Cronkite

by Douglas Brinkley

  According to Rooney, Cronkite tossed a bowl of popcorn in the air when Dukakis blundered. “Game over,” he said, and demanded the TV be turned off. That November 8, Bush routed Dukakis, 426 electoral votes to 111; the vice president carried forty states. Bush had lambasted Dukakis with negatives, painting him as a big-spending liberal, wobbly on crime, short on patriotism, detached from family values. To Cronkite’s chagrin, Dukakis never fought back. At least when McGovern went up in flames back in 1972 he had courage, defending New Frontier–style liberalism and denouncing the Vietnam War with moral indignation. The Dukakis ship had sunk without a fight. An incensed Cronkite was concerned that the Bush crowd had turned liberal into an epithet.

  Playing the Grand Old Man, Cronkite publicly came out as a card-carrying liberal with an ACLU pedigree at a People for the American Way’s Spirit of Liberty dinner honoring Congresswoman Barbara Jordan of Texas on November 17, 1988. Dressed in a tuxedo with a handkerchief protruding from his pocket, he looked handsome and dapper on the dais at the Roseland Ballroom in New York City. Heading to the event that evening, in a taxi going down Park Avenue, he was in a discernibly feisty mood. His oratory that night, influenced by Sidney Lumet’s touchstone movie Network, soared in a no-holds-barred “Defense of Liberalism.” It was Cronkite’s equivalent of Murrow’s RTNDA speech of 1958 in Chicago. Roseland’s multipurpose hall, with its purple and cerise tentlike décor, was Cronkite’s favorite music venue. He had seen Harry James, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie (who wrote “Roseland Shuffle”) perform there. But on this night, a celebration of the pioneering Texas congresswoman Barbara Jordan from the Eighteenth District, it was Walter Cronkite’s stage.

  At the podium, Cronkite, spinning his thoughts in the low, rapid voice of a broadcaster just liberated from the rules of objective journalism, scolded Democrats to never again abandon the liberal tradition that Barbara Jordan represented. His spontaneous remonstrance was electrifying. Some people thought he was Maker’s Mark drunk or brain-fevered. Perhaps he was a little of both. The soaring speech became treasured as Cronkite’s political coming-out party:

  The temptation is rather great at this point to digress into the defense of liberalism, but I shall fight off that temptation. No, I won’t. I know that liberalism isn’t dead in this country. It isn’t even comatose. It simply is suffering a severe case of acute laryngitis. It simply has temporarily—we hope—lost its voice. But that Democratic loss in the election. . . . It seems to me it was not just the candidate who belatedly found a voice that could reach the people. It was not just a campaign strategy built on a defensive philosophy. It was not just an opposition that conducted one of the most sophisticated and cynical campaigns ever. It was not just a failure to reach out to every section of our nation and every sector of our society. It was the fault of too many who found their voices still by not-so-subtle ideological intimidation.

  For instance, we know that unilateral military action in Grenada and Tripoli was wrong. We know that Star Wars means uncontrollable escalation of the arms race. We know that the real threat to democracy is when half of the nation is in poverty. We know that Thomas Jefferson was right when he said that a democracy cannot be both ignorant and free. We know, we know, that no one should tell a woman she has to bear an unwanted child. And we know that there is freedom to disagree with all or part of what I’ve just said. But God Almighty, God Almighty, we’ve got to shout these truths in which we believe from the rooftops, like that scene in the movie Network. We’ve got to throw open our windows and shout these truths to the streets and to the heavens. And I bet that we’ll find that more windows are thrown open to join the chorus than we’d ever have dreamed possible.

  The uncorking at Roseland was restorative for Cronkite’s sagging post-election morale. Never before had he spoken so candidly about his personal liberalism in public. Having built his house from the first brick onward as the objective journalist, the Roseland address planted him firmly in liberal-left soil. The charade of being Mr. Center was over. Something about the Bush ascension to the White House, the degrading of liberalism, had caused his spleen to rupture. Freedom of speech was his new talking point. A taste for the middling gave way to rabble-rousing. If Ted Turner was the “Mouth from the South,” Cronkite became the “Missouri Mouth.” The New York Times ran a long story about Cronkite becoming a scrappy left-winger who spoke his mind. “On television, I tried to absolutely hew to the middle of the road and not show any prejudice or bias in any way,” he explained. “I did not believe the public was sophisticated enough to understand that a newsman could wear several hats and that we had the ability to turn off nearly, you can’t say perfectly, but nearly all of our prejudices and biases.”

