Bill Moyers Journal; 126; Walter Cronkite

Produced in New York by WNET. Some people say that Walter Cronkite at the parties is not the same sober, serious, straight-faced or straight-laced character he is on the air. Is there any truth to that elitist guy? Oh, I think that's absolutely true. Absolutely. The two faces of Walter Cronkite, you know, I'm not saying I'm the life of the party exactly, although I try desperately to be. No, that's not quite true. But I enjoy party, I like dancing, I like the conviviality, a good brawl, have a good what?

Brawl. Walter Cronkite talks about the other Walter Cronkite, the one you don't hear on television every night. Join me as America's best known newsman discusses what a gate, the press, and the time Robert Kennedy wanted him to run for the Senate. I'm Bill Boyer's. This is the living room of the man millions of Americans invite into their living room every evening to report on the news. It's filled with the mementos of a distinguished career, a career as a reporter and broadcaster that has made Walter Cronkite known not only to masses of people who watch him every day, but to the men who make the history he reports. Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon.

Five President and a quarter of a century later, Walter Cronkite still looks at the world with such a passion for objectivity that more people say they trust him than any other man in the public eye. As a young man he reported abroad for the United Press in Moscow in World War II as a foreign correspondent. In 1950, in the infant days of television he joined CBS News and the rest is broadcasting history. From Chicago, the Democratic National Convention, now to Walter Cronkite. Hello everyone, here we are again in studio AARCBS Television Control Point for the Western House coverage this time of the Democratic National Convention. August 1952, the big political conventions were being fully covered by television for the first time, and Cronkite was there. It was the beginning of years of presence at conventions, elections, and inauguration.

Here at Los Angeles, in the sports arena where the Democratic National Convention on this, the third day of its meeting, gets down to the business of... With Edwin Armera, he would set standards of television for a whole generation of newsmen. Direct from our newsroom in New York, this is the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, and Nelson Benton in Tuskegee, Alabama. Dan, rather in black and blue, he became managing editor and anchor man of the CBS Evening News. A year later, it would expand to a half hour. Good evening from our CBS Newsroom in New York on this, the first broadcast of Network Television's first daily half hour news program. Good evening from Cairo, Egypt. I suppose that they are going to enter the late President Nasser sometime today, but from this vantage point, as I report this... But at heart, Cronkite remained the reporter, and his assignments carried him from politics in America to such spectacles as the funeral of Egypt's President Nasser.

This is the most unbelievable scene. This reporter has witnessed an entire lifetime of reporting. Over the years, he was to win a award after award for CBS Reports. You were there in 20th century, but as America raced to the moon, the coverage of the Apollo flights became his favorite of all time. Although he disclaims any role as a spokesman for the industry, Walter Cronkite has offered sharp views and defense of the freedom of the press in these years of conflict between government and journalism. In his den, we talked about this and other issues. Are you breathing easier since Watergate? Well, that's kind of a tough question. As a journalist, I suppose, I'm breathing a little easier since Watergate, and as much

as I think it's going to take an extraordinary amount of gall for the administration to come back and attack freedom of press, as I believe they have in the past. Now, with these revelations, on the other hand, I'm not breathing easier for the country. I think this is a terribly serious blow to the credibility of government and of politicians, and these are matters that strike right at the core of the democratic system. If we can't believe in our government, then cynicism sets in, and I don't think any government can live with a cynical population. You've covered the world long enough to be somewhat cynical about what power does to human nature or human nature does to power. Were you surprised by all this? No, I really can't say that I was surprised by it. I was unhappy that my suspicions proved to be right, but it seemed to me that from the

very beginning, this administration has had the makings of this kind of a disaster. The total lack of confidence exuded by the administration in the people and in the other branches of government and in the press set it up for this problem, the isolation of the president. One of the things that strikes me about all of this is that if the president had not had this attitude that he had, apparently, toward the press, if he had read the newspapers and listened to television news, presumably this couldn't have happened. Even Bradley, by the way, the managing editor of the Washington Post told me that despite all of their revelations on Watergate, it wasn't until you put those two segments on the air in October that his own series began to have impact.

Doesn't that speak for the power of this medium? It does indeed. I think the importance of that was, and that's one of the reasons we did it. I was becoming more and more alarmed at the fact that these revelations were not getting any attention anywhere in the country, that out in the, well, beyond the atomic practically, nobody was paying any attention. How would you compare this administration's attitudes toward the press and relations with the press with previous administration that you've observed? There's been no question about the difference in my mind at all. I have not gotten along well with any administration since I've been a newspaper man and a broadcast journalist. I don't think that anybody probably does who tries to write what he believes to be the facts and the truth. You know only too well from the other side of the picture. But the criticism has leveled by the administrations I have known from Franklin, Donald Roosevelt, on through now to Richard Nixon.

