The Way It Is

When the CBS Evening News escalated its nightly show from 15 to 30 minutes a decade ago this week, NBC followed suit seven days later and ABC brought up the rear in January 1967. Since then, the NBC team of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley has split up, and ABC's game of anchormen roulette finally stopped spinning last year with the competitive combination of Harry Reasoner and Howard K. Smith. Only CBS's Walter Cronkite, 56, has outlasted the ten years of assassinations, riots, space shots, political conventions, elections and Viet Nam. In a business constantly crackling with meteoric rises and declines, Cronkite's longevity and continued influence are unprecedented.

The Cronkite image--sad eyes under luxuriant, quizzical brows, basso delivery at once stentorian and soothing --is as familiar to millions of viewers as the physiognomies of their families, yet the reason for his appeal sends analysts groping for metaphors. Chicago Sun-Times TV Columnist Ron Powers thinks that "somewhere in the collective consciousness of people in this country is the ideal composite face and voice of the American Man--and Cronkite has it." Paul Klein, a former audience researcher at NBC, thinks that viewers have stuck with Cronkite because his rational rhetoric provides a buffer of sanity between the often frightening news images on their screens.

The person seemingly least interested in what accounts for his phenomenal success is Cronkite himself. His recent 2 1/2-month vacation touched off rumors that he was being eased out of the picture, or even that he was seriously ill, but Cronkite was back at work last week, only mildly diverted by the network hoopla surrounding his tenth anniversary as a half-hour anchorman. He did take time out, though, to talk with TIME Contributing Editor Paul Gray about the vagaries of televised news and his plans for the future:

Adjoining the newsroom set familiar to 14 million nightly viewers, Cronkite's small office is a glass-walled goldfish bowl in a sea of activity. Behind his desk rest several joking tributes, including two framed New Yorker cartoons (caption on one showing a man avidly facing his TV set: "OK, Cronkite, lay it on me"). Tanned, younger looking than he seems on the tube, Cronkite lounges in his chair and talks about forthcoming TV technology.

"Miniaturization of cameras and the like means that within the next ten years we'll be almost as portable as radio." Unlike some analysts, Cronkite does not believe that new electronic wizardry will render the anchorman obsolete. He voices pride that the Evening News "has been and will be totally lacking in show-biz gimmickry." A pattern that has worked for ten years, he insists, will not be lightly changed.

He would like to extend the evening news to an hour, admits that the idea has had a cool reception from local CBS stations--which would lose a half-hour of profitable local advertising to the network. "It will come," Cronkite says of hour-long nightly news, but not, he thinks, in the near future.

Indeed, over the years, several of Cronkite's pet desires have been thwarted by economics. "I wish we would do more original reporting, have a bureau in every major city feeding us story ideas daily. But we're never going to solve that matter. If we placed a man full time in, say, Kansas City, we'd pay him $20,000 and maybe only one story of his would get on the air in a year." Similarly, Cronkite has long advocated a later hour for the evening news, either 10:30 or 11:00; such scheduling would tap the massive prime-time audience. Presently, CBS stations run the program live or on tape at a wide variety of times. "For example, Chicago puts us on at 5:30," Cronkite complains, "a bad time for an evening news show."

Irksome though such checks and restrictions may be, Cronkite shows no signs of restiveness. A recent five-year contract with CBS reportedly provides a comfortable salary (estimated in the neighborhood of $250,000 per year), increased vacation time (three months) and the promise of becoming a consultant when he decides to hang up his earphones. That is not likely to be soon. Cronkite laughs off the rumors of his departure, says that his vacation was simply the first extended one he has enjoyed since his sophomore year in high school.

Between trips to Mexico, Haiti and Maine, he spent most of his time on Martha's Vineyard, reading, sailing and staying away from the news--although he could not resist tuning in some of the Watergate hearings and the Skylab coverage. Watching surrogates sitting in for him, had he not thought, "They're doing it all wrong?" An unexpected reply: "Not at all. I look at others and think they do a much better job on the air. I look at my tapes and shudder." Television's institutional anchorman shuddering at his own work? "I guess," he laughs, "if I were still young and really ambitious, I would have run back to New York before my vacation was over and gotten on the air before anyone noticed how much better my replacements were doing." Now that he is back, no one, it seems, noticed.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.