The Legend of Walter Cronkite (original) (raw)

The story behind Cronkite’s reputation as the most trusted man in America has also required some cosmetic attention. In 1972, an opinion research outfit, Oliver Quayle and Company, asked people which public figures they trusted most. Of the choices the company provided, Cronkite came out ahead, scoring seventy-three per cent. CBS was not reluctant to publicize this result; and, informed that he was now the most trusted man in America, Cronkite said, “I’ll be glad to wear the crown.” The poll “confirmed overnight what had long been apparent,” Brinkley writes: “Cronkite was the ultimate reliable source.”

The Quayle poll was a survey of voters in only eighteen states, and the question about trust was a “thermometer” question designed to measure the general level of trust in public figures. Cronkite was the only newsman on the list. All the rest were politicians. In second place behind Cronkite was “average senator” (sixty-seven per cent), followed by Edmund Muskie (sixty-one per cent). As Jack Shafer has noted in Slate, in a survey taken in 1974, specifically of attitudes toward television newscasters, Cronkite finished fourth in the best-liked category, behind Chancellor, Harry Reasoner, and Howard K. Smith. In 1985, a Gallup poll gave Cronkite the highest believability rating among (mostly) people in the news business. By then, of course, he was off the air.

Cronkite came to believe (and Brinkley agrees) that the man who put him out in the electronic cold was Rather. After stepping down as anchor, Cronkite could easily have gone to ABC News, which, under the new leadership of Roone Arledge, was building its brand aggressively, or to CNN, which had been founded in 1980. Both networks tried to hire him. But he chose to stay at CBS, thinking that the network would want to use him. It was a choice he came, quite bitterly, to regret. He concluded that Rather regarded him as competition, and that the network supported its new evening-news star. “It can be said that Rather was the only man whom Cronkite despised,” Brinkley writes.

Rather is not an easy person to like. Howard Kurtz, in his book on the television-news wars, “Reality Show” (2007), says that Rather had few real friends inside CBS News, where he worked for more than forty years. “Dan’s a liar,” Rather’s onetime “60 Minutes” colleague Morley Safer told Brinkley, “and an unbelievably paranoid guy.” But, in “Rather Outspoken,” Rather is unfailingly admiring of his reporter colleagues and his producers. Loyalty is his book’s great theme.

The book is principally a defense of the story that got Rather removed from the anchor job and ultimately from CBS—his 2004 “60 Minutes” report on George W. Bush’s service in the Air National Guard, in which Rather relied on documents, purportedly detailing Bush’s delinquency, of dubious provenance. There is also some career recapping in the book (before 1981, it was an amazing career), and efforts to explain some of the weirder moments during his tenure as anchorman, such as the night he walked off the set when coverage of a tennis match ran over and the network went black for six minutes. He does not explain his decision, on his first broadcast, to deliver the news standing up. (Brinkley says Rather made that decision minutes before airtime, because he refused to sit in Cronkite’s old chair.) It’s all written in the rhetorical blend of “Gladiator” and the Grand Ol’ Opry that is Ratherspeak. Kurtz notes that Rather is a person “who even in private could talk like a medieval knight.”

Rather has only agreeable things to say about Cronkite in “Rather Outspoken.” He does have disagreeable things to say about the president of CBS and the head of the news division. But the villain of his story is Sumner Redstone, who, at the time of the National Guard debacle, was the chairman of Viacom, which owned CBS. (Unwisely, Rather sued CBS and Viacom after he was let go. The case was tossed out.)

Rather’s belief is that he was thrown under the bus by corporation men who betrayed the legacy of CBS News to protect their profits. “From the days of Edward R. Murrow through civil rights, through Vietnam, through Watergate and into the 1980s,” he says, “reporting the truth, regardless of who was trying to cover it up . . . was a virtue unto itself and needed no further justification. This fundamental doctrine was handed down from CBS patriarch William S. Paley himself.” Of Rather’s many loyalties, the ultimate one is to that legacy. He really does believe in Camelot.

When people talk about the corporatization of network news, they mean that something that was once run in the service of truth and the public interest is now being run according to the principles of the marketplace. No one seems to remember that television networks are corporations to begin with. They are creatures of a particular political, financial, and legal environment, and, as that environment changes, they adapt. CBS didn’t become corporate when Viacom acquired it. The Columbia Broadcasting System was a corporation when Paley—already a wealthy man; his family was in the cigar business—bought it, in 1928.

Paley was nothing if not a businessman. A number of associates have testified to his obsession with profits. As Sally Bedell Smith showed in her biography of Paley, “In All His Glory” (1990), and as Lewis Paper described, in more detail, in “Empire: William S. Paley and the Making of CBS” (1987), Paley’s commitment to the news was largely a function of legal and political conditions—it varied as the conditions varied—and of his sense of news programming’s impact on his bottom line. CBS made much more money from its soap operas and situation comedies, deliberately dumb programs like “As the World Turns,” “The Beverly Hillbillies,” and “Gilligan’s Island.” A news division satisfied the “public service” requirements of the F.C.C., whose commissioners are appointed by the President, and which could at any time have broken the networks’ oligopolistic grip on the broadcast spectrum.

