Weighing Anchors
Mini Teaser: Walter Cronkite, A Reporter's Life (New York: Alfred A.
Walter Cronkite, A Reporter's Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).
David Brinkley, A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1996).
Howard K. Smith, Events Leading Up To My Death (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996).
On January 30, 1968, the beginning of the Chinese lunar new year festival known as Tet, 70,000 communist troops launched a surprise offensive throughout South Vietnam. The attackers surged into more than a hundred cities and towns, and, for the first time, Saigon and the vast U.S. Embassy complex in the heart of the city came under rocket fire.
A few weeks later, the U.S. military claimed that because of the heavy losses the Viet Cong had suffered, "Tet" was a defeat for the communists. That was literally true, but Tet was nevertheless both a political and propaganda victory for the communists, and a key turning point in the war in Vietnam. This was because the intensity and scope of the Tet Offensive shocked most Americans, who had been led to believe that given American superiority in firepower and technology, victory in Vietnam was inevitable if not imminent.
This sense of shock acquired a significant amplification in the key electronic media--television. At a time when television news anchormen rarely left their studios, CBS News' Walter Cronkite hurried to Vietnam to prepare a special report on the Tet Offensive and its implications for American involvement in the war. As a veteran war correspondent, with the clout and contacts that only an anchorman can have, Cronkite was certainly qualified to do such a report. And, of course, according to numerous polls, he was at that time "the most trusted man in America."
At the conclusion of that special broadcast on Tet in late February, Cronkite did something he had almost never done before, and certainly not on the subject of Vietnam. After much agonizing he decided that he had to put his credibility on the line and offer a personal opinion. This is what he said:
To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest that we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory conclusion. . . . It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out, then, will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.
At the White House, President Lyndon Johnson watched the special report with some of his staff, including News Secretary George Christian and his assistant, Bill Moyers. According to Moyers, when the program was over, "The President flipped off the set and said 'If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America.'" Five weeks later, on March 31, Johnson announced that he would not seek re-election, this in the context of a unilateral bombing pause of North Vietnam.
No one would suggest that Cronkite changed the course of the Vietnam War, or that he was singly responsible for the President's decision to throw in the towel. But Johnson was prescient when he noted Cronkite's link with "Middle America", for by the end of 1968 most of Middle America came to share Cronkite's views on the war.
In the formative years of television, from about the mid-Fifties to the mid-Seventies, before the proliferation of channels that came with cable and satellites, CBS, NBC, and ABC were indeed the windows on the world for the great majority of the American people. Each night, more than fifty million Americans would gather in front of their TV sets at the dinner hour to watch the evening news. (Fewer than twenty million do so today. And while ABC was number three in that race, it actually had about twice as many viewers in the late Sixties and Seventies as it had in the early nineties when it was number one.)
The newscasts evolved into a combination national town meeting, teach-in, and therapy session, where people could learn about and ponder the momentous events of their world, their nation, and their neighborhoods. And these were momentous times. The Cold War was at its height and nuclear war was widely believed to be a very real possibility. By 1965, the war in Vietnam was raging. Much of the Middle East and Africa was in turmoil and either region had the potential to ignite a superpower confrontation. At home, a president, his brother, and the country's most prominent black leader were assassinated--the latter two in a single year, 1968. Below the seething surface, too, the country was in the throes of at least four ongoing and interlocking social revolutions over race, feminism, sexual freedom, and an array of new technologies. At such a moment, the newly found power of television could have become an instrument for division and extremism, as a free but irresponsible press has been in other times and in other places. It did not.
Perhaps more by accident than design, the television news broadcasts of that era were voices of moderation amid chaos. They reflected middle class values and essentially centrist politics, mainly because the men who produced and presented them were middle class and moderate--sometimes a little to the left, sometimes a bit to the right, but never far from the center.
