Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead correctly asked people not to pigeonhole his friend as one of the old guard only. “He was the original social media guy,” Hart explained. “Before Facebook or Twitter people depended on him being nice. Cronkite wanted to make a better, kinder world. He was a voice shaman. He had a powerful aura. The voice, glasses, pipe—they were perfect totems.”
It was Cronkite’s close personal sailing friends Mike Ashford and Bill Harbach who captured the freewheeling old sailor side of the famed newsman at the New York church memorial. Ashford said that when people asked him what Cronkite was really like, the stock answer was, “He’s just the way you hope he is.” The mourners broke out laughing as Ashford told how free Cronkite was steering the Wyntje, shouting, “Sensational!” as waves battered the yawl about. Vanity Fair once asked Cronkite what person or thing he’d like to be reincarnated as. Cronkite’s answer was “a seagull—graceful in flight, rapacious in appetite.” The genius of Cronkite, Ashford believed, was his own hurt for other people’s misery. “He had an antenna sensitive to friends’ pain,” he said. “He knew the words to restore the fun, chase the worry and make things good.”
When Harbach took to the altar, he spoke of Cronkite as a “one-off,” an absolute original. No one knew how to separate the chaff from the grain quite like Cronkite. Seeing through shell games came naturally to him. Harbach, who had first met Cronkite in the late 1950s as a producer of The Steve Allen Show, sat at Cronkite’s bedside as he lay dying at UN Plaza, reading him poetry. A favorite of Cronkite’s was “Sea Fever,” by John Masefield, and Harbach read it at the memorial service, changing the verse to the second person: “You must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and sky / And all you ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by / And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking / And a grey mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking.”
After the memorial service, CBS News decided to hold a huge public celebration of Cronkite’s career in September 2009 (when everyone was back in Manhattan from summer vacation). CEO Les Moonves opened up the CBS checkbook and threw a grand memorial service for Cronkite at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall. The task of making September 9 a historic event fell squarely on the shoulders of Linda Mason, the CBS News executive who had produced the Cronkite Remembers documentary back in 1997. Everyone in America, Mason soon learned, wanted to be part of the Lincoln Center event. A consensus had developed that in the history of broadcasting—both radio and television—nobody could run a big story alone like the Kennedy assassination or Nixon’s resignation with Walter Cronkite’s even keel. And no one begrudged him what he once told Vanity Fair was his greatest achievement: “Helping establish some TV news standards” (even though, as a corollary note, it was also recognized that television had, in the end, with one or two exceptions failed to maintain the Cronkite standard).
The standard was alive and well with Christiane Amanpour. While other broadcasters were lining up their limo rides to Lincoln Center, worried about their paparazzi shots, Amanpour had awoken in her Upper West Side home, gotten dressed, and pedaled her bicycle down Central Park. She wanted to think about Cronkite in the natural space. She parked her bike and locked it a couple of blocks away from Lincoln Center. Cronkite had been amazed back in 1996 about how Amanpour managed to work full-time for CNN and also contribute five global reports for 60 Minutes each year; he even had a DVD of all her on-air performances delivered to him at UN Plaza. “In my purple suede bolero jacket and black trousers,” Amanpour recalled, “I felt like a cross between the Flying Nun and Mary Tyler Moore, but I got there in time.”
Amanpour’s written diary entry of Cronkite’s memorial radiates the kind of warmth, humor, and intellectual reflection Cronkite would have loved reading. Watching a video montage of the great newsman—“This is Walter Cronkite in Paris . . . Moscow . . . the Great Wall of China and Beyond”—caused Amanpour to weep with pride. A journalist truly could make a difference in a world gone wrong. To Amanpour, just back in New York from Afghanistan (where she filmed the documentary Generation Islam about the lives of young Muslims), Cronkite’s life wasn’t about anchoring the CBS Evening News. He was the quintessential war correspondent of her lifetime. He had become her primary Fountain of Wisdom. No matter if she was covering ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, avoiding rape in Iraq, or comforting children with infectious diseases in Haiti, Amanpour always asked herself the same question: “What would Walter do?”
The answer was to seek the truth, keep people honest, explore the world, and laugh at the absurdity of it all.
