Nixon aide Charles Colson confronted Paley face-to-face the day after “Watergate: Part I” aired, infuriated at the content of the report and the timing, so close to Election Day. “I had called Paley on Nixon’s behalf and went to see him in his New York office,” Colson recalled. “We got along extremely well. I told him how Stanton was on a crusade against the president, that Cronkite’s long ‘Watergate’ segment sounded like the DNC had written it. Paley told me he was embarrassed by the segment. The net effect was that Paley called me a few days later, letting me know he got the second Watergate report cut way down in size.”
While Paley denied that he was influenced by Colson’s arm-twisting visit, devoting nine pages of his 1982 memoir to his defensive version of events, it is reasonable to surmise it had a huge impact. After the Black Rock meeting, Salant heeded the disgruntled Paley and decided that Part II of CBS’s Watergate exposé could be reduced in length. Conferring with Cronkite’s executive producer, Sandy Socolow (and secret producers Gould and Mason), Salant didn’t mention his tense meeting with Paley. Although Salant did somersaults in his memoir to deny it, he had succumbed to White House intimidation tactics. He should have resigned in protest. The CBS producers resented paring down Part II, but agreed to make the necessary revisions. “Walter Cronkite,” Salant recalled, “did not participate. At least, so far as I was involved, he never took a position one way or another.”
Paley’s meeting with Salant constituted the one and only time that the CBS chief ever tried to influence specific content within the Evening News during Salant’s twenty-five-year association with the program. (Paley had asked Cronkite and Schorr to tone down their mockery of Goldwater in 1964.) A righteous Salant, worried about being seen as a patsy, said later that if he had known about Colson’s confrontation with Paley, he would have stood his ground on sheer First Amendment principles and refused to shorten the second part. “If I thought [Paley] was responding to White House pressure,” Cronkite wrote, “he might not be able to control the eruption.”
“Watergate: Part II,” cut from fourteen minutes to seven minutes, was broadcast as planned on Tuesday, October 31. Cronkite then added a disclaimer to finish the broadcast. “The Nixon administration calls these allegations false, in some cases, overblown, hearsay, and misleading in others,” he said. “But apparently this segment of the press, and those disturbed at the possible injury done to the country’s delicate election process, will not be satisfied with mere denials, will not put their suspicions to rest unless or until some impartial body examines the case and renders its verdict. And that’s the way it is, Tuesday, October thirty-first, nineteen seventy-two.”
Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee was ecstatic about Cronkite’s Watergate segments. No longer was the Post alone in the trench warfare with the White House. “When Cronkite aired the Watergate bits, the sun came out for me,” Bradlee recalled. “It was just like being blessed; if Cronkite was taking the Watergate story seriously, everyone in journalism would.”
Just eight days after Part II aired, President Nixon defeated McGovern in the biggest presidential victory in U.S. history: 520 electoral votes to 17. Clearly, Cronkite’s Watergate reports hadn’t been a game changer with the electorate. Nixon—who had taken the United States off the gold standard, allowing the dollar to float on international currency markets—was riding a strong economy that relegated Watergate to a cat-burglar farce with doubtful legs. But the dark clouds of scandal thickened overhead, in part because Cronkite had treated the Watergate break-in as Big News. The controversial two-part report on the CBS Evening News was credited with keeping Watergate on the front burner, where it dramatically sizzled for the next twenty-two months. As Bradlee put it, “Somehow the Great White Father, Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, had blessed the story by spending so much time on it.”
Days after Nixon was reelected, Colson delivered a blistering speech to New England newspaper editors, with Bradlee as bull’s-eye. “I think if Bradlee ever left the Georgetown cocktail circuit, where he and his pals dine on third-hand information and gossip and rumor,” Colson jabbed, “he might discover out here a real America, and he might learn that all truth and all knowledge and all superior wisdom doesn’t emanate exclusively from that small little clique in Georgetown, and that the rest of the country isn’t just sitting out here waiting to be told what they’re supposed to think.”
