A number of students at Rice University likewise pitched in from time to time to help me track down articles on the Internet. A tip of the hat goes especially to Natalie Lazarescou and Irena Popova. My colleagues in the Rice History are hugely supportive of my publishing career. Special thanks to Paula Platt and Rachel Zepeda for keeping our department shop running like Swiss clockwork. Because Cronkite grew up in Houston, I found the morgue at The Houston Chronicle (which has Houston Press and Houston Post clippings) to be a great resource. Special thanks to Jeff Cohen, the Chronicle’s executive vice president and editor, and his staff for helping me excavate old Cronkite-related clippings.
During the summer of 2011 I was a research fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. I have historian extraordinaire Henry Louis “Skip” Gates to thank for that.
It should be noted that I knew Walter Cronkite a bit. Along with his wife, Betsy, he attended my New York book party for Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years, 1953-71 (a revised edition of my Georgetown University PhD dissertation that was published by Yale University Press in 1993). We had lunch a few times at the Century Club and I saw him occasionally at parties in New York and in Massachusetts. He graciously provided a blurb for one of my books. But we were not close. Only through the intervention of Don Carleton did I get to have dinner with him at his UN Plaza co-op in December 2008, only months before he died. Cronkite knew I was writing his biography, but his brain disorder made it impossible for him to assist me in any substantial way. It didn’t seem proper to include my conversations with him as interviews. He is not cited in the notes. Nevertheless, knowing him for over a decade, even a little, helped me better analyze his personality.
A considerable amount of energy was spent interviewing Cronkite’s family, friends, and associates. Everyone in journalism, it seems—from Barbara Walters to Ted Turner to Brian Williams to Katie Couric—has riveting Cronkite stories. (See the laundry list of interviews I conducted on page 775.) All three of Walter and Betsy Cronkite’s children—Nancy, Kathy, and Chip—backed my work from the outset. They wanted me to write a truthful biography of their dad, warts and all. A scholar can ask for no more from a subject’s family. I’m now close with the entire Cronkite clan (although we have our differences of opinion on a few family matters).
Likewise, Cronkite’s significant other for the last years of his life, Joanna Simon, was amazing and forthright about her controversial relationship with the journalism legend. And Cronkite’s chief of staff since 1991, the gracious Marlene Adler, served as my switchboard operator, putting me in touch with all kinds of people.
Three of my most helpful sources—Andy Rooney, Jeff Gralnick, and Bob Pierpoint—died while I was writing this biography. I’m sad they didn’t get to read the final manuscript. Their observations and insights about Cronkite were crucial.
A special thank-you to Cronkite’s longtime producer and friend, Sandy Socolow, is definitely in order. When I started the biography, Sandy came to visit me in Austin. It was the beginning of a productive friendship. We’ve spoken on the telephone probably one hundred times by now. In a number of key instances, he tracked down an old Cronkite friend for me to interview or found an odd document for me to ponder. Ditto for Cronkite’s former scriptwriter Sandor M. Polster and producer Ron Bonn. And Dan Rather, whom Cronkite disliked, nevertheless spent quality time with me explaining all things related to TV news in the 1960s and beyond. He couldn’t have been more candid and helpful. The great Roger Mudd is simply a prince.
Another crucial ally was Alfred Robert Hogan, a graduate student at the University of Maryland and a TV news/space authority. I first met Hogan while signing my book The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. Out of the thin blue sky, Hogan presented me with a Cronkite for President campaign button. That was fun and strange. We exchanged telephone numbers and he mailed me his insightful M.A. thesis “Televising the Space Age—A Descriptive Chronology of CBS News Special Coverage of Space—1957–2003” (2005). Quite graciously, he also shared his own interview transcripts and documents with me. Among his many talents, he has started to compile a much-needed Cronkite broadcastography that attempts to list nearly every TV and radio appearance the icon made in his long public career. Once it’s posted online, it will be the definitive reference guide on Cronkite.