While there were many people involved in these news programs, three men became their personifications: Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, and Howard Kingsbury Smith. All three men have now written memoirs. In addition to serving as fascinating first-hand accounts of much of the history of this century, these books also tell us much about how and why television news did what it did back then. In the interests of full disclosure I must say that as a network television correspondent with ABC News, I was part of that era and worked, quite closely at times, with both Smith and Brinkley. I have great respect for all three men. As I do know them all personally, I can say that in their memoirs each author has found his authentic voice. As you read along you can hear Cronkite's earnest high-to-low cadences; Brinkley's short, staccato sentences touched with irony; and Smith's soft, slight Southern drawl.
The same was true when we watched them on television. We were getting an authentic person, not the creation of show-doctors working with focus groups and Q-ratings, makeup artists, or publicity departments. These were genuine, bona fide journalists who came across on television very much the way they came across in person. They do so, too, in their books.
While the personality of each man was certainly different, it is remarkable how similar the men were in terms of background and personal and journalistic philosophy. All are white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants (though Smith's mother was a Catholic). All were from middle class families, though their early lives were far from idyllic. Their mothers were strong and dominant women who seem not to have liked their husbands much. Brinkley says he was an unwanted child. Smith's father was a ne'er-do-well from an antebellum aristocratic family since gone broke. And Cronkite's father was an alcoholic.
Remarkably, too, all were Southerners, Brinkley from North Carolina, Smith from Louisiana, and Cronkite, though born in Missouri, resident in Texas after the age of ten. Their stories of growing up testify to how they were imbued with solid family values, a sense of personal responsibility, and a strong moral compass that left no doubts over the fundamentals of what was right or wrong. They all went to college and eventually all three worked as wire service reporters with United Press, almost certainly the best possible training ground for any serious journalist.
Their Southern backgrounds are very important to how they approached one of the major stories of their times, the civil rights movement. As young men, none of the three had been an activist for racial equality. In fact, Cronkite confesses that he lacked the courage to take issue with his high school friends when they made racist remarks. But all had seen enough of racism in the South to know that it was morally wrong to perpetuate a system that enforced unequal treatment and protection under the law. This was a proposition that would eventually be accepted by the nation as a whole, with no little help from network television news.
It was not easy being a Southerner covering the civil rights movement for a national network. According to Brinkley, "It was, as NBC's thinking went, my part of the country and so it was a story for me to do. I did "it and it was the most difficult work of my life. Telling the news as straight as I could was not enough. Nothing could satisfy some of the extreme and some not so extreme elements in the South. [They] did not want the news straight. They wanted it slanted, but slanted their way. . . . The mail was poisonous. There were death threats by mail and phone."
Brinkley goes on to recount one of the more ironic consequences of his reporting on civil rights: "The manager of an affiliated station in North Carolina called me a traitor to my home state and in the crudest terminology of the time and place, a 'nigger lover.' He tried to get me off the air but failed. [Then] he hired a reporter, previously unknown, deeply unskilled and something of a rural tin-horn. He put him on his local station each night immediately following NBCNews and gave him the assignment to 'answer Brinkley's lies.'
Every night he came on just after our news program and carefully explained that I was a 'turncoat Southerner turned Northern radical' incapable or unwilling to tell the truth about the problems in the South, most of the troubles caused by 'outside agitators' like me.
He did his job so effectively he became an admired public figure, whereupon he chose to turn his new popularity to his own advantage and run for the United States Senate. He ran. On the strength of his attacks on me, he was elected. His name: Senator Jesse Helms, Republican, North Carolina.
Howard K. Smith encountered even more serious problems. He was fired by cbs News following a documentary he did on events in Birmingham, Alabama. Smith was one of "the Murrow boys", those reporters hired by the legendary Edward R. Murrow on the eve of the Second World War, who distinguished themselves in their coverage of the war. Smith was on the last train out of Berlin after Pearl Harbor, stayed on the Continent to cover the war, and then was one of the first reporters back into Germany after the surrender. Like many of the Murrow boys, and, of course, Murrow himself, Smith had some problems adjusting from wartime to peacetime. He had a strong penchant for commentary, which, during the war, cbs thought was just fine. But in the Fifties, with the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the cbs brass became squeamish about his views, especially when they were left of center. Smith, however, kept pushing the envelope in his commentaries, which did not endear him to top management.