Up to the Nixon administration, the criticism has been harsh. It's been tough time, it's been bitter at time, but it's been directed against an individual story or an individual series of stories or a play of an individual event over, you know, in isolated incidents, they came and they went. But what's been different with this administration is the concerted, apparently well organized campaign against the press. A deliberate effort to bring down the press's credibility in order, I think, to raise its own. I know that the administration has been in touch with publishers and with broadcast executives behind the backs of the newsmen. As a matter of fact, this is more alarming than the frontal attacks. The frontal attacks can be dealt with fairly well, I think. I mean, that's fair combat.

It's the behind the scenes things that are more worrisome. Have you ever been nudged by an executive at CBS because of something the White House? Not an executive at CBS, never. I've been nudged by the White House. You're right in a few of those foreign cars yourself. Now, I'd more to get some personal, but I don't think it's had any effect. Now, I'm not saying that there has not been at some time, rather, some advertiser pressure or government pressure. I know there have been government pressure to the executive at CBS, but to the great credit to the executive at CBS, Dr. Frank Stanton and Bill Paley, and then those who had charged the company and dick-slant down on the level of President of CBS News, it never gets to us. That buffer has been absolutely 100 percent integral throughout. I've been doing the evening news for 11 years and never once, not once, has any advertiser pressure been put on us on the CBS evening news. I know that in, you know, I've got an awful hard time, Bill, convincing anybody of this.

I know that. You know, people come in from the foreign broadcasting operations where their government control students come from the new advocacy journalism schools and the rest, and they come and they talk to me. You know, I could have that stack of Bibles all over the room and take my oath on it, and I still wouldn't believe me, but all I can say is it's true. Would you say that the format and the need to be brief, deter your presenting the news more than your ideology? Well, I don't think that ideology is a problem at all. I deny that we are biased or prejudiced in the presentation of the news on a regular basis. I maintain that all manner biased and prejudiced. It would be, I don't know anybody who isn't, it doesn't harbor some personal feelings about events and men, people who make them, but the mark of the professional journalist Bill, the only thing that distinguishes us as a profession rather than as a craft is

that we have learned to put those biases and prejudices aside, to recognize them when they crop up. And if it's not me, it's an editor who's going to say, well, wait a minute, this thing is a little slanted, I think, the way it's phrased, the word you use or something of the kind. We're constantly battling that problem, and I think most of the time succeeding. I don't think ideology gets in the way of our presenting the fair news program. I think time is, by far, the greater limitation, time is the thing that causes us also to have to make that selection, finally, of what goes in the broadcast. Although more people say they trust you than anyone else in the public eye, I suspect the majority of people don't really know what you believe. Aren't there times when you'd like to throw off the mantle of objectivity and say, this is what I, Walter Krunk, I believe?

Sure. Sure. There are many times I'd like to do that. I've done it only once, and really, or twice, I guess, maybe, both of them in the Lyndon Johnson administration, one on Vietnam, and one which didn't get any notice except from the president. I think you were at the White House. Well, I think I will. And that was the satellite, the use of the satellite that first day, when the satellite went up for the first time and the president ordered it up so he could address the people of Europe, and that was exactly the reason that the governments of Europe were fighting against the satellite. They were still trying to get it into some countries in Europe. And I thought that was a pretty poor show, and said so, but the unheard from the White House. What did you hear? Loudly. I got a phone call. I thought you were the one who made it. Maybe you weren't. But, you know, memory aside, I got a phone call. I got a phone call from the White House, one of those, and sometimes, you know, we heard

directly from the president, you know, we'd call them, correct? But this was the one, one of those phone calls where the euphemism was used. Hey, well, there's some of us were sitting around here at the White House watching the broadcast, and some of us think that, some of us was pretty clear. Well, as you know, one of us, some of us and one is a majority of us. 1868 after 10, was the other example that you expressed your opinion. I had supported the war up at up to 68, and I went out twice earlier, and 65, I think, was the last previous trip. I was very disturbed on that 65 trip, because I had believed that indeed we had a responsibility to help governments establish democracies, whether they were democracies to start with or not. If that was the intention, if that's where they were going, that's the line they were going down, and they were threatened by communist incursions, then, definitely, we ought to be of some help.