While Colson easily lacerated Bradlee, getting at Cronkite was a more difficult proposition. No one saw Uncle Walter as an East Coast elite. His brand was a benign, not-so-tough interviewer. But Colson was insistent that Cronkite—the patron saint of the liberal media—had to be knocked down a peg. President Nixon himself, as revealed in the White House tapes of November–December 1972, was irate at CBS News for aiding The Washington Post. On December 15, he spoke to Colson about hitting CBS News with buckshot until it cried uncle:
Colson: I talked to Paley yesterday, Mr. President. . . . I’m seeing him Monday at one o’clock.
Colson: I’ll just say look, you guys are crazy. You can hire all the executives you want; that isn’t going to solve your problem. You need to put somebody on the air who is . . . going to give balance to all the goddamn slamming that we’ve been taking from Rather and Pierpoint and Sevareid and Cronkite and Schorr. . . . I tell you, I’m going to make a real pitch out of it . . .
Nixon: Well, you do it.
Colson: I’ll, I’ll put the screws to him. . . . He’ll be here Monday and I’ll put the screws to him very hard.
Nixon: Say we want [Herb] Klein and he ought to put him in there. They ought to have balance in their show and Klein is a hell of a television personality . . . and that they ought to have a little balance in the goddamn thing.
From the long “U.S.-Soviet Wheat Deal” report onward, Nixon came to believe that NBC’s John Chancellor and ABC’s Howard K. Smith were more fair-minded than Cronkite. By 1973, in fact, the White House tapes reveal that Nixon pejoratively deemed “intellectual people” who were against him “Cronkites” in the way LBJ used to rail against “Harvards.”
Somehow the president had to curtail Cronkite’s growing stature. “When Nixon got in the White House it wasn’t the most hospitable environment,” Colson recalled. “CBS acted like the Nazis had taken over. Only Sevareid was seen as worse than Cronkite, whom Nixon developed a ‘cordial dislike’ of.” With the exception of Howard K. Smith on ABC, Nixon thought all the TV reporters were flaming Ted Kennedy antiwar lefties. “I’m a conservative,” Colson said in 2011 in his defense. “Nixon wasn’t wrong about the liberal media.”
Through the controversies of Nixon’s White House tenure, Cronkite remained popular with the American public. For twenty-nine years, he had worked at the network as writer, producer, and executive—everybody knew it was Cronkite, in the end, who decided what flickered blue in the suppertime darkness across America. When he took time off around Thanksgiving 1972 to have a benign tumor removed from his throat at Lenox Hill Hospital, the get-well-soon cards came pouring into CBS.
After the 1972 presidential election, with CBS still the ratings leader, Cronkite’s lawyer negotiated a major contractual clause. Cronkite would get three months off every summer—June through August—to enjoy sailing off Martha’s Vineyard on his ketch, Wyntje. Only NASA launches, Cronkite said, would warrant his leaving Cape Cod. His colleagues knew he had it made: $250,000 a year with three months off every summer. And Cronkite, trying not to war with the entire Nixon administration, threw a lifeline to Henry Kissinger (who was never implicated in Watergate). “I was Cronkite and the media’s alibi for their treatment of Nixon,” Kissinger recalled. “Cronkite had made a turn on Vietnam under Johnson. When Nixon came in, he continued to have that bias. But he tried to be fair to me.”
In 1972, the Oliver Quayle and Company opinion research firm surveyed people in eighteen states, asking which public figure they most trusted. Strangely, Cronkite was included w
ith Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, Ed Muskie, George McGovern, Edward Kennedy, and Spiro Agnew on the “trust index” ballot. Cronkite finished in the lead, with 73 percent, compared to Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, who were both rated at 57 percent. CBS News’ public relations office seized on Cronkite’s poll victory with gusto. When asked about being the heroic “Most Trusted Man in America,” Cronkite chuckled, pleased with the designation. “I’ll be glad to wear the crown.” The poll confirmed overnight what had long been apparent: Cronkite was the ultimate reliable source. “When Cronkite was on CBS during the Nixon years,” future NBC anchorman Brian Williams noted, “it wasn’t mere anchoring. It was addressing the nation.”