The final rupture came over a documentary Smith prepared on a series of racial incidents in Birmingham in 1961. It featured an attack by Ku Klux Klan members on protesters who had just arrived from out of town. The Klan used bicycle chains, blackjacks, brass knuckles, and baseball bats to make its point. The city's police commissioner, "Bull" Connor, and his force sat passively in their headquarters across the street until the riot was over. Smith was outraged: "Witnessing the savage beatings in Birmingham was my worst experience since the opening of the concentration camps at the end of World War Two." In his commentary at the conclusion of the program, Smith used the well-known--if still unsubstantiated--quotation from a speech by Edmund Burke: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
Once the documentary was complete, it was screened by a battery of lawyers and network vice presidents. As the lights went up at the end of the showing, one of the lawyers went immediately on the attack: "Smith's quotation from Burke is straight editorial. It's out." What followed, Smith says, was a long, bitter hour. In the end he concedes that even with the cuts forced by the brass, "We had a respectable documentary . . . effective enough to get the city commission of Birmingham to sue cbs for a large amount."
But for Smith there was no redemption. cbs President William Paley ordered him to New York immediately. In anticipation of that meeting, Smith sent Paley a memo, the essential point being that giving equal weight to Bull Connor and to Chief Justice Earl Warren, and leaving it at that, was the equivalent of saying that truth is to be found somewhere between right and wrong, equidistant between good and evil. The civil rights issue, he argued, was not one over which reasonable minds might differ; one side was clearly justified by the Constitution, the other clearly not. In Smith's account of their meeting, Paley threw the memo across the table saying, "I've heard all this junk before. If that is what you believe, you had better go somewhere else." And so he did, to abc, to the great benefit of that network.
The assassination of President John Kennedy was a major watershed for television news in this country. Whatever warts have since been discovered in Kennedy's persona, at the time of his death he was a much beloved president. When tears welled up in Cronkite's eyes as he announced that Kennedy had died, he reflected an emotion almost universally shared by the American people.
Television's three-day nonstop coverage of the aftermath of the event went a very long way in calming a deeply shaken and, at the margin, almost paranoid population. It was crucially important at this time of highest anxiety for the networks to conduct themselves responsibly. After all, just a year before, the United States and the Soviet Union had come to the brink of nuclear war over the Cuban missile crisis. Were the Russians behind the assassination? Should we launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against them if they were? The tv networks firmly said "no" and "no" to those questions in the early days after the assassination, and the country began to breathe easier. One can almost hear the breathless tones and the purple prose of the tabloid programs if something like a presidential assassination were to befall us today. But in November 1963 the networks and their anchors behaved with great seriousness and dignity, and in so doing achieved new levels of respect in the eyes of most Americans.
As noted at the beginning, the war in Vietnam, too, was a major turning point for Walter Cronkite and for network news generally. Tv pictures of American Marines using Zippo lighters to set fire to a Vietnamese village, supposedly "in order to save it", burned themselves into the American psyche. There can be no doubt that television helped to shape Middle America's feelings about the war, although it was the number of body bags that finally turned them against it. Cronkite was the first anchor publicly to oppose continuing the war. Brinkley was less open in his opposition, though he harbored personal feelings that were apparently even stronger than Cronkite's. Brinkley writes, "I thought it was a total abomination that should be stopped immediately, that every life lost there was wasted for no purpose, and that Johnson was to blame because he lacked the political courage to halt a pointless, endless bloody war that could not be won."
