That's the Way It Was
HOTTELET, RICHARD C.
That's the Way It Was A Reporter's Life By Waller Cronkite Knopf. 384pp. $26.95. Reviewed by Richard C. Hottelet Former CBS News correspondent The title really tells almost all. This is not...
...It says something that he has been married for a lifetime to a woman with a gently astringent sense of humor...
...I pontificated," he writes, "my first major pontification...
...The 10-second sound bite became the staple of the news report...
...He remembers the confusion and the Camembert...
...His forte was reporting football games play by play from the studio on the basis of fragmentary notes telegraphed by a Western Union operator on the scene, the same sort of thing Ronald Reagan was doing with baseball...
...Murrow's departure in 1961 was an early portent...
...And.just as the power of television and the press must be reined in by a sense of responsibility, freedom of the press to inquire and investigate must be legitimized by an unflagging effort to know the subject and to be objective...
...One of his experiences, which I am happy not to have shared, was flying into the abortive Rhine crossing A Bridge Too Far in a troop-carrying glider...
...We finally met on our assignments in Moscow in 1946...
...it is the story of a man who has always seen himself as a working stiff, a reporter...
...The broadcast networks, CBS above all, took great pride in their innovative news programming, including superb, hard-hitting documentaries...
...Before World War II, he says, the reporter could identify with the average man "because we were him...
...Visiting his grandparents in Kansas City, he was lured by a "grandiose $25 a week" to join a new radio station as a one-man news and sports staff...
...But he never stopped learning...
...The dentist rushed at him, punched him in the face to send him flying back on the lawn, and shouted "That'll teach you, Nigger, to put your feet on a white man's front porch...
...The broad public, it must be noted, did not complain as the common denominator sank...
...He bemoans the transformation of news anchors into star personalities, believing it removes them from the average person...
...As it happens, I took up with the UP in Berlin at the same age a year later...
...The breakup of his parents' marriage did not sour the boy's life...
...A free press, guaranteed by the First Amendment, is for him the guarantor of democracy...
...Particularly once the spectacular success of 60 Minutes showed that news could be profitable...
...When Warren Harding died, Walter earnestly counseled one client to look carefully at the late President's portrait on the front page...
...At the age of seven, he sold mag-azines...
...Wars and deep fears marked those turbulent decades...
...Rubbing elbows with world leaders, sitting first row center at the history of a generation and receiving virtually unanimous acclaim have not softened a core of common sense...
...For all the light touch and the rich kaleidoscope of anecdotes diving deep in the Al vin submarine, flying toward the Aurora Borealis, swimming with piranhas etc...
...Walter Cronkite is not exactly renowned for modesty, but he never inhaled what the publicity department was putting out...
...He enjoys, as who wouldn't, what he calls the upside of fame: recognition, applause, chances to have outlandish fun, money to buy and race sports cars in one period, bigger and bigger sailboats thereafter...
...I think I got $ 18 a week plus, later, grudgingly, a dollar or two living allowance...
...Although we never met until some time after I joined Edward R. Murrow's CBS team in London in 1944, we were occasionally on the same terrain for example, covering the aviation engineers in Normandy, stitching together their per-forated steel runways a few days after the Allied invasion...
...I remember the calvados and the Signal Corps major, distraught over local hospitality, complaining "everything's being laid but the wire...
...Not that Walter Cronkite wears a hair shirt...
...In other words, the average citizen who wants to avoid stupefaction and steer his own course has to make the effort to inform himself...
...It was an experience shared by others who subsequently went on to splendid careers in broadcasting Bill Downs, Charles Col-lingwood, Larry LeSeur, and Howard K. Smith...
...Unemployed, for the first and only time in his life, he landed at the United Press...
...The greatest victim, he writes, is the political process...
...He regained touch with his father and had loving grandparents...
...A new president of CBS News avowedly sought to set a new standard of "infortainment," soft, featur-ized news aimed at sentiment rather than reason...
...Cronkite, brought into the CBS Board of Directors after his retirement in 1981, probably to keep him from going somewhere else, found that his warnings were not only ignored but also resented...
