Walter Cronkite did not start his career in news broadcasting. In 1936-1937 he had a brief career as a radio announcer and sports announcer, then he started news writing as a UPI correspondent. As a new newspaper man, he got to report one of the most horrific disasters in all modern American history: the explosion of the consolidated school at New London, Texas in March 1937. To this day, authorities in that area are loath to admit how many children died in that blast. They make the official excuse that they cannot compile a complete list of deaths because so many temporary roustabouts working in nearby oil fields collected their dead children and buried them in their hometowns. Probably 400 plus children died in that blast that inspired legislators to require gas companies to add odors to natural gas.
Cronkite covered World War II in Europe as a print correspondent, not -- as some wrongly believe -- one of Edward R. Murrow’s radio news reporter stars. Cronkite never did radio news. Cronkite started in TV news at CBS in 1950. By 1951 he had the assignment of the CBS Sunday Night News – 15 minutes of live late news after What’s My Line?
ENTERTAINMENT VERSUS NEWS
The accusation that modern TV news is bad because entertainment guides its ratings is tripe. Cronkite illustrates that entertainment and news have always gone hand in hand.
Cronkite did You are There, an entertainment show masquerading as education, while he worked as a reporter. He appeared twice on What’s My Line? hosted by another news reporter John Charles Daly. His legendary work hosting the CBS coverage of the American space program clearly had audience entertainment in mind.
He appeared as himself on the classiest of 1970s entertainments, The Mary Tyler Moore Show. On the 9 February 1974 episode, “Ted Baxter Meets Walter Cronkite” Cronkite visits WJM News to see his old friend Lou Grant. (Supposedly, they crossed paths as wire service reporters in World War II.) Walter Cronkite and Ted Baxter appeared on the same screen! What a night.
He appeared three times in Murphy Brown
"Murphy Brown" .... Himself (3 episodes, 1989-1997)
- And That's the Way It Was? (1997) TV episode .... Himself
- Ship of Phil's (1993) TV episode (voice) .... Himself
- Roasted (1989) TV episode .... Himself
In “Ship of Phil’s,” he did a memorably funny voiceover. Cronkite was probably the most famous yachtsman among TV network news reporters, and in that particular Murphy Brown episode, Frank Fontana crashes his boat into Cronkite’s boat in the middle of Chesapeake Bay. “Who the hell owns this bucket of bolts?” Cronkite bellows in that famous voice of his, then turning to his beloved wife, “Betsy!” he orders, “Grab the cat. Abandon ship!”
For those interested in another entertainment program that Cronkite found himself embroiled in, refer to a National Public Radio report he did on his hosting of CBS’s live TV coverage of Michael Todd’s Madison Square Garden party in honor of the first anniversary of Around the World in 80 Days. D-Day it was not. A food fight it actually turned into.
HE WAS THERE ON 22 NOVEMBER 1963
In April 1962, CBS appointed him the anchor of the CBS Evening News. In September 1963, he became the anchor of the first half hour long national news broadcast when CBS Evening News went from fifteen minutes to thirty minutes.
Thus He Was There on 22 November 1963 when the first wire service bulletins started clattering into the newsroom of a shooting in President Kennedy’s motorcade in Dallas, Texas.
The first wire service flash found him eating his lunch at his desk. He was eating cottage cheese and pineapple according to one legend I’ve heard, and it is true – his apple sat on his desk for the first few minutes of the TV broadcast. Cronkite got to interrupt the CBS drama As the World Turns to read the text of the first bulletin over a black and white CBS Bulletin card. He actually sounds sweaty and rattled, and who wouldn’t be sweaty and rattled when under the necessity of dropping The Big One in living rooms across the nation? He read the first three bulletins at 1:40 1:43, and 1:47 EST. The third bulletin interrupted a commercial, which is usually unheard of in TV.
His performance stands in stark contrast to Ron Cochrane at ABC News who had to be hauled back to the ABC studio from his luncheon at a major New York restaurant.