Then there was Howard K. Smith. On many issues, Smith was more liberal than his colleagues. But in the case of Vietnam, he went on supporting the war long after most Washington pundits had given up on it. Though his son Jack had been severely wounded in the Battle of the Ia Drag Valley in 1965, Smith continued to believe in the domino theory. This was obviously a product of his years of working in Hilter's Germany in the 1930s, where the lesson that appeasement only encourages aggression made an indelible impression upon him. Smith did programs and commentaries defending U.S. policy in Vietnam right up through the bloody riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. But as he now admits, it got harder and harder: "My commentaries, critical of the anti-Vietnam rioters and in favor of fighting on in Vietnam, ran head-on against the liberal mainstream. I lost old friends, as a bison loses hair, in large swatches. [Walter] Lippmann was a most regrettable loss.
"As I collided again and again with long admired friends, I heard Cromwell's imperative as if directed across the ages specifically to me: 'I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.'"
The fact that Smith supported the war while his fellow anchormen opposed it may seem to dilute the thesis that the evening news programs as a group were centrist and so pulled government to the center. Not so; the fact that there was not one monolithic view on a subject as significant as the war gave the networks a certain credibility with their viewers. In a sense their dissensus reflected the national ambiguity. When finally all the anchors, and the majority of the nation, wanted to bring the war to an end, Richard Nixon was elected on a pledge to bring peace with honor to Vietnam. In 1968, almost no one imagined that it would take seven more years to end the war, and few believed that the end, when it did come, would not be honorable at all.
In the arena of presidential politics, moderation was again the order of the day for the anchors and their networks. The network news programs were skeptical and nervous about conservative Republican candidate Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964. But they were no more enthusiastic for the campaign of the liberal Senator George McGovern in 1972. Extremism, in the defense of anything, found no aid or comfort in network news rooms. It is therefore particularly notable to read Brinkley's analysis of the person of Barry Goldwater: "I liked Senator Goldwater. I thought some of his political views were extreme and excessive, but it seemed to me he was only saying what he figured an Air Force general from the Arizona "desert was expected to say. There was little or no meanness in him. On the contrary, there was a real friendliness and generosity in him and he was always good company when he was not surrounded by those of his followers who behaved like political banshees."
Indeed, the men the anchors chose as political heroes suggests that they were not in ideological lock-step, but instead possessed an independence and diversity that, again, probably enhanced their collective credibility and acceptability. Smith says, for example, "In my order of worship, Roosevelt was separated from God only by Abraham Lincoln." Brinkley had a much different view of FDR:
Roosevelt being the social snob he was, frequently berated reporters covering the White House. . . . He made no attempt to hide his opinion that we were poorly educated . . . and so we could not possibly know enough . . . or understand enough to report to the American people accurately and fairly about the activities of their president, a 'C' student at Harvard.
Notwithstanding their differing views over presidential personalities, the network news programs tended to be supportive of most government policies in foreign affairs, with Vietnam being the notable exception. They were supportive in large measure because that's the way the anchors felt about the policies. Cronkite was the first anchor to assume the "managing editor" title, but all anchors had a role in choosing what was on their programs and how each story would be treated. (That is true even more so today.)
Naturally enough, views on foreign policy and on particular presidents sometimes collided in unexpected ways. Although he had been responsible for a program called "The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon", done after Nixon lost the race for governor of California in 1962, Smith had a high regard for Nixon's handling of foreign affairs, particularly the opening to China. So did Cronkite, who was not otherwise a fan of Nixon: "Nixon, regardless of whatever other opinions people had of him, deserved credit for his studious approach to foreign policy. And he should be recognized for the move toward reconciliation with China that he initiated when most of the powerful members of the Republican hierarchy were deeply opposed. It was an act of great political courage."
Hence, the Nixon of the McCarthy era or of Watergate would be reviled or ridiculed by the anchors, but the Nixon who pursued dŽtente and arms control with the Soviets and took a pragmatic view of China was applauded. When Nixon behaved as a centrist, he could expect the evening news programs to convey the message that his foreign policies were in the best long-term interests of the United States. His national security adviser and then secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, worked effectively behind the scenes with the elite press to reinforce that message.
