Television: The Most Intimate Medium

(8 of 10)
the invasion, he often arrived in towns ahead of liberating Canadian troops. "I got a lot of garlands and heard a lot of welcoming speeches. The Canadians were not amused."

At war's end, Cronkite went to Moscow for two grim years as U.P. bureau chief. Back in the U.S., he was offered a job as a KMBC radio correspondent in Washington. The pay was good, but Cronkite was dubious. "News is a newspaper's business," he bluntly told KMBC, "and it isn't radio's business." He finally accepted, though, at double his U.P. salary, which, after ten years, was still only $125 a week. When the Korean war broke out, he was hired by CBS and made an impromptu TV debut giving a lecture on the war, complete with chalk and blackboard. He was such a hit that against his better judgment he was soon shifted to television news. "It was a time," he says, "when no self-respecting newsman wanted anything to do with this new electronic beast."

Cronkite was not long in getting the beast under control. In 1952, CBS News Director Sig Mickelson picked him to anchor the network's coverage of the national political conventions, and he did such a workmanlike job that he found himself in the top rank of newscasters. Suddenly he was a star. He began to have his own news shows—Twentieth Century and Eyewitness to History.

Drowned in Din. Despite Cronkite's unqualified success as a newsman, the network persuaded him to try to be an entertainer as well. Reluctantly, he agreed to host a CBS morning program to compete with Dave Garroway's Today Show, and he found himself a hostage to show business. A gag writer was hired to write his lines, and he lost control of the program. "I was reasonably charming," he insists to this day, "but the whole thing didn't work out."

One morning when he arrived for work, he learned from a TV gossip column that he had been replaced by Jack Paar. "In the course of the day, I discovered that the Hollywood version of the networks is quite correct. I called CBS executives all day long and couldn't reach a single one. The order was out to all secretaries that no one wanted to talk to me." It was small consolation to open his mail and read one brief letter: "Jack Paar won't be as good as you. I know—I'm his mother."

After that debacle, along came Huntley-Brinkley with their breezier approach to the political conventions of 1956. "I was the old hand," says Cronkite, "but they received the critical attention." To make matters worse, by the 1964 conventions, the network competition was out of hand. Lugging their equipment with them, TV reporters swarmed over the convention floor. Quiet and restrained, Walter Cronkite tended to get lost in the crush. CBS executives became so panicked by the Huntley-Brinkley ratings that they rigged Cronkite with a new headset—one earphone tuned to the podium, the other to the control room. Their anchorman could not make much sense out of anything. "It was as bad a job as I have ever done," he remembers. Completely agreeing, CBS replaced him at the Democratic Convention with the team of Roger Mudd and Bob Trout. The replacement got even worse ratings than Cronkite.

Demoted though he was, Cronkite bounced back. The audience for his evening news