The Age of Cronkite Passes

By Thomas Griffith

For nearly 20 years now, millions of Americans have first learned about the bad news--and sometimes the good--from the reassuring baritone of Walter Cronkite. With his retirement this week as anchorman from the CBS Evening News goes the man who more than anyone else has shaped and given stature to the role. In the fickle high-risk arena of television, where admiration swiftly changes to boredom or dislike, Cronkite, "the most trusted man in America," has been the stablest on-screen presence of them all. His departure is forcing a restudy, at all three networks, of the job itself.

Being anchorman isn't something that everybody can do, but it is something that hundreds can. Millions of advertising dollars, and each network's prestige, turn on how well this or that person delivers roughly the same news, introducing brief snatches of picture coverage and reading words that usually were written by others. Can Cronkite's replacement, Dan Rather, with that four-square forthrightness of his, and his adrenalized ambition, keep the loyalty of those accustomed to Cronkite's businesslike, low-key delivery? Or will NBC's John Chancellor, another in the trusty Cronkite mold, steal away some of CBS's audience? Will ABC news, which tried to de-emphasize the anchorman and gambled on hi-tech flashiness instead, be able to lift itself out of third place? The air is full of expensive uncertainty.

Cronkite, who won't be 65 until November, is leaving the Evening News earlier than expected.* He does so to make way for Rather, to whom CBS is paying $8 million over a five-year period to keep him from being raided by ABC. But if Cronkite is relaxed about stepping down from the Evening News, he seems the only one at CBS who is.

Rather is a hustling, intense reporter with a staccato style. Will he be able, like Cronkite, to leave a steadying impression of calm underneath all the turmoil of the news? In Rather's eagerness to keep his commitment to 60 Minutes too, he has been taping so many segments in advance that his smile has lately seemed a little tenser. He also knows that around CBS there were those who would have preferred Roger Mudd (who, being passed over, defected to NBC) or the amiable Charles Kuralt, whose CBS morning news has become something of a hit. The other two networks are also in the mood for change, but are waiting to see how well Rather works out.

Roone Arledge, the man who has upgraded ABC's World News Tonight, is convinced that with new technologies in news gathering and the departure of Cronkite, uno one person will be that important to an evening broadcast." But considering CBS's twelve-year dominance of the ratings under Cronkite, it could be argued that there is still something up to date about Cronkite's old-fashioned approach to the news.

Cronkite's believability rests on his ability, in an artificial environment, to project naturalness. It is a quality Cronkite shares not so much with other anchormen, but with Ronald Reagan. Both are sons of the Middle West who, in other surroundings and in more expensive suits, are determined to remain so. Both manage to convey the impression that "what you see is what you get." What you don't see may not be contrary to what you do see, but it is different. In both Reagan and Cronkite, there is obviously more than easygoing amiability.

Back in their Middle Western days, both men did radio broadcasts of away-from-home baseball games, when a minimal telegraphed strike-or-ball message had to be fleshed out into an imaginative description of a game unseen. For Reagan (called Dutch then, though unlike Cronkite he has no Dutch in him) it was good actor's training. Cronkite says with a grin: "If I'd been Dutch Cronkite and stayed with baseball, I might be President now." Instead, this week he is interviewing the President. For Cronkite those game broadcasts were valuable experience in ad-libbing, but also an introduction to show biz in the presentation of the news, a subject that disturbs him to this day.

Given the big salary, the chance to participate in history, to mix with the great and to be sought out by the celebrated, given the obsequiousness of headwaiters and the adulation of admirers (which he enjoys but puritanically tries not to enjoy too much), Cronkite has done a reasonably good job of holding self-importance at bay.

In his final week as anchorman Cronkite is at his desk as the bright lights turn on about ten minutes before the broadcast, in the low-ceilinged newsroom on Manhattan's West Side. In shirtsleeves, Cronkite reads through the copy with a stopwatch, addresses a question over his shoulder to whoever should know the answer ("Don't we have any more on this?"), occasionally turns to the typewriter to rephrase a sentence. Nobody speaks to him unless spoken to. The same sort of invisible cocoon isolates a professional football coach on the sideline from the players around him. Someone unobtrusively places Cronkite's jacket behind him. He stands up, puts it on, sits again, shoots his sleeves, exposing those large cufflinks. The CBS Evening News, to be watched by 18.5 million people, is on the air.

"I get very impatient with what I think are impositions and idiocies or incompetence or sloppiness," Cronkite says. "I'm a very difficult boss. I'm also very impatient with myself. If I've dropped the ball, I start screaming and hollering at the entire production. I hate that in myself. I haven't been able to cure it."