...Walter ran into the same parsimony during 11 years at UP that included service in the United States, then as a war correspondent in London, with the Eighth Air Force on bombing missions and at the front...
...He saw firsthand the impact of television—for instance, people crowding around him rather than 1956 Vice Presidential candidate Estes Kefauver as they got off the campaign bus...
...He also obviously accepts the right of privacy...
...Walter feels passionately about civil rights...
...at nine, he delivered newspapers...
...Once he carelessly put the Houston bank clearings figure off by 10 cents...
...I expect to watch all this from a perch yet to be determined," Cronkite concludes...
...I know what it is like to be a marked man...
...I just hope that wherever that is, folks will stop me, as they do today, and ask, 'Didn't you used to be Walter Cronkite?'" He likely will be, still...
...Like many of us who accepted the sometimes stupid constraints of wartime censorship, Cronkite was appalled by the straitjacket the Pentagon put on reporters in Grenada, Panama and the Persian Gulf...
...The idea was quickly scotched by General Manager Earl Johnson...
...Anchors became multimillionaires, while news division budgets were pared to the bone and foreign bureaus were shut down to provide the money...
...He ticks off the jobs he held: cigar salesman, cowboy, delivery boy, clothing salesman, short-order cook—none of great duration...
...The UP welcomed hungry youngsters, paid them a pittance and taught them the ropes...
...He was given the name Walter Wilcox, which the station owned, so that he could not capitalize on its fame if he moved elsewhere...
...etc.this is a serious book by a professional who has mastered his craft...
...Informed that the numbers racket paid off on the last five digits and that the hoods did not like mistakes, he writes, "The next few weeks were a fear-filled time...
...Documentaries practically disappeared, to be replaced by news magazines and tabloid trash...
...It is the last picture you will ever see of President Harding.' I can't quite reconstruct today what led me to that foolish conclusion, but I record it here to establish my early predisposition to editorial work the ability to be both pontifical and wrong...
...The child is father to the man...
...He had no trouble reminding himself of the reporter's place in the scheme of things when he brushed off the urging of Robert F. Kennedy, among others, to run for the U.S...
...Managements, engaged more heavily in entertainment, became less willing to carry their news divisions as loss leaders...
...An inner drive kept him moving...
...it was 1937 and he was 20 years old...
...Bitten by the journalism bug because of a high school teacher, he went to work for the Houston Post, then the Houston Press, learning the discipline of accuracy...
...When, having been thrown out by the Nazis after several months in jail, I arrived in New York, one UP bigwig suggested there was no need to pay me the allowance for that period because living had cost me nothing...
...After his family moved to Houston, at the time a very Southern city, he witnessed something he would never forget...
...In fact, he wasn't...
...Then things changed...
...Walter faked nobly if the wire went down, but it all ended the time he questioned an inaccurate report on a fire from the program manager's wife...
...This is not an anchorman's journey or a correspondent's reflections...
...We were both scheduled to go in with Allied airborne forces operations that were, thank heaven, canceled when the ground troops moved ahead too fast...
...He has one too, as he recounts the sometimes hilarious progress of his boyhood marked by an urge to tell people what was going on...
...Cronkite's character was formed early...
...Altogether, Cronkite is a liberal an honorable label before the Right-wing hijacked it with a capital L. He disliked Ronald Reagan's trickle-down economics and he stresses education as opening the door of opportunity, with Head Start as a helping hand...
...There was a time, after Murrow initiated broadcast news from Europe as Hitler moved to war, when information was much more than a commodity...
...The networks, grown into big business and absorbed by even bigger corporations, wanted to offend no one...
...The last chapter should be read in schools of journalism, by all who work in the broadcast industry, and especially by people who want to know how television is informing them...
...For the next 30 or 40 years a vast audience was eager to know what was happening, welcoming the word that came from serious reporters...
...To this day he has kept to himself an intimate conversation with Lyndon B. Johnson shortly before the President left the White House...
...Visiting a prominent dentist with his parents, he saw a black delivery boy look for a side door and, finding none, start up the steps to the porch...
...Senate...
Vol. 79 • December 1996 • No. 9