Moonves invited President Barack Obama to speak at the memorial. Like everyone else, Obama had “grown up watching Cronkite,” and he felt honored to be asked. Not only would the president speak at Lincoln Center, but he also ordered his White House staff to clear his entire afternoon schedule for the commemorative event. While CBS News didn’t broadcast the Lincoln Center ceremony, it did stream the program live at the broadcast center on Fifty-seventh Street, via the corporation’s internal feed. “Everybody in the building was glued to the ceremony,” producer Armen Keteyian recalled. “We were riveted. All the speeches were great, but Obama really hit it out of the park.”
To Obama—who stayed for the entire two-and-a-half-hour program—the anchor emeritus represented the high-water mark of TV broadcasting. It was hard, Obama said, to envision a world without Cronkite. “Journalism is more than just a profession,” Obama said. “It is a public good vital to our democracy.” What Obama respected about Cronkite was that he didn’t dumb down news, shout, or act like an angry jackass. The president told the Lincoln Center crowd that Cronkite was great because he understood that “the American people were hungry for the truth, unvarnished and unaccompanied by theater or spectacle.” It was apparent that Obama used the memorial to send a strong message to the fourth estate that the Cronkite standard of clarity and truthfulness needed to be reinstated in a broadcast world where profit-fueled Inside Edition sensationalism was king. Obama was echoing what Cronkite himself had told a West Virginia audience earlier in the decade, when he blamed the decline in journalism standards on “mega firms” that viewed news as “just another profit center.” Such conglomerates as Disney-ABC-ESPN, NBC-Universal-Telemundo, Time-Warner-CNN, and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. spelled the end of wire service reporters like Cronkite being in control of the broadcast news centers of America.
Former president Bill Clinton—who sat next to Obama during the service—also spoke at the memorial, telling stories about how Cronkite reached out to him during the dark months of the Lewinsky scandal. Buzz Aldrin recounted that when the Apollo 11 astronauts were in quarantine in 1969, they watched tapes of Cronkite’s CBS moon broadcast to find out how the mission had transpired. “Storytelling was Walter’s passion,” Aldrin said, “just as flying in space was mine.”
Music also conjured up the spirit of Cronkite that day. Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Sextet led a raucous New Orleans–style musical procession through the packed hall with horns blaring Dixieland. Mickey Hart used a wooden box as a drum. And Jimmy Buffett stole the day, strumming acoustic guitar and singing “Son of a Son of a Sailor,” which Cronkite had adopted as his anthem. The thought of Commodore Cronkite listening to that Buffett song on Wyntje’s speaker system, sea breeze spritzing his face, was the lasting image from a day of music and remembrance at Lincoln Center.
The Cronkite attitude, stout and undaunted, combined with bedrock humility and compassion, gave the Missourian the ability to steady uncertain times. At the height of Cronkite’s fame as CBS anchorman, he tried to identify that elusive quality in his DNA makeup, that defining ingredient that made him different, and somehow managed to explain it. “There are better writers than me, better reporters, better speakers, better-looking people and better interviewers,” he said. “I don’t understand my appeal. It gets down to an unknown quality, maybe communication of i
ntegrity. I have a sense of mission. That sounds pompous, but I like the news. Facts are sacred. I feel people should know about the world, should know the truth as much as possible. I care about the world, about people, about the future. Maybe that comes across.”
In death, Cronkite was viewed as the polar opposite of tabloid news. In a 2001 interview with Larry King on CNN, the anchor emeritus had put his finger exactly on what was wrong with the TV news business. Instead of explaining vital news, networks operated like a pack of wolves, chasing after a tabloid story like Princess Diana’s car crash or the O. J. Simpson trial ad nauseam, beating it to death. Cronkite’s beef against pack news informed the spirit of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report hosted by Stephen Colbert. What also worried Cronkite was that U.S. political campaigns were becoming reality shows instead of public teaching endeavors. “Nobody’s asked me, which is strange, but I think the networks ought to be doing headlines,” Cronkite had told Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post in 2007. “Drop that ‘Your Pocketbook and Mine,’ ‘Your Beauty and Mine,’ ‘Your Garbage Can and Mine.’ ”
In July 2009, the Cronkite era, from any number of perspectives, ended. In the new world media order of twenty-four-hour cable news, sports, and business networks, and thousands of Internet news sites from the Daily Kos to the Drudge Report to the Huffington Post to a rushing flood of YouTube videos, there would never be one media voice so trusted again. No anchorman or reporter was likely ever again to command that much authority.