The slightly beat-up set, with Cronkite in the middle of what looks like a newspaper copy desk, is the way Cronkite wants it. Let other networks experiment with big anchor desks like airline counters, glitzy overhead lighting like a Vegas hotel lobby, or space-age backdrops of multiple TV screens--Cronkite knows the value, in maintaining listener loyalty, of what he calls the "old shoe" factor. It irritates him when young interviewers ask him how much of the broadcast he writes, as if this alone distinguishes a newsman from an announcer (his written contribution is "purely whimsical--from 0% to 50%," Cronkite says; Chancellor writes more of his). The choice and editing of stories matter more to him.

Cronkite is an old-fashioned newspaperman, a good one and proud of it. He was in the first group of war correspondents to fly a bombing mission over Germany. After the war, he covered Stalin's bleak and hostile Moscow for United Press. Out of his U.P. experience, and his concern that so many millions get their news only from TV, Cronkite tries to see to it that CBS runs more news items, even brief ones, than the other networks. He persists in the mannerisms and discipline of the older medium as if this guarantees his integrity--and the integrity of the news--in television's less pure environment of hucksters, big money and pizazz.

Television's personality cult, though it has enriched him, troubles Cronkite. The inflated salaries of anchormen, when compared, he says, with those of "print journalists who for heaven sakes are as good or vastly better," clearly reflects marketable personality. His defense is a little pat: "Compared to rock-'n'-roll singers, we ought to make more than we make. Compared to teachers and newspaper journalists, we're vastly overpaid." He adds: "I don't even like looking at tapes of myself. I probably could improve my performance immensely if I studied what I'm doing. The idea repels me. I don't want to be a personality, a presenter, a show-biz thing. I resisted a long time going to contact lenses. When a person needs glasses, why do they have to hide the fact? That was a big hassle around here."

CBS tried to devise special glasses for him that wouldn't reflect the strong lights. Nor would Cronkite move from the newsroom to a high-ceiling studio where "they could have saved me some years in appearance on the air by proper lighting." He was insisting on a point: "It's not the picture of me that counts. It's what we are saying and doing." John Chancellor says: "The fact is, those of us who are serious middle-aged journalists have sheltered in the lee of his success."

Dan Rather will be sitting at Cronkite's old desk next week, but restlessly. He doesn't like the word anchorman, and sees himself more as "a lead correspondent. I want to grab a pencil and get out of the office. I do not intend to be an inside man." But until Rather has shown that he can hold on to Cronkite's audience, CBS wants him at that familiar desk.

Roger Mudd, who is being groomed for anchorman at NBC, also considers himself a reporter, though his expertise is mostly about the Washington scene. NBC is staying with Chancellor as anchorman, though he has the contractual right to move to commentaries instead. Cronkite and Chancellor, eleven years his junior, have a quality that is rare among on-camera personalities, though not among the news staffs of the networks. This is an ornery insistence that serious news should get its due weight, with or without pictures. (Cronkite also deplores those cliche pictures of gas pumps and checkout counters.)

Over at ABC, Roone Arledge introduced the pictorial wizardry that other networks have had to copy. Last year, with strong Iran coverage, ABC began to overtake NBC. In recent weeks, however, NBC has steadfastly stood off the challenge (CBS has an average 27% of the evening news audience, NBC 23%, ABC 22%). Arledge may soon be making changes. Among his multiple anchors, Max Robinson might be shifted out; Frank Reynolds' status is unclear; Arledge hopes to sign up Tom Brokaw, who is unhappy doing NBC's Today show, which has diminished the journalistic reputation he earned as a White House correspondent. Arledge, however, foresees the decline of the anchor role: "If something happens in Europe an hour before the broadcast, we can get pictures and accounts back here on the satellite so you rarely need a person to sit there and tell stories." Maybe so. ABC news keeps the eye busy, but there are still complaints that it leaves the mind confused. Over at CBS they speak of the "magic number," up to seven minutes, that the anchorman should be on screen, to give cohesiveness to the news. This may become the battleground of post-Cronkite television news: whether pictures or content will dominate coverage.

Cronkite himself, proud of the television tradition he embodies, is seething about the news-programs he sees too often on local stations, where "all it takes today to be an anchor person is to be under 25, fair of face and figure, dulcet of tone and well coiffed--and to be able to fit into the blazer with the patch on the pocket." For such show-biz tricks he blames greedy, indifferent station owners with no commitment to news responsibility. He is exercised by those communications schools that ignore writing, reporting and editing, "move right into Makeup I, Makeup II, Trenchcoat I and Trenchcoat II," and produce graduates "without any depth of understanding."

Is this just an older man's lament at changing fashions? Certainly television news is at its best when it shows rather than tells--the events witnessed, the participants seen and heard. The trouble comes when fires more spectacular than damaging or sensationalized "tragedies" from the police beat displace news of consequence but lacking in zingy illustrations.

After Friday there will no longer be anybody around to say with insistent confidence, "And that's the way it is." Much will be lost if there are not enough people in the glittering new technological era to uphold, with that same insistence, Walter Cronkite's fierce devotion to the news that matters.

* But he will do 13 weeks this summer of CBS's new science series, Universe, and occasional specials.

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