The Importance of Being Walter

France's leading anchor out-Cronkites Cronkite

One evening a few years ago, several agents of the French government slipped unobtrusively into the U.S. on one of the most daring assignments in the annals of international skulduggery. They checked into a midtown Manhattan hotel, spent much of the next few days watching the CBS Evening News in their rooms, and then fled the country as quietly as they had come, their mission accomplished. The mission? Figurez vous! To capture Walter Cronkite.

Not in the flesh, of course. But in spirit, nuance, mannerism, inflection and any other ephemeral component of credibility that might explain the graying CBS anchorman's enormous popularity. A faction in the state television monopoly wanted to replace the reigning crew of bland newsreaders with a single, reassuringly credible, American-style anchorman--en effet, a French Walter Cronkite. In 1974 French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing made that scheme possible by splitting the monopoly into three parts. Officials of Television Franc,aise I, one of the new state-owned but competing channels, were given only two months to find a suitable anchor, so they took a long shot: Roger Gicquel, a relatively obscure former airline steward, failed actor and radio-station executive who had never been in front of a TV camera.

For the first six months on the job, Gicquel recalls, he was only an actor playing the role of anchorman. "I must have seemed a bit awkward," he admits, "like I was wearing my Sunday suit." But, "little by little, I began to understand that it was necessary only to be like I really was." Much of Gicquel's appeal seems to lie in a kind of Gallic avuncular gloom, and an ability to register an appropriate flicker of sorrow, anger, levity or weariness in reaction to whatever news he is reading--the same reactions that viewers presumably are having. As Gicquel puts it, "I try to consider myself the recipient of the news just as the public will be, and to re-create before the public my reaction as I first felt it. In other words, it's more a carnal, physical style of communication than an analysis in words." According to the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, Gicquel, "carrying the burden of all the distress, loneliness and violence, grimaces painfully over all the international tensions and unemployment."

Whatever the source of his chagrin, Gicquel was soon out-Cronkiting Cronkite. The somber, chain-smoking Frenchman has brought an unprecedented measure of subtle and sometimes anti-government editorializing to French TV news--to the chagrin of about 75 viewers each week who write him to protest. He delivers himself of stronger opinions off-camera. Last year he produced a serious book about the impact of TV on French society. Called Violence and Fear, it has become a bestseller.

Gicquel's heavy-lidded, slightly pained visage regularly decorates the pages of fan magazines. Social scientists grind out studies on the style and content of his weeknightly 8 p.m. newscast. That program's popularity helps T.F. 1 to outdraw its nearest competitor by 2 to 1 in the ratings, and at $50,000 a year Gicquel has become probably the nation's highest-paid journalist. French radio has given him a regular morning commentary, in which he examines "social problems that pass unperceived in society" (sample topic: latent resentment of computers). One leftist daily has pronounced Gicquel a more important public figure than Giscard, Premier Raymond Barre or Socialist Party Leader Franc,ois Mitterrand. With tongue in cheek, Le Nouvel Observateur describes Gicquel as "the Christ of the 8 o'clock news."

The man who would be Walter was born 45 years ago in a Paris suburb, grew up in backwater Brittany, and returned to the capital to seek his fortune as an actor. He never found it. "I was not aggressive enough," he concludes. Married and a father at 19, he left the stage for a steady paycheck as a steward for a small French airline and spent the next six years shuttling back and forth to Africa and points east. Eventually he became a minor suburban correspondent for the right-wing daily Parisien Libere, and was holding down an administrative job at a Paris radio station when T.F. 1 found him.

Unlike Cronkite, Gicquel writes all his own copy for the newscast. He has come out against the French death penalty, made disapproving remarks about the Shah of Iran's reliance on political repression, and criticized the government for not trying harder to rescue a French archaeologist held prisoner by guerrillas in Chad for 33 months. After he twitted a Marseille insurance company for firing a woman who came to work in Bermuda shorts, the firm sued him (the case is still unsettled). The day after he commanded viewers to lower the temperatures in their homes to save energy, French utilities reported dramatic reductions in gas and electricity consumption.

In his willingness to step over the line that separates fact from opinion on tightly controlled French TV, which only last week began allowing critics of government policy to reply on the air to ministerial pronouncements, Gicquel strays widely from the American anchorman's practice of reading the news inoffensively and letting someone else do the commenting. He has not lost his reverence for the master, however. "Cronkite was a myth for us," Gicquel explains. "People spoke about his personality and the fact that he had the unanimous support of Americans. I was intoxicated by him." Indeed, shortly before he joined T.F. 1, Gicquel made a pilgrimage to New York to see Cronkite in action. Helas, he did not get much more than a handshake. Recalls Gicquel wistfully: "Walter was very busy." qed

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