In Cronkite, his hefty new biography, author and historian Douglas Brinkley tackles the “most trusted man in America,” as newsman Walter Cronkite was known for decades. Cronkite, born in Missouri in 1916, cut his teeth as a World War II wire-service reporter and was anchor of the CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981. Millions of viewers watched him report, eyes glistening, the assassination of JFK; cheer on the space program (with tinker-toy like props on his desk); and reproach Lyndon Johnson for turning Vietnam into a bloody stalemate. (“If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country,” LBJ supposedly said to an aide after a damning CBS News special report on the war in early 1968.)
Brinkley’s treatment is generally sympathetic but at the same time demythologizing. His Cronkite is rendered, in human scale, as a figure of enormous ability and core integrity (with a few lapses) but also colossal ambition and decided political opinions. And as Brinkley shared with me in a wide-ranging telephone interview, Cronkite, who died in 2009 at age 92, had a canny sense of his invaluable “most trusted man” brand. Excerpts from the conversation follow:
Paul Starobin: The popular image of Cronkite remains as a kind of favorite uncle welcomed into the American household. But that wasn’t really his personality, right?
Douglas Brinkley: There was nothing avuncular about Walter Cronkite. You don’t make it to the top of the profession and stay there decade after decade by being weak-kneed. It is a slaughterhouse of an industry. Cronkite clings to air time as much as possible. If he smells you nipping at his heels, you’ll get whacked, you’ll disappear. If you poached on his turf, or if you tried to take him down a few notches, you were met with wolverine fierceness. Walter Cronkite is the single most competitive person I have ever written about—ranging from Henry Ford, Theodore Roosevelt, and FDR to John F. Kennedy.
Paul Starobin: A prime example of that in the book is Cronkite’s defiant response to an attempted smackdown by CBS founder and chief William Paley. After Paley decreed that Cronkite would not anchor the 1964 Democratic national convention in Atlantic City, Cronkite moved the CBS Evening News from New York to that city to broadcast the regular show from there. “Retreat was not an option,” you write. Where did that competitive drive come from?
DB: He grew up in the Depression, the family had no money, he was the child of an alcoholic father, he had been fired a lot in his life, he clung to his jobs. His fierce competitiveness is wonderful, but his inability to accept a defeat in trivial things [like card games] is a quirk, as is his extreme cheapness—not leaving tips, never picking up the tab.
PS: I’m struck that you see parallels between Cronkite and Ronald Reagan—perhaps not the likeliest of pairings.
DB: There were very many similarities between Ronald Reagan and Walter Cronkite as personalities. Both were from the Midwest, both had alcoholic fathers, both had to make up sports coverage [as offsite radio broadcasters, riffing off wire-service accounts of the games], both had to disarm people with charm. Both wore well with people, and both are beloved in America.
PS: Did he deserve the “most trusted man in America” moniker?
DB: What a TV network decides to run as news—by nature it has some form of bias. Cronkite pushed for civil rights, the environment, women’s rights. He made a decision that Watergate was a real big story. I ended up believing that he was a journalist to trust, but he was also part and parcel of his times.
PS: What about his role as a cheerleader for NASA and the space program?
DB: On NASA boosterism, he is either praised or guilty as charged. He was seeing it as a big special-event story. So the question is whether he is right to be focusing on space and pushing that story narrative. I feel [the answer is] yes.
The impact of Cronkite, and specifically Cronkite's break with the Johnson administration over the Vietnam War, is vastly overrated. I think the fallacy is called 'post hoc, ergo propter hoc' in Latin. US participation in the war went on for another five years. The 1968 and 1972 elections produced overwhelmingly right-leaning victories at the presidential level. LBJ did not lose 'the country' over the war; as anyone actually alive and sentient in 1968 knows, he lost the country over his disastrous domestic policies, notably the race riots which followed the burst of liberal legislation on civil rights, and rising (justified) fear of violent crime, which was dismissed as racist by liberal savants. (Johnson's Attorney-General was Ramsay Clark!) The only thing Cronkite's dissent from the war indicated was that Johnson had lost the Martha's Vineyard class of affluent Democrats. Public opinion on the ground about the defining social issues in the US during this period was very different from that of Cronkite's views - there was an obvious and growing disconnect between elite opinion and mass opinion during the Cronkite years. The chattering classes spend a little too much time talking to themselves.