And where the attempt to take over the government was by force, as it was in South Vietnam, I definitely thought we should help. I thought we should help by advising those governments, giving them material support, never with the troop strength that we threw in there. And that's what disturbed me in 65, or disturbed me, was government credibility. Again, I thought we were being lied to when I went out there in 65, because the administration in Washington was saying that this was the limit of our commitment. I forget what the figures were, they were in 56,000, 65,000, whatever it was, something in that figure. And yet, I saw them beginning to build Cameron Bay. I talked to the generals who said we're going to need a quarter of a million men out here. All of this and the pipelines already were filling up when the people were being told only 56 or 65,000 was the nature of our commitment. But we were being kidded. I don't think the whole Vietnam war would have gone the way it went. If the administrations who were involved in Vietnam had ever said this may cost a million men, this may cost our national treasure.

This is all out war. This is where we've chosen to stand and fight. If they'd said that to the American people, I think the American people would have responded to it. It was being insinuated into the war, not being told the truth as we moved into that major commitment that got the people down on the war in Vietnam, so that we couldn't believe anything that was happening out there. Well, 65 was beginning, I began to get disturbed with this thing, but I didn't feel my role was to say anything about it, I'm trying to be an impartial journalist. It seems to me that we've all learned from our experience that the facts don't speak for themselves, that the facts can lie, and that the facts need a trained observer who, when he is disturbed by what you saw and heard, says, I am disturbed. That may be editorializing, but isn't it? Well, I think that you have a point, I think my answer to that point is that I think you also need impartial newsmen who are not committed in delivering the news on an evening

broadcast. Once you have committed an opinion, then people are going to put everything you report into the framework of that commitment, and I think that when I finally in 68 spoke out that that damaged, without a question of it out, my reputation for objectivity in reporting the Vietnam War during the rest of that period. But as I've told you, the president told some of his associates, I was not there at that time, but in 1968, one of them subsequently told me that Mr. Johnson said, he thought the war had been lost the moment from Vietnam, you said, in 1968, what you saw happening. If in 1965 you, Walter Cronkout, had said they're lying to us, mighten the effects not have been worthwhile. Gosh, I don't know, but you're putting off a burden on my shoulders. I hope I'm not responsible for the Vietnam War from 1965.

There are a lot of people who would like to transfer that burden. Do you have any concern for the effects of what you've broadcast as an objective? Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. I think it's very hard for anybody to understand even our own executives, CBS, to understand how much goes into each decision, into each thing we broadcast that might conceivably be controversial, that boy, we worry and sweat over each piece, and the concern is very great about what the impact and what the effect will be. Do you have final say as managing editor of CBS News? It ends up being that final say within our unit. If in our unit we come to a real head-on clash on what should be on the program or should not be, then I'm the last words and some of the guys got a broadcast at my face is hanging out there and I'm managing editor, that's why I'm managing editor.

However, if it got to be a real crunch, if the executive producer said, well, boy, you are so wrong, I can't go on with the broadcast doing that. I'm sure they would appeal it. We've never had that. But you do have editors and others, producers who help be a check on your own inclination. Oh, yeah. I don't want to suggest at all that I am the sole authority around there. We've got an executive producer, two producers, five assistant producers, three writers and editor. They all are participating in this decision-making process at all times and they don't hesitate to call me down on one, any one of those people. Aren't you ever tempted to want to cross over from being a spectator? Do you mean run for office? No. Well, I remember it night. I'd like to be appointed to one. Anyone in particular? Oh, no. I kind of kidded about that when people said you run for the Senate, I'd say I wouldn't run for the Senate.

That's been suggested a couple of times by both parties incidentally, which shows something about not only impartiality, but the fact nobody knows what they stand for. But I would like, I think, would be great to serve in the Senate. I would never want to go through that business of having to get elected. But I'm worried about the financing structure and politics these days. It's gotten to be such a big money business. Thanks partially to the use of television. And I'm afraid that a poor boy, such as I am, I know that my salary is mentioned in six figures, but I'm building a lot of destroyers with all that money and have very little of it left, educate my own family. But basically a poor boy, as far as running for office these days, raising two or three million dollars to run for state offices far beyond any personal finances of mine or of my immediate friends, I think when you go out raising that kind of money, there's got to be some obligations and quid pro quo.