But, in perhaps the most meaningful tribute to Cronkite, CBS News, under the direction of its wunderkind president David Rhodes and veteran executive producer of 60 Minutes Jeff Fager, started steering the network back to the seriousness of the House of Cronkite days. Not only was the first post-Couric anchorman Scott Pelley of Texas, who was all about hard news and a Cronkite worshiper, but the august Charlie Rose of PBS was also hired to anchor CBS This Morning. Cronkite’s desk may have been turned to pulp wood, but his old studio’s wall-sized Mercator projection of the globe was excavated from a New Jersey storage warehouse. It was reintroduced to the studio at West Fifty-seventh Street to serve as Rose’s morning show backdrop. Cronkite would have felt flattered and vindicated.
Unafraid to flag-wave, but uncompromising when it came to exposing societal inequities of any kind, Cronkite, in last analysis, became the TV conscience of cold war America and beyond. His sense of comity at times of national crisis helped guide the country through tumultuous decades. “For a news analyst and reporter of the happenings of the day to be successful, he or she needs three things,” Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the Moon, said of Cronkite when the anchorman died in 2009. “Accuracy, timeliness, and the trust of the audience.” Cronkite had all three.
The essential thrust of Cronkite’s life was captured by President Obama in his Lincoln Center eulogy. “He was family,” Obama said, speaking as surrogate for millions of Americans. “He invited us to believe in him, and he never let us down.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I began this biography at the suggestion of the late David Halberstam. We were driving from New Orleans to Baton Rouge for the Louisiana Book Festival, drinking Starbucks coffee and swapping road stories, just killing time on I-10. Conversation turned to the relationship between the White House press corps and U.S. presidents in the age of television. Somewhere around Gonzales, Halberstam, whose The Powers That Be is the classic study of modern U.S. media history, made the bold claim that Walter Cronkite was the most significant journalist of the second half of the twentieth century. He felt that although Ronald Steel had written the definitive Walter Lippmann and the American Century and Joseph Persico had excelled with Edward R. Murrow: An American Original, no one had adequately tackled the life and times of Cronkite. I was intrigued. A few days later, I made a preliminary call to my agent of twenty-two years, Lisa Bankoff of ICM, to see if there was a Cronkite biography in the publishing world pipeline. She cast a wide net and came back with a no. I was off and running.
By happy coincidence, Cronkite had just donated his extensive papers to the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. Although Cronkite didn’t graduate from UT—or any college, for that matter—he had spent two years at the school, from 1933 to 1935, taking classes and working for its student newspaper, The Daily Texan. His love for his alma mater was fierce. I telephoned the Briscoe Center’s director, Professor Don Carleton, a first-rate historian, about the possibility of writing a biography of Cronkite. He was extremely enthusiastic about the idea. Someone, he believed, needed to take on the massive assignment. It was long overdue.
What made the Cronkite project appealing, other than Halberstam’s belief that the CBS newsman was so historically significant, was the fact that the UT trove included such excellent artifacts as Cronkite’s dozens of letters home from Europe during World War II; internal CBS memos; production materials from Cronkite series such as You Are There, Eyewitness, and The Twentieth Century; private photographs documenting his early life, his United Press clippings from the 1930s and 1940s, personal scrapbooks and his reportorial notebooks from Vietnam; fan mail dating from the 1950s to the 1980s; and personal correspondence with the most famous journalists, political figures, and entertainers of his day. Because Carleton is trying to turn the Briscoe Center into a top-tier depository of new media history, he has recently acquired the papers of many of Cronkite’s friends and colleagues, such as Andy Rooney, Harry Reasoner, Joe and Shirley Wershba, Robert Trout, Sig Mickelson, and Morley Safer, as well. This made for great one-stop shopping.