A number of Cronkite’s old friends proofread this book, helping me avoid embarrassing errors. Mervin Block, the great TV scriptwriter, meticulously copyedited chapters with fraternal good cheer. He is a mentoring mensch possessed of a razor-sharp wit and a pitch-perfect Maxwell Perkins pencil. Others who gave the entire manuscript a careful read include Roger Mudd, Bill Small, Chip Cronkite, Kathy Cronkite, Sandy Socolow, Don Carleton, Marlene Adler, and Robert Feder. Various specialists also weighed in on specific chapters: Ron Drez (World War II and Vietnam); Donald Miller of Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania (World War II); Vivian Rogers-Price of the Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum in Savannah, Georgia (World War II); Gary Mack of The Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, Texas (the JFK assassination); Lew Wood (Eyewitness and the JFK assassination); Daniel Ellsberg (Vietnam/Watergate); Don Fulsom (the Nixon administration); Gerald Posner (JFK assassination); Ron Bonn (space and the environment); George Abbey (space); and Bernard Shaw (the 1960s and 1970s).
No words can express how helpful two of the great CBS News correspondents of the Vietnam War era were in helping me understand the “Cronkite Moment.” of February 27, 1968. Morley Safer and Jack Laurence are the best in the Murrow sense. They read multiple drafts of my Vietnam chapters, made shrewd editorial comments, and helped keep my morale high. My admiration for both men is boundless. I only wish I could have interviewed CBS news producers Ernie Leiser, Bud Benjamin, Sig Mickelson, and Gordon Manning (a close Cronkite friend). But, alas, they have passed.
Alan Weisman shared with me his marvelous 1981 diary from his trip to Sadat’s funeral with Cronkite. Christiane Amanpour likewise offered me some personal diary pages. Don Michel, a legendary Illinois radio and television broadcaster, alerted me to the love letters of Cronkite and his high school sweetheart, Bit Winter. (They proved to be quite revelatory.) Brian Williams burned me a copy of the campy 1964 documentary Anchorman. The DVD provided an unvarnished look at Cronkite unplugged, cinéma vérité style. Former president of CNN Tom Johnson of Atlanta helped me track down people to interview, and sent me a stream of helpful e-mails. The brilliant Austa Shellace “Shelly” Austin provided essential counsel and suggestions throughout the writing process. And Shelby Coffey of the Newseum was a regular fount of wisdom.
At one juncture, this biography was considerably longer. Determined to keep the page count down to a manageable level, I received critical copyediting help from Trent Duffy of New York and Judith Steen of Santa Cruz. When this book needed hard cuts at the end of the line, Roger Labrie, a fantastic line editor, helped me slash anecdotes and tighten the prose for a final round. My friends Emma Juniper of Arizona and Kristen Hannum of Colorado always worked the graveyard shift on my behalf.
The keeper of the Nixon Tapes, Luke Nichter at Texas A&M University, directed me to relevant Nixon-Colson conversations, thereby saving me untold hours of labor. Everybody at the John Glenn School of Public Policy at the Ohio State University (including Senator Glenn) helped me perfect the Mercury program pages. The Paley Center for Media at 25 West Fifty-second Street has a fine collection of content broadcast on radio and television.
Chris Callahan, dean of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, provided me with reams of information pertaining to his outstanding program. It’s hard to overestimate what a great place the Cronkite School has become for young people to learn the art of TV reporting. The school publishes The Cronkite Journal. Melanie Alvarez does a terrific job as executive producer of Cronkite NewsWatch.
Aaron Brown, former CNN anchorman, now the Walter Cronkite Professor of Journalism at ASU, offered revelatory commentary to me about his old friend.
My friends at the American Society of News Editors, Carnegie Corporation of New York, National Public Radio, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation do so much to keep U.S. journalism history alive and well in America. All these nonprofits deserve our deep gratitude. As does Lally Weymouth of the Washington Post, for her stellar Fourth of July parties on the Hamptons.