In the second bulletin, Cronkite had a wire service quotation from secret service agent Clint Hill that the president was dead. Cronkite was not quite willing to express that news so uncategorically so early in the broadcast, so he worded that piece of information this way:
“A secret service man was heard to say he’s dead. Pause Whether he referred to the president is not known.”
It was known. Cronkite was not willing to use it without some sort of corroborating verification.
Meanwhile Alan Jackson at CBS Radio News, confronted with the same wire service quote, simply avoided the deal by changing its content altogether.
The CBS news room TV cameras did not warm up until 2:00 p.m. EST when Cronkite’s visage and voice both went on the air.
By a little after two p.m., Cronkite had two sources confirming that the president had died.
First, Dan Rather got the news from the priest who performed the last sacrament of the Roman Church for President Kennedy.
Second Eddie Barker, KRLD TV news director, learned of the death from an emergency room doctor who announced the news on live KRLD TV from the Dallas Trade Mart that the president had died.
In normal news, that would have been enough confirmation for an official report. However, Cronkite did not have an official confirmation from the presidential entourage. So he managed to tell the audience that the president was dead, while at the same time noting that the reports were not officially confirmed. It was an act of professionalism rarely seen these days when any old rumor will do in a pinch.
Cronkite performed brilliant that afternoon. It still stands to this day as his big moment. His pronouncement at 2:38 p.m. of the president’s official death notice is the standard soundbite we see when someone wants a piece of Cronkite’s reporting the news that day. However, Cronkite had many memorable sequences that afternoon. Cronkite was so busy getting the news on the air for the first hour and half that he forgot to put on his suit coat. Abut about an hour after the shooting, he did a masterful summary of the news to that point, while a CBS camera operator did a slow, pull- in focus on his face. When he announces that Dan Rather has confirmed the president’s death, the camera operator yanked in on his face like some sort of button to emphasize the point.
William Paley and Don Hewitt decided to give him a break after being on the air live for an hour and a half straight. At that point Cronkite left the set and turned the broadcast over the highly erudite and classy Charles Collingwood. When Cronkite returned a half hour or so later, he wore makeup, a dark tie and a suit. He worked again for a couple of hours straight with very little scripting, and then took another break when Howard Smith replaced him. Smith got to announce the arrival of the presidential plane at Andrews Air Force Base.
Meanwhile at NBC, Chet Huntley, Frank McGee, and Bill Ryan reported the news with help from David Brinckley in Washington and various local reporters (in color because NBC TV’s Fort Worth affiliate had color TV cameras on their news set). They all performed well, though their broadcast resembled amateur night at Hoboken for the first hour. ABC relied on Jay Watson, the news director at the ABC Dallas affiliate, who was the most brilliant TV reporter that day after Cronkite. Cochrane did so-so. The men who filled in for him while he returned from the restaurant looked as if they had been dragged right off the street.
Cronkite was not on the air on 24 November 1963 when Jack Ruby shot and killed the president’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. CBS was broadcasting ceremonials from Washington and started covering that incident live about a minute or two after it happened. NBC TV News broadcast the murder on live TV, something of a first in the sordid history of sordid TV news.
The Kennedy assassination taught CBS News to keep a TV camera on in the news room 24 hours a day so that its news bulletins would have a face to report the news. In September 1964, he was available to do the first bulletin that Soviet leaders Brezhnev / Kosygin and friends had deposed the Russian dictator Kruschev.
CRONKITE AT THE CONVENTIONS
Cronkite anchored CBS News coverage of political conventions, which the exemption of a 1964 conventions. CBS, in one of its more infamous bad judgments, decided to let Bob Trout and Roger Mudd co-anchor to fight back the highest rated coverage of NBC with Huntley-Brinckley.