Cronkite secured many exclusive interviews with key figures of the Watergate saga, including John Dean; Archibald Cox (shortly after he was fired from his post as special Watergate prosecutor); and Leon Jaworski (on the day he was appointed to succeed Cox). Nixon loathed all of them.
But Cronkite was excluded from Nixon’s infamous Enemies List. Daniel Schorr and Dan Rather interpreted the omission of Cronkite as proof that he hadn’t warred enough with the White House. Andy Rooney teased Cronkite mercilessly about the exclusion. “I was always offended by the fact that [Nixon] put out an Enemies List midway through his administration and that somehow or other I wasn’t on it,” Cronkite recalled. “It was a kind of a source of embarrassment among my colleagues that I didn’t make it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Fan Clubs, Stalkers, and Political Good-byes
GROWING UP WITH CAPTAIN KANGAROO—BREAKING THE COLOR LINE WITH BERNARD SHAW IN HAWAII—CONNIE CHUNG HAS A ROLE MODEL—TOM BROKAW’S JOE DIMAGGIO—THE CRONKITE FAN CLUB—LBJ’S DEATH ON AIR—ANSWERING MAIL—BOY SCOUT MANNERS—JUMPING LIKE A JAGUAR—GAY PRIDE—GOING ROGUE ON THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW—A HOME IN THE VINEYARD—NIXON FLEES—OF LESLEY STAHL AND BARBARA WALTERS—DARWIN’S TOP DOG
No one has yet written the definitive history of television as babysitter for millions of cold war–era children. But starting in the late 1950s, the phenomenon hit its stride. American kids grew up with programs such as CBS’s Captain Kangaroo and Cronkite’s You Are There as educational explainers and directors of life. Bernard Shaw, growing up on Chicago’s South Side in the 1940s and ’50s, was one of many nurtured on the Tube. Shaw’s father had bought a twenty-one-inch Zenith and his son watched You Are There on a regular basis. Just as the young Cronkite in Houston had a newspaper route, Shaw grew up delivering four Chicago dailies: the Tribune, Sun-Times, Herald-American, and Daily News. “We had Cronkite on the set and four Chicago newspapers delivered to the house,” Shaw recalled. “Plus two black papers, the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender. My idol was Cronkite. I decided I wanted to be just like him at a very early age. I followed everything he did.”
Without money for college, Shaw joined the Marines in 1959. During the early Kennedy years, Corporal Shaw was stationed at the Marine Corps Air Station in Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii. One afternoon he was sitting in Barracks Number 225, reading the local Honolulu Advertiser, when an item made him sit straight up with excitement. Walter and Betsy Cronkite had arrived in Hawaii. Shaw was determined to meet his TV hero in the flesh. The Advertiser noted that the Cronkites were staying at the exclusive Reef Hotel in Waikiki. Overcome with excitement, Shaw bombarded the hotel switchboard with telephone calls. Try as he might, Cronkite was unreachable, out in the jungle conducting an interview for The Twentieth Century with an intransigent Japanese soldier who refused to accept his country’s surrender in 1945. “I felt,” Shaw later chuckled, “like a stalker.”
Eventually Cronkite returned Shaw’s calls and they arranged to meet the next day for an amicable chat in the hotel lobby. Shaw, full of nervous anticipation, arrived early. “I was convinced he wouldn’t show up,” he said. “He was running a little late. But suddenly there he was, sticking out his hand with ‘Gee, Sergeant, I hope I haven’t been keeping you long.’ He had purposefully given me a promotion up from corporal as a joke.”
It felt like a dream come true: Shaw, in full tropical marine uniform, discussing world affairs with his CBS News idol, who looked tan and bearish in a brightly colored Hawaiian shirt. Betsy excused herself to dress for dinner, leaving the men to mull over world events. A twenty-minute meeting became forty-five minutes long. They had bonded instantly. Shaw, an African American, told Cronkite that institutional racism would never bring him down, that he was going to be a Big Three anchorman someday. Did Cronkite have any advice? “Read, read, read” was the answer. He paternally explained that a TV journalist first had to become a general assignment reporter. That meant knowing something about international affairs, sports, gardening, architecture—everything. “I’m not going to let anything or anybody DEE-ter me from succeeding,” Shaw said.