Mark Updegrove, director of the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, helped me track down the original transcripts of the LBJ-Cronkite interviews. Karen Herman of the Archive of American Television in North Hollywood, California, provided me with important documents in their holdings. Gil Schwartz, personal assistant to CBS CEO Les Moonves, was exceedingly helpful on a number of occasions. Michael Freedman allowed me to participate in a very illuminating media conference at George Washington University, along with Marvin Kalb and Sam Donaldson. Freedman is a walking media history encyclopedia who shared numerous documents with me. Phil Gries’s privately owned audiotape collection of landmark moments in TV history was a wonderful resource as well. Bill Whitehurst of Austin also deserves special mention for allowing me to use an amazing batch of Cronkite family photos that were originally given to him by Helen Cronkite (the CBS anchorman’s mother).
Others on the honor roll include Stephanie Ambrose Tubbs, Debby Applegate, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Cindy Shogan, John Northington, Jim Powers, Bob Armstrong, Linda Aaker, David Friend, Graydon Carter, John Ross, Cullen Murphy, David Leebron, Howard and Suzanne Monsour, Daniel Kirschen, Kabir Sehgal, Ed Forgotson, Lorrie Beecher, John Cole, Todd and Sharon Kessler, Walter Isaacson, Joe Klein, Frank and Mary Landrieu, Ellen Futter, Mark Madison, Gerry Goldstein, Jessica Yellin, Mary Walsh, Brian Lamb, Laura Leipert, Rachel Sibley, Tom Helf, Jimmy Buffett, Carol Blue, Yvette Vega, Mickey Hart, Jann Wenner, Will Dana, Wynton Marsalis, Jim Irsay, Duvall Osteen, Mac Lehrer, Doug Whitner, Mark Bilnitzer, Dave Morton, Scott O’Neill, Bob Asman, Susan Swain, and John L. Lewis. And to Linton and Jan Weeks (in loving memory of Stone and Holt).
My friends at HarperCollins did a terrific job preparing this biography for publication. President and CEO Brian Murray, a fellow Georgetown University graduate, was hugely supportive of my writing on Cronkite from the outset. Likewise, both publisher Jonathan Burnham and president and publisher Michael Morrison were always steadfast behind the project. The hyper-diligent editor Tim Duggan, a longtime buddy, oversaw all aspects of production. We’ve become a team with amazing shorthand. I admire him tremendously. He’s the modern publishing industry’s gold standard of excellence. His facile assistant, Emily Cunningham, operates much like a one-woman assembly line, keeping the process always moving forward with minimal complaints. She is a talented pro. Late in the game Duggan brought in Rob Fleder (freelance editor) to help pare down the manuscript; he was superb. In the production department, David Koral worked diligently with me on a series of draft manuscripts to make this book as error free as possible. He’s an accomplished tradesman. Whenever I publish a book, I insist that Kate Blum be the publicist. She makes going on a national tour and doing media appearances fun.
My mother deserves credit for saving drawings I did as a seven-year-old in Atlanta, Georgia, depicting CBS News, Cronkite, and the Vietnam War. They serve as raw testimonials to the impact TV had on young people on the era. When we moved from Georgia to Ohio in 1968, my admiration of Cronkite stayed with me. There is a picture of me in the Bowling Green Sentinel-Tribune February 9, 1972, serving as anchorman for “News Six” (sixth-grade news). When asked by the reporter what I wanted to be when I grow up, my answer was “Walter Cronkite” or “a sports announcer.” My sister, Leslie Brinkley, has been a TV reporter for ABC affiliate KGO in San Francisco since 1988.
Most of Cronkite was written in my home office in Austin. Every Monday to Friday after my wife, Anne, had dropped our three kids at Eanes Elementary School, she returned with breakfast and helped me for hours transcribing interviews and making travel arrangements. Whatever was needed. She is the best. With a surge of blood-pride rising from my heart, I hope our three children—Benton, Johnny, and Cassady—will get to read about the TV broadcaster who meant so much to Dad while he was growing up in Atlanta and northwest Ohio.
—Douglas Brinkley
Austin • Houston • Cambridge • New York
March 5, 2012
Sources and Notes
The Walter Cronkite Papers at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin are voluminous. They are kept in fairly well-organized files. Cronkite was a Depression-era packrat. He didn’t throw out much, so scholars have to pan through the 263 linear feet of the collection to find the gold. Throughout the notes, I refer to this collection as WCP-UTA. It’s truly astonishing how many interviews Cronkite gave over the years to reporters. To have cited them all or included them would have been an exercise in futility. The Rosetta Stone of the collection is clearly Cronkite’s correspondence with his wife, Betsy, during World War II. Walter Cronkite IV (the anchorman’s grandson), a recent graduate of New York University, and history professor Maurice Isserman are editing the correspondence into a book for National Geographic.
