What Cronkite realized by 1992 was that the everyday American life stages had changed drastically since the black-and-white TV days of Douglas Edwards. With shopping mall stores staying open until 9:00 p.m. and some fast-food franchises operating 24/7, there was no longer a rigid nine-to-five workweek (particularly on the coasts). As Rather was delivering the CBS Evening News in 1991, potential viewers were at happy hours, workouts, ball games, and their children’s extracurricular events. They weren’t rushing home for suppertime news. Only in the Midwest and the Rocky Mountain states did the tradition of Big Three evening news seem to hold its firm footing in the age of cable TV. No longer was breaking news confined to the staid half-hour shows. Besides cable, the Internet was revving up to make the CBS Evening News even more disjointed and obsolete.
During the 1992 presidential election, Cronkite hitched his star to the upstart Discovery Channel. John Hendricks, the founder of Discovery who was raised on Cronkite broadcasts, approached the icon about rebroadcasting rights to Walter Cronkite’s Universe. Hendricks, without hyperbole, credited the CBS science-environment show for being the galvanizing inspiration for his cable network. “I struggled for funding like mad in the 1980s,” Hendricks said, “and then Walter came on board and everybody believed in it.” Hendricks paid Cronkite to do long-form interviews of all the presidential candidates prior to the Iowa caucus. Hendricks also tapped him to host the Emmy Award–winning Understanding Great Books, whose title nicely described the program’s content. “Walter became a friend, counselor, and mentor to me,” Hendricks recalled. “If the story of the Discovery Channel ever gets made into a movie, Walter gets top billing. Without him there wouldn’t today be a Discovery Channel.”
While President Bush geared up for his reelection bid in early 1992, Cronkite continued circulating as the éminence grise of journalism. Whether he was hosting a dinner at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York for author James Michener, or hiking the U.S.-Mexican border to study immigration, or lending his voice to Hollywood director Steven Spielberg’s We’re Back animation about dinosaurs, or working on documentaries for the Discovery Channel about presidential politics, Cronkite was back in the mix. Nobody held his overt liberalism against him. But because he had denounced the Gulf War with such vehemence, fuming about the restrictive Annex Foxtrot memo (which stipulated new restrictions on the media covering the conflict), President Bush refused to participate in his Discovery Channel show. “I greatly regret that President Bush and his campaign managers have turned down our invitation,” Cronkite lamented, “but I cannot help but note that all the others did find time for this.”
One 1992 presidential candidate who didn’t miss the opportunity to be interviewed by Cronkite was Arkansas governor Bill Clinton. The two became quite friendly on the campaign trail. Clinton would shout out “Hey, Walter” to Cronkite in New Hampshire or New York or Florida, like a grown-up kid seeing his teeny-bopper idol. But Cronkite became bored with the ’92 campaign. His role seemed to be that of crotchety oldster, always telling the whippersnappers how much better journalism was back before Telstar. After the Democratic presidential debate in Dallas in early March, he held a round table forum on journalism ethics for the Discovery Channel, but the public service program fell flat with viewers. In an age of MTV videos and IMAX theaters, old-school public service programs were a cold curse to sponsors.
If Cronkite played a memorable role in the 1992 election, it was in taking a few well-placed swipes at third-party candidate Ross Perot of Dallas. But Cronkite agreed with Perot when he claimed at the National Press Club on March 18 that Washington was a town of “sound bites, shell games, handlers, and media stuntmen.” Cronkite privately criticized CNN’s Larry King—a dear friend—and others for always lobbing softball questions at the prickly billionaire founder of Electronic Data Systems. “Perot can stumble into an answer that is meaningful,” Cronkite said. “But that can’t go on forever. At some point he’s going to have to sit down and discuss the issues with journalists who would be more persistent in their line of questioning.”
On November 3, 1992, Clinton won 370 electoral votes to Bush’s 168, with zero votes for Perot. It was a humiliating way for Bush to go down after brilliantly guiding the United States through the demise of the Soviet Union, German reunification, and the Gulf War. At a party that the actress Carol Channing threw, Cronkite was asked to sum up President-elect Clinton. Without hesitation he said, “Clinton has Carter’s intelligence, Johnson’s experience, and Kennedy’s gonads.” It was Clinton’s favorite shorthand summation of his style ever uttered.
