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January 26, 1997
Broadcast NewsBy TOM WICKER
Walter Cronkite's memoir of television journalism from its infancy to the age of the talking haircut
A REPORTER'S LIFE
By Walter Cronkite.
Illustrated. 384 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.
hen John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas in 1963, Walter Cronkite stayed on the air for the Columbia Broadcasting System for countless hours. His performance that weekend helped pull together a nation stricken with grief and was a signal event in television's evolution into the national nervous system.
When Mr. Cronkite came back from Vietnam after the Tet offensive of 1968, he concluded on national television that the war had become no better than a stalemate. Hearing that, President Lyndon Johnson told associates, ''If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America.'' And he had. When Mr. Cronkite asked Robert Kennedy, then a senator from New York, whether he would run for President in 1968, Kennedy turned the tables: he proposed that Mr. Cronkite should run for the Senate. Mr. Cronkite refused, but the idea reflected polls showing that a journalist -- a television journalist at that -- had become the most trusted man in America.
Walter Cronkite had come a long way from the little-known World War II and Moscow correspondent whom the old United Press had tried to promote to its London bureau at the magnificent salary of $127.50 a week -- plus a cut in its overseas cost-of-living allowance. Mr. Cronkite had been with the wire service for 11 years.
For obvious reasons, the relationship would not last much longer. The future anchorman switched to radio for a group of Midwestern stations and arrived to head the group's Washington bureau just in time for Harry Truman's inauguration in 1949. When the Korean War broke out, he accepted a longstanding offer from Edward R. Murrow and CBS. But he never got to Korea; CBS bought WTOP-TV in Washington and assigned Mr. Cronkite as its newscaster, more experienced radio reporters being contemptuous of the new medium.
Mr. Cronkite started his television career with no scriptwriter and no script other than wire service reports and a few scribbled notes ''pasted behind the desk sign that identified WTOP-TV.'' He presented war news with the chalked outline of Korea on a blackboard and drew arrows to depict troop movements. A scorched map represented Kansas during a drought.
Such tales of the makeshift early days of television are among the most entertaining in Mr. Cronkite's modest but highly readable memoir, ''A Reporter's Life.'' And these experiences left him unprepared for the fame that followed his pioneering anchor stint at the exciting 1952 national party conventions, the last to be straight news events, without party stage management.
''Well, Walter,'' said Sig Mickelson, then president of CBS News, ''you're famous now. And you are going to want a lot more money. You'd better get an agent.'' The idea struck Walter Cronkite the reporter as ridiculous, something out of show biz. He was then making ''below two hundred a week,'' plus sponsors' fees, and he saw, presciently, that ''down that road lay the perils of the star system and the million-dollar anchors.''
During the years before Mr. Cronkite's anchorman fame, Senator Lyndon Johnson, the majority leader, had arrived at WTOP-TV for his first appearance on what later became ''Face the Nation.'' When L.B.J. characteristically passed out a list of questions he demanded to be asked, Mr. Cronkite had to explain that news programs didn't work that way. Johnson walked out in a huff, but Mr. Cronkite persuaded him to return for the interview, which proved to be a half-hour of ''monosyllabic answers or none at all.''
Johnson's Presidency, the Tet offensive and the momentous ''stalemate'' broadcast were two decades ahead, but Mr. Cronkite recalls the incident as ''a harbinger of the relationship that still exists between politics and television: a standoff between an attempt to manipulate the medium and the medium's determination not to be manipulated.'' Many a viewer has concluded that the manipulators are all too often winning that struggle these days, and in a powerful final chapter, Mr. Cronkite agrees: ''The photo opportunity, the manipulation of the sound bite, the control of the so-called debates, the barrage of . . . negative commercials -- all are instrumental in turning political campaigns into political theater to be played out on television's home screens.''
This deterioration of television news is a disaster, in Mr. Cronkite's view, and he does not hesitate to name names and point fingers. He believes a free press essential to democracy, and considers the television branch -- even at its infrequent best -- inherently inadequate to the necessary public enlightenment: ''The nation whose population depends on the explosively compressed headline service of television news can expect to be exploited by the demagogues and dictators who prey upon the semi-informed.'' Mr. Cronkite also fears, with reason, that print journalism is following television news into ''infotainment.'' He offers two remedies: educating young people to become more discriminating about news and persuading advertisers to support responsible journalism. His tone conveys the message that he's not holding his breath.
Walter Cronkite is a serious man and this is a serious message, but ''A Reporter's Life'' is far more than a sermon on the First Amendment (which he believes is ''at the heart of the American success story''). It's the story of a modest man who succeeded extravagantly by remaining mostly himself -- succeeded in a demanding new medium, itself part of an exploding technology that made the world more complex by enabling peoples to know more about one another. And not unlike journalism itself, his memoir is a short course on the flow of events in the second half of this century -- events the world knows more about because of Walter Cronkite's work, and some of which might not have happened without it.
Mr. Cronkite also displays here his avid interest in and great knowledge of the space program, which marked his anchor years, and the ease with which he moved among so many of the great names of the era: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, among Presidents; Fidel Castro, Frank Sinatra, James Michener, the Duke of Edinburgh, Frank Costello, among an eclectic list of others.
Mr. Cronkite plays down as undeserved, however, the credit he was given for bringing together Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin, thus ''setting off the chain of events that would lead to the first formal peace between Israel and an Arab neighbor.'' As he tells it, the subject first arose when he was fighting ''to stay awake'' during a ''tepid'' interview with Sadat on the bank of the Nile. Sadat unexpectedly said he would go to Jerusalem if there could be peace with Israel.
The remark was not even included in that evening's broadcast, but rumors of Sadat's intent kept surfacing, and Mr. Cronkite decided to pin them down. In a satellite interview on Nov. 14, 1977, he deployed the journalist's best weapon: he asked. Sadat replied that he would go to Jerusalem that very week, on only one condition -- that he be able to outline Egypt's position to the Knesset. Begin, with some backing and filling, accepted, and Sadat flew to Israel four days later -- with Walter Cronkite aboard his plane. ''It was later suggested by some critics that I had overstepped the bounds of journalistic propriety by trying to negotiate an Israeli-Egyptian detente,'' Mr. Cronkite writes. ''They did not know the full story -- that my initial journalistic intention was to knock down the speculation over the visit.'' With no intent to dispute that purpose, I'd say that few other journalists of any period could have elicited that vital information from Sadat, or gained its acceptance from a relatively unenthusiastic Begin.
In 1973, years after Sig Mickelson proposed he get an agent, Mr. Cronkite sought and won summer time off instead of a salary increase. He reflects that if he ''had played for different results'' he might have become a million-dollar anchor, the industry's first ''before ABC hired Barbara Walters.''
Suppose he had ''played for different results'' -- not just then but all during his career? The age of infotainment might have arrived years sooner, the near illiteracy of a sensation-seeking public might be much farther advanced than it sadly is, and we might never have had a man we could call our most trusted -- as we don't today. Walter Cronkite might even have become a senator, one more of which we hardly need, and all those Americans who watched his nightly broadcasts for so many years certainly would have been the poorer. That's the way it is.
Tom Wicker is a former columnist for The New York Times.
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