from the floor. Cronkite presided over the events, untangling and explaining them. Critics complained that the 1972 conventions seemed to be mostly about Cronkite. “The program might well be called ‘Cronkite and His Friends,’ ” said one reviewer. CBS News did have one good plot line at the Democratic Convention in Miami: the selection of a vice presidential candidate.
Many Democrats were promoting the notion of Cronkite’s becoming McGovern’s vice presidential nominee. Stickers and buttons to that effect were manufactured. There was a groundswell of “We Want Cronkite” gra
ssroots lobbying. He was, after all, beloved, credited by liberals with challenging the war hawks LBJ and Nixon. “We had conversations about this,” actor Warren Beatty recalled. “One night we had dinner at Frankie and Johnny’s restaurant in New York. Our conversation centered on whether he could be in politics—perhaps run for senator of New York—if not vice president.” McGovern’s campaign director, Frank Mankiewicz, tried to get McGovern to seriously consider Cronkite as VP, but to no avail. “I didn’t really give it serious thought at the time,” McGovern recalled. “Frank kept saying, ‘Don’t you realize he is the most respected man in America?’ But I just didn’t think Walter would be interested in leaving CBS News. It was a nonstarter, an unrealistic fun ten-second thought.”
McGovern ended up choosing Missouri senator Thomas Eagleton, but after the senator’s past psychiatric problems hit the news cycle, McGovern dropped him two weeks later and replaced him with the former head of the Peace Corps, Sargent Shriver. “If we had picked Cronkite, I could have avoided the whole Eagleton snafu,” McGovern later reflected ruefully. “I think Cronkite on the ticket would have made a major difference. I should have listened to Frank.”
What Cronkite most admired about McGovern, why he would have at least considered being on the Democratic ticket, was his conviction that Nixon’s mad B-52 strikes against Hanoi and Haiphong, which were killing tens of thousands of North Vietnamese civilians, were reprehensible. To Cronkite, Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia in 1970 and Laos in 1971 would be judged terribly in the annals of history. While Cronkite was pleased that Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho spent much of 1972 in peace talks, he was also concerned that this news had deepened public apathy.
In September 1972, Cronkite surreptitiously met with Ellsberg again at a private CBS News office. No blindfolding or hotel rendezvous. Ellsberg’s gripe was that Cronkite’s Evening News kept portraying the Nixon administration as getting the United States out of Vietnam, saying that casualties were down, as were the number of U.S. troops on tours of duty. This was a gross oversimplification of the situation. “You keep showing the wind-downs,” Ellsberg said to Cronkite. “The two things that aren’t going down are the bombing tonnage being dropped—a Nagasaki a week—and the number of refugees.” Cronkite was intrigued. They were sitting on opposite sides of a desk with a telephone pushed off to the side.
“Do you have proof?” Cronkite asked.
“All you have to do,” Ellsberg instructed, “is call the Pentagon’s public affairs office and say you’re a journalist who wants the weekly bombing tonnage.”
With a glint in his eye, excited to be in Ellsberg’s orbit again, Cronkite said deal me in. To Cronkite’s delight, Ellsberg had the Pentagon public affairs office number on hand. “You call,” a nervous Cronkite said. “I don’t want to give my name. But I also don’t want to pretend I’m somebody else.” A bit of comedy ensued. Cronkite, in the end, convinced Ellsberg to call the Pentagon as he listened in. “The Pentagon office gave Cronkite the stats,” Ellsberg recalled. He said, “ ‘That’s fascinating.’ Next I told him to call Ted Kennedy’s office and get the refugee statistics.”
Cronkite found Ellsberg to be right on both accounts. The CBS Evening News no longer reported only the Vietnam troops’ wind-down statistics that the Nixon administration wanted conveyed. On a number of occasions, due directly to Ellsberg’s prodding, the bomb tonnage and refugee numbers were also featured on the broadcast.
Cronkite found time for a new type of report in late September 1972, one that easily consumed half of the available minutes in a given CBS Evening News program. The innovative format was an in-depth overview of a complex story with detailed follow-up segments. The first to make an impact was a three-part investigative series about the Nixon administration’s deal to allow the sale of American wheat to the Soviet Union. The worst drought since 1963 had sent Russian grain buyers to the United States, where they purchased 25 percent of the annual wheat crop in what became known as the U.S.-Soviet Wheat Deal. “Walter decided the Russian wheat deal was the Teapot Dome Scandal,” Gould recalled. “I was doing a long profile of McGovern’s wife, but Walter pulled me off it. He was all about wheat graft. I came in with a ten- or eleven-minute long-form piece, and he wanted to add to it. That much time for one story on the Evening News just didn’t happen.”
For three evenings—September 27 (Wednesday); September 29 (Friday); and October 6 (Friday)—Cronkite, in what The New York Times deemed “the most encouraging development in electronic journalism,” got up from his anchor chair (for the first time since 1962) to explain charts and graphs that exposed the corrupt aspects of the deal. The segments were expertly produced by Stanhope Gould and Linda Mason. Encouraged by the positive response to the wheat-deal story, including compliments from both R. W. Apple and David Halberstam, he immediately planned another multipart report, this time on Watergate.