  On March 11, 1989, jarred by the Natural Resources Defense Council report Ebb Tide for Pollution: A Program for Cleansing the Coast, Cronkite returned to North Carolina to deliver a blistering speech about saving the state’s pristine coastline. Sailing around Cape Hatteras National Seashore was to Cronkite a sacred endeavor. But on a return visit to North Carolina, inhaling a sulfuric stench, he saw poisonous water and decided to speak out. “Nowadays, you see more people, more houses, more development—on the barrier beaches and the coastline,” he said. “You see oil scum and gasoline floating on the surface. And all the detritus of so-called civilized living—the throw-away wrappings and containers—above all the PLASTICS. The styrofoam, the used baggies—bobbing in the swells ubiquitously—sometimes as far as a hundred miles off-shore. You see plastic waste floating all around you, and you find it hard to remember that all this plastic in our life is less than a half a century old—that there actually was a time when man managed to get along WITHOUT plastic—happy in the ignorance of what he was missing.”

  If Cronkite found any professional pleasure in 1989, it was, predictably enough, with NASA. He worked with Michael and Roger King of Houston on a documentary film about the Challenger disaster. When the twentieth anniversary of Apollo 11 occurred that July, he hosted the star-studded black-tie gala at the Hyatt Regency Hotel at the Galleria in Houston. Surrounded by mural-size panoramas of the lunarscape, with a huge photograph of President Kennedy looming over the head table, Cronkite took to the podium. “I could drown in the nostalgia tonight,” he said. “The waves of it are overwhelming.” All three of the Apollo 11 astronauts—Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins—spoke from the heart that evening. The only sour note came from Cronkite, who was worried that Bush (unlike Kennedy) hadn’t given a tight deadline or a strong financial commitment to Mars exploration. The Apollo program had cost the U.S. taxpayers $25 billion; to Cronkite, it was worth every damn penny. Without a similar cash outlay, he said, going to Mars would remain a pipe dream.

  There were plenty of things President Bush did accomplish that Cronkite approved of throughout 1989 and 1990. None were more meaningful to the anchor emeritus than when the president met African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela in June 1990 and signed the Americans with Disabilities Act a few weeks later. Cronkite praised Bush for not gloating over the United States’ winning the cold war and overseeing the German unification process, but he was highly critical of the administration’s defense of Saudi Arabia after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1991. Cronkite took the view that if the Big Three networks hadn’t gutted their foreign bureaus in the late 1980s, the Middle East conflict might not have happened. In 1984, to Cronkite’s eternal chargrin, Tisch laid off hundreds of CBS employees, including his correspondent buddies David Andelman, Fred Graham, Morton Dean, and Ike Pappas. Cronkite blamed Rather, who was signing off his Evening News broadcasts with one word—“courage”—for failing to stand up to Tisch. “The New York Times was reporting the [Iraqi] build-up on the border, but television gave the story slight attention,” Cronkite believed. “Suppose network correspondents in Baghdad had been urging their evening news programs to put them on air with reports on the growing dangers?”

  On January 9, 1991, the House voted 250 to 183, and the S
enate 52 to 47, to authorize President Bush to go to war against Iraq. Cronkite was rife with dissent. When Bush ordered Operation Desert Storm to begin on the morning of January 16, 1991, in Washington (the morning of January 17 in Iraq), Cronkite made public noise. During those first tense days of the heavily televised Gulf War, CNN, providing twenty-four-hour coverage, was the only news organization with the stealth ability to broadcast from inside Iraq as the U.S. bombing campaign got under way. Screaming missiles, F-14s taking off from aircraft carriers, antiaircraft flashes, night-vision cameras, tanks rumbling across the desert—the whole high-tech war was being beamed into America’s living rooms on CNN. If Vietnam had been America’s first living room war, then the Gulf War was cable TV’s first real foray into the world of the three TV families. To a child, the CNN broadcast might have looked like a video arcade game or fireworks display; to Cronkite, the TV glow from the Middle East smelled of death.