At the 1968 Democratic National Convention, he made one of his biggest mistakes as a reporter. On the last night of the convention, Chicago’s police rioted injuring dozens of protesters and destroying property belonging to the presidential campaign of Eugene McCarthy. “The thing is simple,” one McCarthy activist described. “They came in and clear out the entire floor [of their hotel headquarters].” The violence spread from the outside to the inside of the convention hall as well. Dan Rather got roughed up on the convention floor on live TV and Cronkite let his emotions show for the rest of the evening. Cronkite got the opportunity to interview Mayor Daley after those incidents, and let his opportunities slide. Instead of getting eyeball to eyeball and nose to nose and demanding to know why Daley authorized gestapo tactics – something Connecticut Senator Abe Ribicoff willingly did on live TV – Daley took Cronkite, in the words of one observer, “like Grant took Richmond.”
In1980, Cronkite and CBS did not get bamboozled, as did ABC TV News, by rumors that Reagan had selected Gerald Ford as his running mate.
CRONKITE AND VIETNAM
Cronkite did reporting from the Vietnam War. from time to time.
In typical liberal histories, Cronkite’s March 1968 Report from Vietnam gets credit for convincing Lyndon Johnson that he had lost average America on the subject of the Vietnam War and to not to run for reelection. In typical conservative histories, America had won the Tet Offensive and then Cronkite ruined it by telling the Americans that the war was a lost cause. The truth turns out to be a little more subtle.
America was already sick of the war before Cronkite announced on live TV what we knew already. Presidential duties and the horrors of War had so completely burned out Johnson by March 1968 that he started seriously pondering his withdrawal from the 1968 presidential campaign for several weeks already. Tet was the first straw, McNamera’s crack up was the second straw, Cronkite’s denunciation was the last straw.
THE NEWS
Typically, we see small sound bites of Walter’s hosting the CBS coverage of Apollo 11's landing on Sunday afternoon, 20 July 1969, but he hosted CBS’s coverage of the Gemini project with equal sophistication and class. His did the bulletins for the first news reports surrounding the Apollo 1 disaster in January 1967. In April 1970, he headed the news coverage of the Apollo 13 almost disaster. His coverage of the last Apollo flights were much more polished than the Apollo 11 coverage, which suffered from a problem in that the CBS simulation of Apollo 11 landed before the actual Apollo 11.
On 4 April 1968, Cronkite got to do the first bulletins of the death of Martin Luther King, which happened during the 5:00 hour in the mountain west. For some reason, KSL TV did not switch on the sound until a minute into the broadcast.
Cronkite also got to interrupt his own CBS Evening News broadcast to report the death of Lyndon Johnson on 22 January 1973. His legendary set of interviews with Lyndon Johnson after Johnson retired are today less interesting than they sound, mostly because Cronkite never screwed up his courage to ask the real question of the day – how does it feel to avoid war crimes trials in the Hague?
Nixon and his like-minded associates despised Cronkite down to their toenails, but oddly enough Cronkite’s reporting on the Watergate Scandal does not stick in the mind. I do not know if he did the first bulletin of Agnew’s resignation. I saw the NBC bulletin at Provo High School. If anything, John Chancellor’s special reports remain the news highlights of Nixon’s September 1973 firings of his attorney general and assistant attorney general when they refused to dismiss Archibald Cox Cronkite anchored the coverage in early August 1974 when Nixon’s resignation became a political necessity, but I guess it says a lot about his professionalism that I do not remember him.
More memorable was the day Cronkite and Dan Rather got to cover two big news stories on 20 January 1981 – Reagan’s inauguration and the release of the Embassy hostages in Iran. CBS made the huge mistake of insisting Cronkite retire in early March 1981. CBS had a mandatory retirement age at that time, but it did not make the same mistake twice. Dan Rather stayed on into his 70s. Cronkite, therefore, missed his opportunity to report on the assassination attempt on Reagan some twenty-four days later.
Cronkite did various sort of news special reports in later years, hosted New Years Day symphony music from Vienna for years, and did for National Public Radio a series of interesting reports on the history of broadcast news.
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