Ever the loyal Democrat, Cronkite was glad Clinton had won, but oddly hurt for his Kennebunkport friends George and Barbara. They were among the finest, most patriotic people he knew. Just three days before Christmas, at the Kennedy Center honors, Cronkite, the emcee, suddenly launched into an unscripted moment. At the show’s close, he pointed at President Bush and offered a high note of thanks. “There’s one more honor to be paid tonight,” he said, turning himself to look squarely at the president’s face, “to an individual who has served his country in war and peace for more than a half a century who has joined us again tonight to pay tribute to America’s performing arts. We offer him our respect, our gratitude, and we thank him for service to his country with honor.”
President Bush got a long standing ovation, with a grateful Cronkite the last to stop clapping.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“The World’s Oldest Reporter”
EARTHQUAKE CHASING—CHECKING UP ON SHAW—WELCOME TO THE CLINTON AGE—SEVAREID DIES—HISTORICAL MEMORY—THE CRONKITE REPORT—TIME FOR THE ORGY—GIVING ROSTROPOVICH A CHAIR—A SURROGATE FOR WORLD WAR II ANNIVERSARIES—IN PRAISE OF 24/7 NEWS AND THE INTERNET—STARTING UP CRONKITE AND WARD—DEATH OF HELEN—CRONKITE REMEMBERS A REPORTER’S LIFE—MOVING TO THE UN PLAZA—GROWING MORE LIBERAL—INTERFAITH ALLIANCE—TIME TO SAIL WITH THE CLINTONS—JOHN GLENN IN SPACE—MILLENNIUM SPOTS—SPOTTING TRUMP—WORLD FEDERALIST—BUSH V. GORE
One evening in early 1994, the seventy-seven-year-old Cronkite was jarred awake from a sound sleep by a loud rumble. His hotel room was shaking. The lamp crashed, the desk drawer opened, and he was almost tossed from his bed. Los Angeles was in the midst of the Northridge earthquake, which measured 6.7 on the Richter scale. Cronkite instinctively headed to the lobby to find an emergency transistor radio. He heard Bernard Shaw talking to the Atlanta headquarters about the quake from his own L.A. hotel room. Quickly, Cronkite put on his suit and shoes, headed to the lobby, and flagged down a taxi, barking, “Go where it’s the worst!”
While Shaw was reporting from a hotel room, Cronkite wanted to get the reportorial edge by seeing the damage firsthand. The itch of a newspaper reporter on the hunt for a quick lead hadn’t left him. “He hadn’t lost his drive to own a news story,” Shaw later chuckled. “He outhustled us younger guys by immediately getting reactions from victims.” There was no quit in old Walter. About a half hour later, having assessed the grim on-the-ground situation in downtown L.A., he tracked down Shaw, still at his hotel, telephoning him from the lobby. It was the reverse of 1961 at the Reef Hotel in Hawaii: Cronkite was now the stalker, while Shaw was the big-time CNN anchor.
“Are you okay?” Cronkite asked.
“Walter,” an amused and touched Shaw said. “Is that you?”
“Yes!” he laughed. “I’m in your lobby.”
“How did you know I was here?”
“I’ve been listening to your radio reports,” Cronkite said. “Been riding around in a cab inspecting the damage.”
Shaw was flabbergasted. Cronkite had the gumption to check out the devastation like an ambulance-chasing UP reporter and then swing by to check on him. He joked with Shaw that he still abided by the old wire service dictum: “Cover the goddamn news, get it on.” Roving around Los Angeles, talking to quake victims, many of whom called him “Uncle Walter,” became his quasi-missionary work for a week
following the quake. During the New London school explosion in 1937, he had a job to do for the Dallas UP bureau. With the Northridge earthquake he was on the scene but had no media outlet for which to report. Rather wouldn’t have him on his CBS Evening News. Having no byline or show was a terrible thing. “I think Walter was shaken by Northridge,” Andy Rooney recalled. “Here he had been lucky enough to be smack in the middle of a natural disaster and he had no one to broadcast for.”