Paley’s CBS was not the place Dan Rather imagines. In “Getting It Wrong,” Campbell discusses Murrow’s 1954 “See It Now” programs on McCarthy. He notes, as have others, that those shows were very late in the day. People who knew Murrow wondered why he waited so long: by 1954, McCarthy had been hunting witches for four years, though not a single person he accused of being a spy or a subversive was ever proved to be one. Murrow and Friendly did not pretend that they were out front on the issue. Murrow read anti-McCarthy editorials from a number of newspapers on the first of the 1954 programs, and cited a speech attacking McCarthy that had been delivered on the Senate floor earlier in the day.

Murrow’s program was powerful television, in part because it used a lot of footage of McCarthy, one of the least telegenic of men. But McCarthy was ultimately brought down by the Army-McCarthy hearings, which were held from April through June of 1954. That was where Joseph Welch, the counsel for the Army, confronted McCarthy with his famous denunciation: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” Although the hearings were televised, CBS didn’t carry them. ABC did; CBS ran soap operas. The television critic of the Times, Jack Gould, wrote that ABC, not Murrow, killed McCarthy. And even Friendly later admitted that it was ABC’s coverage, more than the “See It Now” program he had produced, that led to McCarthy’s demise.

Paley was upset by Murrow’s broadcast. CBS declined to buy newspaper ads for the program, and when the Paleys called Murrow after the show it was Mrs. Paley who did the talking. Paley might have been unhappy partly because of the Fairness Doctrine, which required networks to air opposing viewpoints, something with little appeal to sponsors. (McCarthy did go on CBS to respond to Murrow, though his loopy performance did not help his case.)

Paley was also allergic to controversy because he didn’t want to alienate viewers or politicians, and after 1954 he undertook to shut Murrow and Friendly down. The program started being moved around on the schedule; people in the industry began to refer to it as “See It Now and Then.” Finally, in 1958, after a stormy argument, in Paley’s office, between Murrow and Paley, with an astonished Friendly looking on, the show was killed. Five months later, Murrow gave a speech in Chicago criticizing television for “decadence, escapism, and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live,” and Murrow and Paley, who had been close friends since meeting in London during the war, did not have a civil conversation again until just before Murrow’s death, of cancer, in 1965.

The history of television news is studded with career-damaging journalistic train wrecks. Conflict was built into the system from the start: airtime is finite, and some percentage had to be sold to sponsors, most of whom preferred to be associated with the upbeat and the noncontroversial. Paley pushed Howard K. Smith out of CBS in 1961, because he thought that Smith’s sympathetic coverage of the civil-rights movement was too opinionated. (This opened the door for Cronkite to be named anchor.) In 1965, CBS reassigned Safer from Vietnam to London because of the reaction to Safer’s report on the torching by American soldiers of the village of Cam Ne. (Rather replaced him.)

Paley and Stanton forced Friendly out in 1966, when he made a fuss about CBS’s decision to stop broadcasting George Kennan’s testimony at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the war in Vietnam. NBC, which had little going for it anyway in daytime programming, carried the proceedings; CBS showed reruns, including a fifth broadcast of an episode of “I Love Lucy.” Six years later, Paley ordered a news program on Watergate to be cut down, in response to complaints from Nixon’s aide Charles Colson. In short, Rather’s ouster after the National Guard broadcast belongs to a distinguished tradition.

It was always a battle getting controversial subjects and opinions on the air in the era of the broadcast networks, whose motto might have been “Offend no one.” Cable, which has a very different business model, is another story. Since cable viewers are billed just to watch, no matter which channels they prefer, opinion pays. The makers of cable news don’t need to attract everyone; they just need to establish a loyal niche audience. A piece of your monthly cable payment goes to Fox News, whether you care for it or not. A piece goes to MSNBC.

Journalism and history are about getting things right. But the past has many uses, and one of them is to inspire the present. People in any profession like to create an imaginary past, populated by the Ones Who Came Before. Sometimes, we figure these people to be narrow-minded fools and feel motivated to demonstrate our own superior tolerance and sophistication. More honorably, if not necessarily more accurately, we imagine our predecessors as nobler and braver than our small and anxious selves—as men and women who stuck up for principle and, by their righteousness, moved the world.

At the end of the first episode of “Newsroom,” the news anchor, played by a gruff Jeff Daniels, is congratulated by the head of the news division, a gruff Sam Waterston, after an aggressive report on an oil spill. A bottle of Scotch is produced, as befits the gruffness. The Waterston character wants to encourage his newsman to continue to speak his mind on the news he reports. “Anchors having an opinion isn’t a new phenomenon,” he tells him. “Murrow had one and that was the end of McCarthy. Cronkite had one and that was the end of Vietnam.” Don’t let it be forgot. ♦