Besides the Vietnam woes, Cronkite had been upset that fall that The Washington Post (or Woodward and Bernstein) had been eating CBS News’ lunch (and everyone else’s) on the Watergate story. A few of Cronkite’s reporters—notably Daniel Schorr and Lesley Stahl—would collect fresh clues, but Cronkite never got a big story, and for one reason: CBS News never found Deep Throat. In early September, Cronkite called an Evening News staff meeting to figure out how to upgrade the importance of the Watergate story. Present at the meeting was executive producer Paul Greenberg (having succeeded Midgley) and producers Ron Bonn and John Lane (who replaced Socolow and Bensley).
The Cronkite unit all agreed that Woodward and Bernstein had the story right; their reporting seemed impeccable. And so Cronkite decided that, rather than let the story die the death of a thousand cuts with fragmentary TV reports, the CBS Evening News would do a report about what Woodward and Bernstein had reported. It was a practical decision that Cronkite hated, but he made it because the Watergate story had to be told on television to take hold of the public imagination. And it never had been. Cronkite and the producers tentatively decided on two long segments—longer than anything CBS Evening News had ever done—to run on successive nights. “Everybody from Walter down wanted to make this look different,” Bonn recalled, “look important—because it was.”
As Ben Bradlee, editor of The Washington Post, recalled, his old friend Gordon Manning telephoned one day in the middle of October and announced, “I’m going to save your ass in this Watergate thing. Cronkite and I have gotten CBS to agree to do two back-to-back long pieces on the ‘Evening News’ about Watergate. We’re going to make you famous.”
Watergate, which would become a historic test of the American form of government, was generally misunderstood in the fall of 1972. Despite revelations of the Watergate break-in and other illegal skullduggery, nearly two-thirds of Americans polled by the Gallup organization that October considered the scandal “just politics.” The story lacked cohesion. For CBS News, the trouble with the Watergate scandal was that it wasn’t a visual story like the Vietnam War or Earth Day or the civil rights marches. The Washington Post was almost alone in investigating Watergate, taking greater risks with each passing day. Cronkite was aware that the Post was under increasing pressure from the White House to drop the story, with major advertisers threatening to pull out of the newspaper if it continued to pursue the investigation. (Back then, the FCC also mandated TV license renewals every three years. In January 1973, the FCC tried denying licenses to Post-owned stations in Florida.)
CBS News president Dick Salant was taking a huge risk in airing “The Watergate Affair,” a two-part story, just eleven days before the election. All major Nixon administration figures had refused to be interviewed for the pieces. In introducing part one of the fourteen-minute CBS News reports on Friday, October 27, Cronkite presented the reportorial work of Woodward and Bernstein as accurate and thorough. Nixon acolytes Haldeman and Ziegler were given a few seconds for balance. “Most of what is known as the Watergate affair has emerged i
n puzzling bits and pieces, through digging by the nation’s press and television newsmen,” Cronkite told viewers. “Some of the material made public so far is factual, without dispute—those men caught in the act at Watergate, for instance. Some is still allegation, uncovered by the press but as yet legally unsubstantiated. We shall label our sources carefully as we go along. But with the facts and the allegations, we shall try tonight to pull together the threads of this amazing story, quite unlike any in our modern American history.”
It was Woodward and Bernstein who broke the story wide open; Cronkite only lent high-octane credence to their investigation and introduced it to a wider audience. The CBS broadcast gave millions of viewers a frame of reference by which they could make sense of the “puzzling bits and pieces” they’d heard about in drip-drip fashion since the spring. Thanks to the Cronkite imprimatur, the Watergate cover-up became decisively important for a large segment of America’s television audience. No mere break-in and not “just politics,” the unfolding Watergate scandal was deemed worthy of 64 percent of the October 27 CBS Evening News broadcast. CBS’s part two, on Nixon’s money laundering via CREEP for political sabotage and intelligence gathering (aired on the following Tuesday, October 31), had the White House in jitters. On both days, CBS employees congregated in the Washington bureau, gleeful that they had Nixon on a gangplank. “There was great excitement in the bureau,” Lesley Stahl wrote in Reporting Live. “We all knew that allotting so much time to reporting the charges of wrongdoing would incite the wrath of the Nixon White House and campaign.”
Bill Paley didn’t like Watergate Part I and dreaded the very idea of part two. A supporter of Nixon’s reelection bid, Paley deemed the work of Cronkite, Gould, Manning, and Mason “unfair, unbalanced, derivative, inaccurate, based on hearsay, and mingling rumor with editorial opinion”—but he didn’t order part two killed. He maintained that he expected CBS, as a news-gathering organization, to be responsible for everything it presented. Because Cronkite was a friend, Paley’s rage was aimed more at reporter Daniel Schorr. “The broadcast troubled me,” Paley later wrote. “It just did not seem in keeping with Cronkite’s usual objectivity.” After harshly criticizing the October 27 report, Paley allowed that the decision as to what to do about Part II still belonged with news division president Salant. But on October 30—the day before it was due to air—Paley called an emergency meeting at Black Rock with Frank Stanton (CBS vice chairman), Arthur Taylor (president of CBS), Jack Schneider (the president of the CBS Broadcast Group), and Salant. Paley’s ultimate message was that the White House heat was getting unbearable. On a regular basis, Charles Colson, full of veiled innuendo and cause-and-effect threats, would call Paley to harass him about the FCC not renewing affiliate licenses. Colson went into action in Florida—at WPLG (Miami) and WJXT (Jacksonville)—determined to revoke their licenses because they were owned by The Washington Post. “We’ll bring you to your knees,” Colson threatened, “in Wall Street.”
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