While working on Cronkite, Carleton asked me to serve as a fellow at UT’s Briscoe Center—an honor I gladly accepted. Office space, as well as a parking spot, copy machine, and phone service—all the perks a research scholar needs—were generously provided. The staff at the Briscoe Center—led by Carleton—is amazing. Thanks are in order to Margaret “the Magnificent” Schlankey, Erin Purdy, Brenda Gunn, Aryn Glazier, Roy Hinojosa, Amy Bowman, Stephanie Malmros, Evan Hocker, and Teresa Palomo Acosta. Don’s daughter, Aunna Carleton, a close friend of my family, helped find old New York Times stories and checked out books from UT on my behalf.
In July 2007, I was hired by Rice University as a tenured professor of U.S. history. Every fall semester I teach three courses: History of the Cold War (HIS352); Twentieth-Century Presidents (HIS291); and U.S. Conservation History (HIS425). This leaves me free to research and write from January to August without classroom responsibility. Although Rice is in Houston, I own a home in the foothills of Austin, just a few miles from the Cronkite archive at the University of Texas. I’m frequently shuttling between Austin and Houston along Highway 71 and I-10—a commute of two and a half hours—which can be tedious. To pass the time, I listen to a lot of folk, jazz, and NPR. But there is a wonderful upshot. The Brinkley family can now claim personal friendships in two great communities: Austin (Westlake and Rollingwood) and Houston (River Oaks and West University).
Scores of producers, writers, reporters, executives, and archivists at CBS News are personal friends. They helped me in myriad ways. Bill Felling—the national editor—has been a dear and constant friend. (I hope he listens to the audiobook of Cronkite on his commute from New Jersey over the George Washington Bridge to midtown Manhattan.) I’m frequently on the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley, CBS This Morning (with Charlie Rose, Erica Hill, and Gayle King), CBS News Sunday Morning (Charles Osgood), and Face the Nation (Bob Schieffer). This association has enhanced my understanding of the frenetic work milieu at West Fifty-seventh Street. A special thanks to CBS News president David Rhodes (a Rice alum), Jeff Fager (chairman and executive producer of 60 Minutes), Al Ortiz, Michelle Miller, Rita Braver, Charles Osgood, Bob Schieffer, David Farber, Jeff Glor, Bill Plante, Jim Axelrod, Byron Pitts, Bob Simon, Betty Nguyen, Steve Kroft, John Dickerson, Lara Logan, Norah O’Donnell, Bob Fuss, and Chip Reid.
To wade
into Cronkite leavings in both New York and Austin, I tapped my longtime friend Julie Fenster of New York for assistance. I first met Julie back at American Heritage magazine many moons ago, and we have been steadfast allies ever since. She has been my committed partner on this biography, researching obscure facts, helping organize chapters, and offering her shrewd insights into the history of American journalism. Her editorial skills and historical judgment are awesome. I never could have sifted through the seas of Cronkitiana without her. She was indispensable.
Starting in the fall of 2010, Sara Haji, a recent graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, became my personal assistant. Sara, now a law student at the University of California at Berkeley (and clerking for the Federal Trade Commission during the summers to boot), was recommended to me by my friend Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation (thank you, Katrina), and was a phenomenal asset. Sara worked with me at the Briscoe Center, rifling through boxes of material, collecting and compiling photos, and setting up interviews (all of which I personally conducted). She ended up naming her white Toyota “Cronkite.”
In July 2011, I received amazing assistance from Virginia Northington, a recent graduate of the Plan II Honors program at the University of Texas at Austin. Virginia is blessed with a keen grasp of history, literature, and journalism that belies her young age. Her honors thesis at UT—“Literary Naturalism in the Interwar Novels of Jean Rhys”—is a revisionist study of the distinguished author of Voyage in the Dark. With Virginia, there was no learning curve . From the get-go, she helped me transform Cronkite from a diffuse first draft into the carefully copyedited final manuscript. Punctual, brilliant, and always in work mode, she made our collaboration one of the high-water marks of toiling on this book. Because Virginia has a great love for marine conservation, I look forward to working with her on Silent Spring Revolution, the third volume of my Wilderness Cycle.
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