No one saw Cronkite much on television anymore in 1994 unless it was a celebrity turn on the news-oriented CBS comedy Murphy Brown (as himself) or on CNN’s Larry King Live. No longer was he needed for big conventions or terror attacks. He was largely an annoyance at CBS News and an out-of-steady-work legend everywhere else except at the Discovery Channel, which didn’t do breaking news. But as the Northridge earthquake demonstrated, not for a second did Cronkite, a true workaholic and playoholic, want to retire from the fourth estate. Every day, he diligently followed a promising lead no matter that day’s schedule. Producers in the 1990s who were successful in TV broadcasts with Cronkite—like John Hendricks and Jon Ward—knew that the magic words were “I want you to host” such-and-such news segment or documentary. Had somebody—for old times’ sake—decided to create an “All Cronkite” network, like Oprah Winfrey did for herself in 2011, he would have said yes. “Walter was always open for business,” Tom Brokaw recalled. “He never grew bitter or unapproachable. Walter got up every morning knowing who he was. Dan Rather woke up every morning trying to decide who he’d be that day. As a result, Rather didn’t have a clue.”
By the time Clinton was sworn in as the forty-second U.S. president on January 20, 1993, the world of journalism that Cronkite had grown up in was fast disappearing. No longer were newspaper rooms smoke-filled, resounding with the clatter of typewriters in every direction as corps of desk assistants dashed frenetically about. Carbon copies were unnecessary in the era of word processing. Confirming Cronkite’s worst fears, cities that once had two or three newspapers were now lucky to have one. In television journalism, on the other hand, there were many more outlets. “People put their faith in what they see on television, and we all know there probably wasn’t a night that went by that we didn’t, somehow or another, badly, with no intent, distort a piece of news or make a mistake,” Cronkite reminisced. “When we knew about it, we’d correct it. But, gee, to depend on somebody to tell you the absolute truth every night and give you The Word every night, that’s a bad thing, a serious problem in a democracy.”
Cronkite’s cool, objective style (supported by vigorous fact-checking) could still be found on The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour on PBS, ABC’s Nightline with Ted Koppel, CBS’s 60 Minutes, and a few other old-school holdouts. But such quality reporting had largely become obsolete in the accelerated world of 24/7 cable news. Cronkite, lo and behold, had come to represent a historical personage, a holdover from the golden age of TV. Tabloid news had seized America’s attention span and only Bill Moyers and Marvin Kalb seemed to care. “The fact that you can’t find a new Walter Cronkite on television today is no fluke,” Jack Fuller wrote in his seminal What Is Happening to News. “The dispassionate approach embodied by Cronkite does not attract the audience it used to. Walter Cronkite was lucky to have worked when he did. (And we were lucky, too, for he helped the country through some very difficult times.) Today he would be canceled. So, by the way, would Walter Lippmann.”
Over the summer of 1992, Eric Sevareid died of cancer. He was seventy-nine years old. Ever since November 1964, when the long-established Sevareid joined Cronkite on the CBS Evening News to deliver two-minute end-of-broadcast commentaries, he had been an almost godlike presence on the airwaves. Always noble-looking, with his immaculate shock of silver-gray hair and Roman profile, Sevareid had been a unique figure in TV news. He had his detractors, but few begrudged him his high-altitude station as a sober journalist and urbane philosophical pundit. It was the superb irony of Cronkite’s career that without Sevareid—the quintessential Murrowite—his famed CBS Evening News broadcast might never have surpassed NBC in the Nielsen ratings.
But that was then. When ABC News’ Ted Koppel (one of Cronkite’s favorite non-CBSers) retired from Nightline in 2005, after twenty-five years with the program, he told viewers about a spontaneous quiz he gave young interns hoping for a career in broadcasting:
“How many of you,” I’ll ask, “can tell me anything about Eric Sevareid?” Blank stares. “How about Howard K. Smith? or Frank Reynolds?” Not a twitch of recognition. “Chet Huntley? John Chancellor?” Still nothing. “David Brinkley” sometimes causes a hand or two to be raised, and Walter Cronkite may be glad to learn that a lot of young people still have a vague recollection that he once worked in television news. What none of these young men and women in their late teens and early twenties appreciates, until I point it out to them, is that they have just heard the names of seven anchormen or commentators that were once so famous that everyone in the country knew their names.