I don't understand this nostalgia for the Cronkite period 1963-1981. One yardstick, small but telling: during this period, JFK was assassinated, his brother was assassinated, Martin Luther King was assassinated, George Wallace was shot, Sen. Stennis was shot, President Ford was shot at twice, and Ronald Reagan was shot. By instructive contrast, in these supposedly partisan and mean-spirited times, there had been no such violence directed at a political figure after 1981 until the shooting of Rep. Giffords in 2011.
#1 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Wed 13 Jun 2012 at 12:44 PM
As Bill Clinton famously said, "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is."
Mark Richard's use of the Latin "hoc" (this) intimates that the "this" referred to is the end of the Vietnam War. As one who was indeed "live and sentient" (and an Evening News staffer) in 1968, my recollection of the informed commentary at the time is that the "this" that Walter was credited with (or reviled for) was that his break with the LBJ administration seemed to presage the end of the Johnson presidency, not war’s-end, which, as Mark correctly points out, was still years away.
But that's all just wordplay. Mark's philippic, typical of right-wing political commentary, uses an assortment of actual facts, near facts and factoids to reach a peroration that appears on the surface to pass the ipso facto smell test, but which is, finally, neither ipso nor facto.
#2 Posted by Art Kane, CJR on Wed 13 Jun 2012 at 05:37 PM
Pardon. This comment is not to incite - really - but just to allay my curiosity.
Wouldn't a conflict of interest disclaimer be in order for this journalistic piece, since the interviewee's book is being advertised on the CJR website please?
~ Isa
#3 Posted by Isa Cann, CJR on Wed 13 Jun 2012 at 06:13 PM
To Art: post-Sixties historiography/hagiography has generally, and inaccurately, cited Cronkite's announced opposition to the Vietnam War as a public-opinion turning point against the War itself, not just against Lyndon Johnson. The 'doves' never did have a majority of public opinion on their side if being anti-war meant a precipitous withdrawal of troops from Southeast Asia, though this is often strongly implied in contemporary discourse recalling Cronkite. LBJ was already in political trouble before Cronkite's announcement, for the reasons I noted. Wallace's candidacy in 1968 was fueled almost entirely by alarm over violent crime and urban rioting, and Nixon campaigned strongly on those issues. The latter did not campaign on 'winning the war'. The mainstream Democrats were charging that 'law and order is a code-word for racism', not a winning strategy in retrospect.
You are, of course, invited to specify what were 'near facts' and 'factoids' in my post. My original observation was that the importance of Cronkite's conversion on Vietnam has been given too much retrospective importance, and I think I'll stick with that opinion as a teen growing up in a fairly representative area (central Ohio) in 1968 - though I understand why a NY-based 'Evening News staffer' might think otherwise. 'Right-wing phillipic'? Groan. These attepts at ideological abuse not only have liver spots on them, but they uninentionally confirm the argument that elite opinion in places such as NY and DC was becoming untethered from mass opinion during the never-never 1960s and the dreary 1970s.
#4 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Fri 15 Jun 2012 at 12:50 PM
Of course, if we're going to get all nostalgic about past presidents interrupted, anyone remember people getting huffy over that Carol Coleman interview a while back?
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_06/004222.php
Unless you're a fricken protestor with code pink or teabaggers for truth, you don't interrupt the speech, you interrupt during the question period during the response to your question just like Helen Thomas did when Bush finally asked a question of her 7.9 years into his presidency.
If someone had pulled this on Bush, jobs would have been lost, networks would have been demonized, press passes revoked, and bombs would have been dropped.
This is yet another episode of republicans being ahistorcal a-holes.
#5 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Fri 15 Jun 2012 at 06:50 PM
Whoops, another episode of pages on a small device getting mixed up.
My bad.
#6 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Fri 15 Jun 2012 at 07:00 PM