And that’s the way it was with Walter Cronkite
Gunkholing and looking back with the most trusted man in America
In honor of “Independence Day,” which in the context of Juneteenth takes on yet more ironic resonance, I’m celebrating someone I considered to be a great and patriotic American:
On a sunny, windy afternoon I was leaning into a shaky ladder, scraping blistered white paint off trim on a second-story window in Orleans where we were living, when I heard that someone was on the phone.
“Who?” I yelled, trying to decide if it was worth clambering down.
“He says it’s Walter Cronkite.”
This meant my friend Tommy, who would call and announce that he was anyone famous — Jerry Garcia, Muhammad Ali, Mother Theresa. I flipped the scraper to the sand, grateful for a break, and backpedaled.
“Uncle Wally, is this the way it is?” I asked, riffing off the real Cronkite’s famous newscast sign-off, ‘And that’s the way it is…’
There was dead air, and then came that sonorous cadence a generation of Americans trusted. “I’m trying to reach Seth Rolbein. Have I done so?”
“Oh, uhh, yes, Mr. Cronkite,” I stammered. “To be honest, I thought you were a friend playing a practical joke on me.”
He guffawed, probably used to such moments, then explained that he was calling from his summer home on Martha’s Vineyard, had seen a magazine expose I had written about a controversial underwater treasure hunter with some island connections. He appreciated its insights and execution, he said.
“That is a huge compliment, thank you,” I stammered. “I think the fellow did think I was trying to execute him.”
He guffawed again. “I am calling to inquire,” he continued, words playing out like a news brief, “as to whether you might have the time and inclination to voyage over to the Vineyard on Saturday and spend the day sailing, should wind and weather allow.”
Hang out with Walter Cronkite?
“Wind and weather be damned, I’ll be there,” I told him.
He greeted me and Kathy at the door of his handsome home, a cooler in hand with sandwiches and soft drinks packed by his wife. That would be Walter Cronkite in the door frame of his Vineyard home, not just head and shoulders like I had seen him so many nights framed in the living room TV. No, full form in a Lacoste shirt, baggy cream-colored shorts over battered moccasins, cooler in one hand, breaking through the invisible television screen to shake with the other, blue eyes twinkling under the bushiest of eyebrows, gray hair askew, jowls sagging in a comfortable way, the person who had kept American families company for decades but did more than that, who told us that JFK had been shot and so had Lee Harvey Oswald, who narrated as we set foot on the moon and waded through Vietnam. The man we believed.
“We picked a good day for a sail,” he intoned. I couldn’t yet shake the feeling that he was reporting, not making small talk, that he’d identify his meteorological sources next.
“I believe you,” I said.
Before long we were gunkholing around the island aboard his 48-foot, custom-built sailboat “Wyntje” (named after a Dutch ancestor born in the 1600s). He needed me for brawn only, which I supplied while reveling to have the world’s best anchorman and narrator to ourselves; Edgartown Harbor wide shot, slow pan to Walter, tight shot of eyes bluer than the water and eyebrows even bushier than on the tube, neatly trimmed white mustache that never seemed necessary, slow pull back for the latest brief.
“Since I’ve stopped doing the news every night, it’s been quite interesting to be able to pick and choose my projects,” he said, letting a red buoy slip away on the port side. “I do have one major remaining goal.”
“Something journalistic?” I asked.
“More experiential. The one thing I really want to do before I’m too old is -- go into outer space.”
“The final frontier!”
“I am not Captain Kirk,” he smiled.
At that point he was just past 70, so this struck me as most improbable. But NASA had launched a “journalist in space” program, and who would be a better choice? He had anchored when the first American astronaut, John Glenn, blasted off, and for every other major space event into the early 1980s; he was the first and maybe only non-astronaut other than a President to be given a moon rock. He did become a finalist to fly, despite his age, but that was one dream he never lived; the “journalist in space” program was scrapped after the space shuttle Challenger blew up, with “teacher in space” Christa McAuliffe onboard.
The afternoon passed with increasing comfort, formality evaporating as sails trimmed. There were two moments I wanted to ask him about, and eventually I did.
The first was what drove him to release his remarkable commentary after returning from a reporting visit to Vietnam in early 1968, at a time when our military leaders and President Lyndon Johnson were insisting that victory was just around the corner:
“To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.”
“I just had to say it,” he said. “I really didn’t have much choice. No self-respecting reporter could have come back with any other conclusion.
“By the way,” he added, “I certainly wasn’t the only one who saw what was happening.” But he was the only one who could prompt President Johnson to turn to an aide after the broadcast and say, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” Johnson announced that he would not seek re-election a few weeks later.
The second moment was later that fulcrum year, 1968, August. Democrats were holding their political convention in Chicago, and demonstrators against the Vietnam War had stormed the streets, focusing wrath on the party of Johnson. Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley loosed police on the protestors; scenes of bone-crunching batons and violence filled televisions across the nation.
Cronkite stepped far out of the anchorman’s dispassionate, impartial role. “Police state,” was how he described the city. When turmoil reached into the hall itself, and young reporter Dan Rather was roughed up (on camera) by security guards as he was trying to interview a protesting delegate, Uncle Walter from the anchor-desk-on-high ostensibly spoke to Rather but was speaking to the nation: “I think we’ve got a bunch of thugs here, Dan,” he said.
“And then there was Abe Ribicoff,” Walter remembered, keeping a light hand on the Wyntje.
“Senator from Connecticut?”
“Right, he was there to nominate this guy for President who had no prayer, George McGovern, a decent man, a combat veteran from South Dakota. McGovern got his chance four years later.”
“Four more years,” I muttered.
“Ribicoff tore up his prepared speech and stared right at Daley, accusing him and the Chicago police of ‘Gestapo tactics.’ And I did it again, I just be impassive. I said something like, ‘Attaboy, Abe,’ or ‘You tell’em, Abe,’ and I caught a lot of grief about that.”
“I remember that, I heard you,” I said. “And I remember seeing Mayor Daley point at Ribicoff and scream at him, though you couldn’t see what Daley was saying, he had his hand cupped to his mouth.”
“Do you want to know what he was saying?”
“Of course.”
“Forgive me for such ugly language on a beautiful afternoon, but he was yelling, ‘F—k you, you Jew son of a bitch, you lousy motherf—ker, go home.’ We didn’t put that on the air -- maybe we should have.”
We were tacking back into Edgartown Harbor, he was checking landmarks over his shoulder which made it seem even more like he was reexamining the past.
“There were plenty of people at CBS who thought I had stepped beyond my journalistic role and responsibility,” he mused. “Perhaps they were right. But recall the context: Robert Kennedy had been assassinated two months earlier. Thousands were dying in Vietnam every week. The streets of Chicago, the great American city of broad shoulders, were filled with violence, and many of the protestors looked familiar, like our children. And there I was, live, at the anchor desk. There comes a moment when observation alone, reporting without an emotional component, is no longer possible -- and, one could argue, no longer right.
“That,” he smiled, “might be a good topic for a course at the Columbia School of Journalism. I’ve never been much of an academic, I was flying by the seat of my pants.”
NEXT, PART TWO: SAILING BY THE SEAT OF MY PANTS TO BAR HARBOR WITH WALTER.
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You are a gifted writer. You had me on your ladder scrapping paint. So it is with humility that I write that I think that Alan Shepard, not John Glenn, was the first astronaut. 🤷🏻
Wow! Enjoyed every moment of this incredible journey. Thank you!