Cronkite, at His Apex

AP Photo Some 34 years ago, Walter Cronkite gave a wide-ranging interview to The Daily Beast’s Allan Dodds Frank about the burden of being "the most trusted man in America." Here’s Uncle Walter, in his own words, at the top of his game.

In April 1975, the newsman on top of the world, Walter Cronkite, generously gave me an hour-long interview. I was then a 27-year-old reporter for The Washington Star who had called to ask what the end of the Vietnam War meant to him and the country.

Invited to his office at CBS on West 57th Street in New York, I quizzed America’s top anchorman about his role in the world, his views of the news business and what he said during the seven minutes he actually talked on the 30-minute CBS Evening News broadcast.

“What the newspaper can do better than anybody else is cover news in depth. I don’t mean analytical pieces necessarily or first-person pieces, or subjective journalism. I mean just get out and get the facts.”

To anyone who was serious about news in those days, Cronkite, of course, loomed as the giant—the man who as much or more than his sainted predecessor—Edward R. Murrow—kept the flame of true reporting alive.

What was most impressive about Cronkite was his clear-eyed assessment of the news business he so cherished. He understood the burden of being the most trusted man in America.

Sometimes, he told me, it meant astronauts told him top-secret facts that were supposed to remain classified and he had to decide whether to protect them or reveal the nuggets they had given him. He developed a rule of thumb: If two reporters knew, it was no secret.

Much of what he said, especially about newspapers, rings even truer today, even though he was considering all this before cellphones, before the Internet, before cable news.

My thanks to Faye Haskins of the Martin Luther King Library in Washington, D.C., who retrieved the interview published April 22, 1975, from the library clips of now-defunct Washington Star.

Here are some of the highlights of that interview.

Allan Dodds Frank: Do you think that television could have changed the course of the war in Indochina if it had been reported differently?

Walter Cronkite: Well, if it had not reported the war, perhaps. If it had failed to do its job, it might have had an effect on the war in Indochina. The fact that the American people saw the horror of war, night after night, lived the frustration of our policy in Vietnam through visual representation of what was happening out there, night after night, must have had an effect. I don’t see how it could have failed to. That was what upset the administrations of both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon so much, was that the public was let in on the secret of what war is really like and what we were doing out there. It was impossible for them to carry on a foreign military policy behind the curtain of remoteness which wars in the past permitted.

Certainly that curtain isn’t as opaque as it once was for the CIA either. What’s your reaction to William Colby’s briefing newsmen on the submarine story and then urging them not to use the material? (Director of Central Intelligence William Colby had briefed a select group of reporters about the operations of the Glomar Explorer, a ship built by Howard Hughes’ company that had allegedly had fumbled a secret effort to recover a sunken Soviet submarine.)

That’s a very peculiar story. It seems rather clear to me that one of two things happened there—and both of them involved a kind of politics. Either he had some reason to want to get the story out or if he was concerned about it not getting out, there must have been an internal political reason for it, more than a real security reason. He just wouldn’t have revealed the facts that he did to members of the press.