Two oral history interviews of Cronkite conducted by Don Carleton were extremely helpful. One was done for the Briscoe Center and the other for the Archive of American Television. Carleton is the co-author of the indispensable Conversations with Cronkite (2010). Out of all the books cited in the notes, Cronkite’s own A Reporter’s Life (1996) was by far the most valuable. A full bibliography would be far too long, but all the relevant secondary sources can be found in the notes. Every American should read three wonderful biographies of Murrow: Joseph E. Persico’s Edward R. Murrow: An American Original (1988); Alexander Kendrick’s Prime Time: The Life of Edward R. Murrow (1969) and A. M. Sperber’s Murrow: His Life and Times (1986). In learning about Cronkite my admiration for Murrow grew leaps and bounds.
Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson’s marvelous The Murrow Boys (1997) should be mandatory reading in every journalism school and workshop.
Anybody interested in CBS News history should read Sally Bedell Smith’s In all His Glory: The Life of William S. Paley; The Legendary Tycoon and His Brilliant Circle (1990); Ralph Engelman’s Friendlyvision: Fred Friendly and the Rise and Fall of Television Journalism (2009); and Paul Gary Gates’s Air Time: The Inside Story of CBS News. Six memoirs from old CBS News hands deserve special mention: Fred Friendly’s Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control (1999); John Laurence’s A Cat from Hue: A Vietnam Story (2002.); Bill Leonard’s In the Storm of the Eye: A Lifetime at CBS (1987); Leslie Midgley’s How Many Words Do You Want? An Insider’s Story of Print and Television Journalism (1989); Richard Salant’s Salant, CBS, and the Battle for the Soul of Broadcast Journalism: The Memoirs of Richard S. Salant, ed. Susan Buzenberg and Bill Buzenberg (1999); and Roger Mudd’s The Place to Be: Washington, CBS, and the Glory Days of Television News (2008).
The CBS News Reference Library in New York is an amazing depository of all things related to the history of the network. I received dutiful help, time and again, from Cryder Bankes and Carole Parnes. Here is where all of Cronkite’s broadcast scripts and logbooks are kept. It’s an amazing depository of the history of TV news. In addition to the WCP-UTA and the CBS News Reference Library, the following manuscript collections are important to those interested in Cronkite:
American University—Washington, D.C.
Ed Bliss, CBS News
Columbia University—New York
Fred Friendly, CBS News and public broadcasting
Roone Arledge, ABC News and ABC Sports
Georgetown University—Washington, D.C.
Frank Reynolds, ABC News
George Washington University—Washington, D.C.
Richard C. Hottelet, CBS News
Library of Congress—Washington, D.C.
Eric Sevareid, CBS News
Lyndon Johnson Library—Austin, Texas
Lyndon Johnson Papers
New Canaan Public Library—Connecticut
Richard S. Salant, CBS News and NBC News
Saint Bonaventure University—New York
Douglas Edwards, CBS News
Smith College—Massachusetts
Pauline Frederick, ABC News and NBC News
Syracuse University—New York
Mike Wallace, non-CBS interview material from 1959–1961
Tufts University—Massachusetts
Edward R. Murrow, CBS News
University of Maryland—College Park
Arthur Godfrey, CBS
Neil Strawser, CBS News
Plus the National Public Broadcasting Archives and the Westinghouse Radio Archives
University of Michigan—Ann Arbor
Mike Wallace, CBS News
University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill
Charles Kuralt, CBS News
Nelson Benton, CBS News
University of Wisconsin/Wisconsin Historical Society—Madison
Robert W. Asman, CBS News and NBC News
Burton Benjamin, CBS News
Jules Verne Bergman, CBS News and ABC News
David Brinkley, NBC News and ABC News
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