As foreign policy landmarks go, the March 1979 Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty rates high on the list of diplomatic achievements in the second half of the twentieth century. Israeli Premier Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their respective roles in achieving that peace. I have always thought that President Jimmy Carter should have been included and that, more to the point here, Walter Cronkite might well have received an honorable mention. Cronkite's interviews with Begin and Sadat nailed down Sadat's historic visit to Jerusalem, which led ultimately to the peace agreement.
Cronkite denies that he was actively engaged in any diplomatic midwifery, and he points out that Sadat had been talking privately for months about making such a dramatic gesture. But Cronkite also observes, "The important point is that television journalism, in this case at least, speeded up the process, brought it into the open, removed a lot of possibly obstructionist middlemen, and made it difficult for the principals to renege on their very public agreement." One may add that when world leaders, American or otherwise, were willing to moderate hardline positions in the interests of peace, they were warmly embraced and encouraged by the anchors. It hasn't always been so, but in the classical era of American television the peacemakers got far more air time than the demagogues.
Television news was also the principal cheerleader for what became known as the space race. Cronkite immersed himself in the minutiae of space flight in ways that made him seem like one of the astronauts. But beyond his technical expertise was the subliminal message: His enthusiastic support for the program meant that Cronkite was giving his personal imprimatur to the goal of putting a man on the moon. In so doing, he deflected any opposition to such an uncertain and expensive enterprise that may have emerged at the time. The public's reaction seemed to be that if Walter was for it, it must be good for America.
In the time of Cronkite, Brinkley, and Smith, network television news had its period of greatest influence mainly because it rejected extremes, supported moderation, and had as its symbols men of unquestioned journalistic excellence and integrity. In holding to centrist policies, the anchors and their colleagues contributed at least a little to peace and stability in both foreign and domestic affairs. The daily arguments in their newsrooms were not about what story would be the most broadly interesting, amusing, or titillating, but what was the most intrinsically important; what it was that viewers needed to know to make them better citizens. As Eric Severeid of cbs once said, "My job is not to tell you what to think. It is to suggest what you should think about."
Those days are gone, just as other golden ages have passed away when the unique set of circumstances that created them somehow changed. Peter Jennings, Ted Koppel, Tom Brokaw, and Dan Rather are fine journalists. They learned at the feet of masters like Smith, Brinkley, and Cronkite, and they have made their own important contributions as reporters during the years in question. As anchors, they are struggling to carry on the best of the tradition. But they are struggling under entirely different, and not especially helpful, circumstances.
Thirty years ago the network news divisions did not function for the sole purpose of making money. Bill Paley was first and foremost a businessman, not a journalist, but he enjoyed the prestige that cbs News brought him. He didn't expect the news department to be a principal vehicle for enriching his stockholders, nor did the heads of NBCor ABC think differently. When I joined ABC news in 1965, the annual budget of the news division was five million dollars and it lost money. When I left thirty years later, the budget had ballooned one hundred times to $500 million, and it cleared another $2-300 million above that annually.
This transformation from network loss-leader to cash cow has changed dramatically the nature of network news. It means that the number one preoccupation of those who now run the network news divisions are the ratings, because the amount of money brought in depends on those ratings. This accounts more for the changed nature of the news than the declining number of viewers, a decline to which the cash-cow approach itself probably contributes.
The other major change in network news has been brought about by the end of the Cold War. As long as there was the threat of Armageddon, the networks felt obligated to report on related foreign and U.S. foreign policy news. They no longer feel so obliged. Among other things, this means that the network's role as a force for moderation and general education in the area of foreign affairs has been significantly diminished.
Among many of the younger people who now work in network television news, the common metaphor for the old anchors is that they were "dinosaurs." Superficially that may be true, but, unlike the dinosaurs, we know exactly why the likes of Brinkley, Smith, and Cronkite have disappeared from the airwaves. And after reading their respective memoirs, each of them plain-spoken, evocative, and reflective of the good men who wrote them, we can genuinely regret their extinction.
Essay Types: Book Review