And I would be unwilling to make that compromise, even for the most honest guy. I said a friend, even a friend, even a friend has got to at some point when he puts up 200, 300,000, a minute and whatever. He's got to come to you and say, Walter, Senator, Joe or whatever. I don't want you to do this. If you think anything wrong about it, I don't want you to do that. But do you suppose there's any way you can check up on this little thing for me, which means when you put me in touch with the people who can do it and so forth. That's power-brokering, even if it's for good. And I would hate to be put in that position. I'd like total independence. I wouldn't want to have people who put up money in my race come to me and say, how in the world could you vote for that housing bill when you know that I've got all those acres tied up up in Westchester County? That would be terrible.

In March of 1968, Senator Robert Kennedy told me at dinner at a restaurant here in New York that he thought you would make the best United States Senator, President Company included, and said, in the state at that time, but that he couldn't persuade you to run. Well, he didn't try that hard. I didn't think he never twisted any arms. Isn't it a problem being so close to men like the late Senator Kennedy being a part of the establishment? Well, it is a very serious problem. I think that, I should say here very quickly, it's an iterated somewhat if you're close to all walks of the establishment, all groups in the establishment. And I think that I've thought of money friends and the Republican liberal, Republican conservative ranks as in the liberal democratic, liberal conservative ranks. So there is a balance as far as an ideological input. There is a terrible problem always for newsmen who are working on the fringes of the power

structure in getting too close to those who are news sources and protecting the news source out of friendship rather than doing their job. And I think that's a human thing that it's very, very hard to balance. But again, the professional journalist simply has to learn to do it. And it's the reason I think that you find that most presidents are politicians in high positions, they candidate, for instance, gets very bitter about the press because suddenly he finds that those good friends he had on the way up are suddenly writing stories that he doesn't agree with. Or he thinks harms him, and he didn't expect that kind of treatment from his friends. It happens every time. What effect has all of this attention on you had on Mrs. Cronkide and the children? Made them absolutely in sufferable.

No. I'm saying that only because they're on the other side of the camera over there listening. I think it's, I don't know what effect it's had on the children. I can't judge that because I've been in this limelight all the most of the whole time they've grown up, although two of them are adults now, and the boy is 16. But I hope it hasn't had any effect on them, although I don't know that. I don't know what kind of people they'd have been if I'd been in the United Press all these years. As far as Betsy goes, I don't think it's had any effect on her whatsoever at all. She's the same guy. I'm married one of them making 37.50 a week. That was 37.50 a week. That wasn't there very long ago, it didn't seem very long ago. When your daughters were growing up, Ben Chip, as well, did you worry about the effects of television on them? Not your celebrity status, but the effects of the medium on their lives? Well I guess, in a way, we started out like so many families limiting their access to

television each day, and then sort of slowly slipped on that. We wanted to watch, we wanted them around, so the discipline fell down on that. I don't think, though, that television is damaging to children. I've changed my mind about that. I thought so at first I was kind of swept up with all the concern that they'd be frozen into that box and not read and all those things. It hadn't worked that way with my family at all. My children are readers and they're doers, and I think that if anything, it has expanded their range of knowledge, and I think this is what is true with most kids. I think that particularly for those underprivileged homes where the children have not had an opportunity to discuss subjects with their parents, who have not given an example of reading and thinking parents, the television is a marvelous substitute parent in this regard.

Even the violent programs so forth, at least in most of them the use of the language is probably better than it is in the homes of the underprivileged and depressed. There are thought processes that open up a new expansion, their world, expand their world. I think that these things are important and good. So if you had to draw up the bottom line of the effects of television on our society generally, would you give it a plus or a minus? I'd give it a very big plus, a very big plus. Is there anything left to do that you'd like to do? Oh, it's a terrible thing to say not really because it sounds like I'm ready to curl up and die, far from that. What I'd like to do is keep fighting the battle of free press, free speech, and stay out there and try to put together the best possible half hour news broadcast we can. Try to get an hour and stick with it because I think it's the highest of colleagues.

What would you like to be remembered for when you've said your last sign off? Oh, boy, I think I'd like to be remembered as a good newsman just for honesty and integrity, telling it like it was, I think that'd be the highest accolade. Well on that note, let me thank you in behalf of my colleagues in public television for spending so much time with us this evening and good night and good luck to you. Well, good night and good luck to public television. It's needed in this country and I hope you win your freedoms back. Thank you, Walter. I'm Bill Moyers. Good night. Good night and good night and good night.

Good night and good night. Good night and good night. Good night and good night and good night.