“No,” Cronkite replied, smiling. “Don’t let anything di-TUR you.”
If Shaw was going to reach the major leagues, his pronunciation would have to be Webster’s Dictionary precise. But Cronkite took the ambitious Shaw, full of passion and unrealized potential, seriously. He recognized that the Marine was a wonderful monologuist blessed with a rich bass-baritone voice, and they made a pact to stay in touch. In 1994, when Shaw received the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism at Arizona State University, he recalled that the face time with Cronkite in Hawaii was “pivotal . . . seminal . . . inspirational . . . educational.” After Shaw completed his military service and began studies at the University of Illinois in Chicago, he corresponded consistently with Cronkite, who followed his career trajectory with sublime pleasure as Shaw rose from local news to White House correspondent for Westinghouse Broadcasting. “My goal was to be at CBS working with Cronkite by age thirty,” Shaw said. “I missed the mark by one year. I was thirty-one when CBS executive Bill Small hired me in 1971.”
Shaw was assigned to the CBS News Washington bureau. Cronkite, presiding over the entire CBS News enterprise from his New York perch, bragged about how he had discovered the young talent in Hawaii back in 1961. He was elated to have Shaw, an excellent extemporizer known for his perceptive vitality, on his team. Starting in the 1950s, CBS News had executive producers—Bud Benjamin, Russ Bensley, Ernie Leiser, Paul Greenberg, and Sandy Socolow among them—who were unabashed civil rights activists. By the early 1960s, CBS News also had a stable of correspondents whom Martin Luther King Jr. embraced as allies: John Hart, Charles Kuralt, Nelson Benton, Murray Fromson, Robert Schakne, Howard K. Smith, and Dan Rather. “I’ll never forget the first story I did for Cronkite’s CBS Evening News,” Shaw recalled. “When introducing me, a smile curled on Walter’s lips. He looked so happy and proud that I had made it, that my dream to be his colleague was real.” Cronkite welcomed Shaw with a warm letter that included a friendly warning about CBS. “We are a long way from perfection,” Cronkite wrote, “and I know that you are sophisticated enough not to let the petty annoyances dim your broader vision of the outfit. Our feet may not be of clay, but our little toe is suspect.”
Another member of the CBS News class of ’71 who considered herself a Cronkiter was Connie Chung (née Jung Yukwa), whose father was a Chinese diplomat. Growing up near Washington, D.C., Chung—honest, smart, and utterly telegenic—tried emulating Cronkite in hopes of pioneering in broadcast journalism and refused to let being an Asian American serve as a roadblock to her professional success. Chung got her first serious job covering Capitol Hill for a local station. Before long, CBS News’ Washington bureau chief, Bill Small, searching for women broadcasters in the early 1970s, hired her. Considered just a “kid reporter,” Chung had no desk or typewriter at the bureau and was forced to borrow equipment from a few Murrow-era veterans. A number of the CBS correspondents—Daniel Schorr, in particular—were chauvinistic about Chung joining the boys club, but Cronkite wasn’t among them.
With Chung, Cronkite was paradoxically lenient and strict at the same time. Feeling that Chung was going to become a huge star, sens
ing she had that special something, he warned her to “never get a big head.” There was also advice about simply waiting for an AP or UPI wire, not believing a second- or third-tier source just to break the news. Survival . . . that was the key to success in broadcast journalism. In 1993, Chung, to Cronkite’s delight, was chosen to co-anchor the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. Having half of Cronkite’s old job made her giddy with disbelief. “I said I wanted a no-asshole staff,” she recalled. “Cronkite had raised the bar not just on the air but also in how to be in a workplace environment. He was kind of fatherly to me, Uncle Walter. The way he carried himself around women was charming. When he called me from New York, the first thing he said was, ‘That was a very, very good job.’ I felt I had come of age. A double very from Uncle Walter!! I was floating in heaven.”
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