  The United States, with support from both NATO and the United Nations, aimed to kick Iraq’s troops out of neighboring Kuwait. Cronkite, a war skeptic with highly tuned instincts for Pentagon anti-press shenanigans, was glued to his television, watching the CNN troika of Bernard Shaw, John Holliman, and Peter Arnett, who all braved the heavy bombing of Baghdad to broadcast from the war zone. CNN president Tom Johnson had previously negotiated a deal with the Iraqi government to permit the installation of a permanent audio circuit in their makeshift bureau in Baghdad. “The telegraph at the other networks went dead during the bombing,” Johnson recalled. “So CNN had the only able service to deliver live reporting. There was a spell when Arnett was the only TV voice getting out of Iraq.” At CBS News, only Allen Pizzey’s fine reporting struck Cronkite’s fancy.

  Shaw had been promised another interview following his October 1990 session with dictator Saddam Hussein and publicly said he wouldn’t leave Iraq until he got it. These CNN correspondents were the new Murrow Boys, cableteers deep in the Middle East maelstrom—only, their medium was television instead of radio. CNN captured on film Tomahawk missiles raining down on Baghdad live in a startling way. “The skies over Baghdad have been illuminated,” Shaw reported in hair-raising fashion. “We see bright flashes going all over the sky.”

  Cronkite had telephoned Tom Johnson of CNN in Atlanta, worried that President Bush, known for a narrowness of vision, was going to blunder by prohibiting reporters from embedding with U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia for the slog to Baghdad. He urged Johnson to remember how President Reagan had censored the press in the Grenada invasion of 1983. The Pentagon was still trying to blame CBS News for losing the Vietnam War. “Walter,” Johnson said, “why don’t you tell the president yourself on CNN?” While CBS News used Cronkite only sparingly for Operation Desert Storm, CNN used him often, through Johnson’s intervention. There was still a weightiness to the Cronkite brand that CNN could profit from in 1991.

  There was no virtuoso performance by Cronkite during the Gulf War. His voice on CNN was instead that of guardian of the fourth estate. While President Bush believed that the military strike had “started well” because no U.S. planes had been “lost in the first wave of attacks,” Cronkite offered a different perspective. “There are Americans dying,” he said on January 16, the first day of the war, “undoubtedly at this hour.” Sounding like an antiwar pacifist of I. F. Stone vintage, he asked the Pentagon to make sure that reporters were given full access to the war, as in Vietnam under LBJ. Speaking on a four-wire link with Shaw, Arnett, and Holliman, Cronkite then oddly personalized the inherent dangers these brave reporters faced. “I suppose,” he said, “there comes a point where it becomes foolhardy to risk one’s life to do that job if it’s almost certainly fated at the end. But I can’t make that judgment for anybody today.”

  Sitting in New York, Cronkite was worried from the get-go about whether Shaw—who was reporting under a desk from the Al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad as cruise missiles traced by—would survive the pounding. Shaw brought Cronkite into the mix in a meaningful way. He was now part of the network’s coverage. A CNN truck had set up a makeshift studio at Cronkite’s Eighty-fourth Street home so he could speak directly with Shaw in Baghdad. The net effect was that Cronkite became via satellite a sage advisor to the Baghdad boys, warning them not to showboat and to keep their helmets on. “It was so intense,” Shaw recalled. “The historical irony of Walter and me covering a war together in such a modern Baghdad-to-New York fashion was lost on me. But we considered Cronkite a crucial part of our coverage when we were covering the war, and Cronkite was covering how the CNN reporters were covering the war.”

  Cronkite’s old friend Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle was in New York just after Desert Storm was proclaimed a whopping success by the U.S. media at the end of February. Walter and Betsy took Caen to dinner at Le Cirque on East Sixty-fifth Street. When talk about the Gulf War started up, Cronkite turned bitter. The very mention of the president made his face turn cold. “Bush said we were fighting the Iraqi leadership, not the Iraqi people,” he remarked. “Well, we killed 100,000 of them and Bush has yet to offer one word of sympathy.”

  Besides the death of Iraqi civilians, the ordeal of CBS News’ Middle East correspondent Bob Simon had Cronkite gripped with anxiety. Simon was Cronkite’s ideal of an outstanding foreign correspondent. Ever since they had met back at the CBS Broadcast Center water fountain in 1967, sharing laughs over a filthy joke, Cronkite had thought of Simon as kin. Simon, who served as a national correspondent in New York for CBS News from 1982 to 1987, was, Cronkite believed, among the finest TV reporters since Murrow. Whether Simon was reporting on Pope John Paul II’s historic visits to Poland and Cuba, the prison release of Nelson Mandela, or the execution of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, Cronkite approved. Simon, he would say, single-handedly saved the CBS Evening News from ruin during Rather’s dismal reign.