The dominant view, perfectly articulated by Koppel, was that a television broadcaster, at the end of the day, was only an ephemeral talking head. TV news epitomized transitory, disposable American culture. Sevareid’s CBS News colleagues knew that “Eric the Red” helped bring down Joseph McCarthy, Spiro Agnew, and Richard Nixon. But history largely forgot his public influence once the Clintons moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Cronkite never really warmed to Sevareid personally—he was put off by his conceit. But Sevareid’s passing spelled the beginning of the end of the Greatest Generation of broadcasters raised on Murrow. “Eric was one of the best of that small number of news analysts, commentators and essayists,” Cronkite told the Los Angeles Times obituary writer, “who truly deserved to be called distinguished.”
No up-and-comer in the TV news business struck Cronkite’s fancy during the Clinton years quite like Brian Williams. Cronkite had first encountered Williams on WCBS in 1993 and kept a watchful eye on him the way an NFL scout watches high school football talent in Texas or Oklahoma. When Williams went to NBC News in 1994, Cronkite caught his broadcasts regularly. He was impressed by the way Williams effortlessly grappled with the Clinton impeachment drama: with utter objectivity. When, in 1996, Williams anchored his own one-hour broadcast on MSNBC—a kind of AAA cable farm club for NBC News—Cronkite intuitively knew that the boy from Elmira, New York, was headed for electronic journalism stardom. Around that time, Williams wrote Cronkite “an obsequious letter,” one that he hoped no historian would ever find. Williams told Cronkite that he was his “North Star” and invited his idol to lunch. Cronkite accepted, and a genuine friendship blossomed. “I couldn’t believe I got to hover in the same sphere with him,” Williams recalled. “We started seeing each other socially and talking on the telephone.”
When Cronkite spoke at a library lecture series in Darien, Connecticut, named in honor of Richard Salant—who dropped dead of a heart attack on February 16, 1993, while giving a speech in Southport, Connecticut—Williams dutifully attended. A real journalism history nerd, Williams knew all about how Salant had raised professional standards as CBS News president from 1961 to 1964 and from 1966 to 1979. He knew how many duPonts and Peabodys the tireless Salant had earned for CBS News during Watergate and Vietnam. He was a huge fan. As prearranged, the Williamses—Brian and Jane—invited Cronkite to their New Canaan home after the library talk to tell Salant stories. “I was excited beyond belief,” Williams recalled. “My one true hero was coming over to my house. If only my poor mother had been alive. I told my daughter that the older man with the white, fuzzy mustache was my idol, that he was like a Santa Claus figure. As he ate our lasagna, I thought that my mother would have considered Cronkite crossing the threshold of our Elmira home in the 1970s for dinner to be the single greatest event that could have possibly happened to her.”
Susceptible to such flattery and warmth, Cronkite became even closer friends with Williams. Shortly after 9/11, the New York Dai
ly News ran a little notice that Cronkite thought Aaron Brown of CNN was the Rolls-Royce anchorman in the news business. A shudder passed through Williams, the showman, who took mock umbrage at that tabloid endorsement. In full prankster mode, he wrote Cronkite a deeply comical, faux-blistering letter complaining that he had “been laid bare” and had his “feelings stomped on” by the revelatory embrace of Brown. “Walter cracked up about it,” Williams remembered. “It became our running joke.”
What Williams understood was that the Cronkites—Walter and Betsy—lived for humor. Practical jokes and clever asides consumed their days. With the kids fully grown, Betsy accompanied her husband on a dozen junkets in the 1990s. A case in point was working together on the documentary “Yellowstone Remembered” for PBS. At the gift shop near Old Faithful one day, the Cronkites split up, looking for souvenirs in different aisles. Suddenly, a woman came up to Betsy, tapped her shoulder, and whispered, “Doesn’t that man over there look like Walter Cronkite?”
“Oh, no,” Betsy said. “He’s much too thin.”
“You know,” the woman said, now considering. “I think maybe he died.”
“Yes,” Betsy said. “I think that’s right.”
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