  So when Simon (along with three members of CBS News’ coverage team) was captured by Iraqi forces near the Saudi-Kuwait border during the opening days of the Gulf War, Cronkite grew nervous, worried about the shakedown tactics of Saddam Hussein’s thugs. At strange hours he would telephone Mike Wallace for information. Cronkite found out that CBS News was working all channels—the Vatican, Jordan’s King Hussein, the PLO, and the Russians—to free the media hostages. After forty long days in solitary confinement, Simon and the others—Peter Bluff, Roberto Alvarez, and Juan Caldera—were released. The weight of the world was lifted off Cronkite’s shoulders. The CBSers were safe and sound.

  Simon returned to New York a flavor-of-the-week hero. Putnam, smelling publishing dollars, signed him to write a quick memoir, Forty Days, about being locked in solitary confinement, tortured by sleep deprivation, and ruthlessly interrogated. On his first day back at work, Simon found a handwritten letter from Cronkite waiting for him. “I’m so very proud of you,” the note began. Cronkite praised Simon for having walked away from “pack journalism” during the Gulf War by covering the Saudi-Kuwait border and for his stoic bearing as a captive. “It made me cry,” Simon recalled. “Can you imagine? Walter Cronkite was proud of me. . . . It left me numb just staring at the paper.”

  Cronkite’s concern about the news media being thwarted by the Pentagon was overblown. Reporters such as Christiane Amanpour of CNN and Forrest Sawyer of ABC were able to detail U.S. troop actions quite ably from the pits of the Desert Storm action. And Cronkite’s critique of the war as an unmitigated disaster for U.S. foreign policy was off base. While many Iraqi civilians did lose their lives in Operation Desert Storm, the Bush administration was widely applauded—even at the United Nations and NATO headquarters—for kicking the dictatorial Hussein out of Kuwait. Victory in the Gulf War translated into President Bush’s scoring a 91 percent approval rating in USA Today, the highest ever for a U.S. president.

  Political differences with President Bush over Iraq couldn’t interfere with Cronkite’s need for good contacts and summertime cordials. Many of his closest friends were Republic
an policymakers. At the Bohemian Grove in California, his campmate at Hillbillies was none other than George H. W. Bush himself. Much had happened since U.S.-led forces began air attacks on Iraq in January, ranging from the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles, to the EPA’s announcement that the ozone layer was being depleted by pollution, to South Africa’s repealing apartheid, to the Warsaw Pact’s being dismantled. When the United States and the USSR signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) on July 31, 1991, Cronkite fired off a note of congratulations to President Bush in Maine. The president responded with an invitation for cocktails and dinner.

  Every summer, Cronkite—besides sailing from Martha’s Vineyard out to Nantucket, or over to Cape Cod, or out into Buzzards Bay or the Elizabeth Islands—liked to head north and explore Maine’s rock-ribbed coast. “Sometimes we would go visit Tom Watson, the head of IBM, at his place on Northeast Island in Maine,” nautical sidekick Mike Ashford recalled. “But this summer, Walter wanted me to meet with George and Barbara Bush in Kennebunkport, so we went.”

  At the Bushes’ compound, Cronkite, Ashford, and a few others sat on the president’s patio in the cool Atlantic breeze, watching the glorious sunset, relaxing and sipping Bush-shaken martinis. “Suddenly, there was an old-fashioned telephone ring,” Ashford recalled. “President Bush went to take the call. He came back with the biggest smile imaginable on his face.” A startled Cronkite had never seen Bush so “exultant” before. Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, who in 1990 had won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to democratize the USSR, had just telephoned to let Bush know that the Communist Party had been disbanded in the Soviet Union. “What great news,” Ashford recalled. “We all ceremoniously hoisted our glasses to toast the death of communism. For Walter it was the greatest news in the world.”

  On December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved following the resignation of Gorbachev on Christmas Day. To Cronkite it was the biggest event since V-J Day. The thought of a world rid of nuclear weapons seemed plausible. He spoke about that very real possibility with former secretary of state George P. Shultz on a number of occasions. Even with the Kremlin checkmated, Cronkite couldn’t bring himself to back a Republican. But instead of criticizing Bush directly, he critiqued the entire electoral process. Like Tom Brokaw of NBC News, he lamented the “cancer of the sound bite” in which political candidates spoke in rehearsed five- to ten-second snippets aimed at making the nightly news cycle. “Naturally,” Cronkite said, “nothing of any significance is going to be said in 9.8 seconds.”