Walter Cronkite Playboy Interview

In commenting on the demise of Life interviews last autumn, former chief editorial writer John K. Jessup remarked, "Except maybe for Walter Cronkite, there is no more focal point of national information cutting across these special interests, no cracker barrel, no forum, no well." Certainly, if God had set out to create a prototypical middle American, He could have done little better than limn the image of the sad-eyed 56-year-old man—at his CBS anchor desk in New York—whose military-drum-roll voice, sending modulator needles flickering toward the bass registers, has become part of our collective consciousness. Time interviews has described Cronkite as "the single most convincing and authoritative figure in television news," and a survey conducted by Oliver Quayle and Company to measure trust in prominent figures showed Cronkite leading everyone—including Presidential candidates Richard Nixon, Edmund Muskie, Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern.

But while Cronkite is regarded by the public as a fatherly, sympathetic figure, he has a rather more volatile reputation among his colleagues in the broadcast industry, where he's known as a tough, jealous and outspoken guardian of newsmen's rights. When Vice President Agnew made his now-famous speech in Des Moines in 1969, sneering at TV news commentators as "a tiny, enclosed fraternity of privileged men elected by no one and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by Government," Cronkite was among the first broadcasters to join the battle. Agnew's speech, he charged, was "a clear effort at intimidation." In May 1971, while most network news executives were taking refuge in corporate anonymity, Cronkite lashed out at the Nixon Administration for committing "a crime against the people" by trying to prevent TV from doing its job as the people's observer of the performance of their elected representatives.

This position at the barricades is, in fact, a highly distasteful one for the Missouri-born, Texas-educated dentist's son, who has avowed no greater desire in his 22 years at CBS than to be where the news is. "Punditry doesn't really appeal to me," he once told TV critics in New York. Cronkite joined United Press after his college days at the University of Texas and, when World War II broke out, he became a top U.P. correspondent—filing eyewitness dispatches from the Battle of the North Atlantic in 1942, landing with the invading Allied troops in North Africa in November of that year, taking part in the Normandy beachhead assaults in 1944, dropping into Holland with the 101st Airborne Division and riding with General Patton's Third Army to the rescue of encircled American troops at the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. After the war, Cronkite re-established U.P. bureaus in Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg, and he was chief U.P. correspondent at the Nuremberg trials of Göring, Hess and other Nazis before becoming U.P.'s chief correspondent in Moscow. Returning home in 1948, he broadcast events in Washington for a group of Midwestern radio stations before joining CBS News, where he became managing editor in 1963.

Before and since going to CBS, he has been present at most of the major news events of his time; perhaps his strongest identification in recent years has been with coverage of the United States space program, for which he has received two Emmy awards. He has also been a fixture of CBS' political-convention coverage from its infancy in 1952 through the 1972 campaign—with one important, and humiliating exception. In 1964, CBS pulled Cronkite out of his anchorman's post for the Democratic Convention, substituting Roger Mudd and Robert Trout in an attempt to counter the rating success of NBC's Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. Cronkite's professional pride was deeply hurt, but he accepted the decision without public or private comment—and was back in the driver's seat after TV critics and the public voiced loud displeasure. Never again has he been so cavalierly treated by his network.

Though he has always cherished his old wire-service-bred belief in objectivity, Cronkite has occasionally departed from his impersonal role. Sometimes the departures were unintentional—as when his voice broke with emotion in November 1963 as he announced President Kennedy's assassination, and when he gleefully chortled "Oh, boy!" on witnessing the blast-off of Apollo 11 for the moon in July 1969. Sometimes they were deliberate: In March 1968, after a two-week visit to Vietnam, he concluded several newscasts with ringing statements of his view that the Administration was wrong in its policies there. And on at least one on-the-air occasion, Cronkite got just plain mad. During the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago after seeing a CBS correspondent punched on the convention floor by security officers, he fumed: "If this sort of thing continues, it makes us, in our anger, want to just turn off our cameras and pack up our microphones and our typewriters and get the devil out of this town and leave the Democrats to their agony."

He didn't pack up, of course. He hung in there and saw the story through, as he has ever since his first days as a wire-service reporter. Thoroughness is a Cronkite hallmark—as evidenced in two of last year's most incisive news specials: a three-part series on the controversial U.S. Soviet wheat deal and an in-depth report on the Watergate scandal, both of which he put together after returning from trips with President Nixon's entourage to China and the Soviet Union.

It's likely that Walter Cronkite has talked, on-mike, with more of the world's headline makers than has any other living American—with the possible exception of Henry Kissinger—and many of his interviews have been considered landmarks of broadcast journalism. In September 1963, he inaugurated The CBS Evening News, network TV's first half-hour, five-day-a-week news broadcast, with an exclusive conversation with President Kennedy. Among his other subjects: Egypt's President Anwar El-Sadat, Israel's Premier Golda Meir, Yugoslavia's President Tito, West Germany's Chancellor Willy Brandt, Britain's Prince Philip, and Daniel Ellsberg, the man who released the Pentagon papers. Most recently, Cronkite conducted a series of four interviews with former President Lyndon Johnson, the last taking place just 10 days before Johnson's death in January.

To get a summing up of Cronkite's own feelings about his 40 years in journalism and about the current contretemps between the Government and the press, Playboy assigned Chicago Sun-Times TV critic Ron Powers to interview Cronkite in New York. His report:

"Walter Cronkite is a Walter Mitty in reverse: He is a famous man who has fantasies of being ordinary. His office—a pristine cubbyhole just off the Evening News set at CBS' big broadcast barn on West 57th Street in New York—proves it. There are the obligatory 'serious books' about Presidents and nations, the plastic-lined wastebasket, the three TV sets and the 'Facts on File.' But there is also a large, sentimental oil painting of a sailing boat (boating is Cronkite's favorite recreation), a box of chocolates and a cardboard-cutout statue of Apollo spacemen, a grade-schooler's gift that Cronkite keeps as a souvenir.

"He never loosened his necktie as we talked, but he propped his feet up on his desk and alternately clasped his hands behind his heard and fiddled with his stretch socks. At one point he interrupted the interview to take a phone call from some dignitary; the one snatch of conversation I heard was, 'This is between you and me and the fence post....' He coughed frequently—blaming it on a cold—and his voice in conversation was surprisingly low, as though he were trying to protect the throat that had recently undergone surgery for removal of a benign tumor. (He insisted he was fine now.) His eyes, so penetrating on the screen, seem pale and sensitive in person. He has the old-time journalist's knack of forming his thoughts into cogent, parsable sentences as he speaks, and he displayed a gift for the lyric phrase when talking of his reveries at the helm of his boat or of memories of childhood days in Texas.

"I frequently sensed a mild, resigned puzzlement that the life of a superstar had come to him. He was unfailingly courteous with me, but on the topic that was obviously foremost in his mind—current Government ploys to muffle newsmen in the pursuit of their work—he was neither mild nor resigned. He was visibly steamed, in fact, when we discussed the subject, which I broached in my first question."

I don't know what happened inside the Administration. I don't know at what point its members decided that it would be wise to attempt to bring down the press's credibility in an attempt to raise their own. But I think that's what has happened. It's sort of like that U tube we used to see in physics class that shows the countereffects of pressure: When you put pressure on one side and the level goes down, the level of the water on the other side has to rise. Extending that theory, if you could lower the credibility of the press, you could raise the credibility of the politicians. That must be the underlying theory in their attack.


PLAYBOY: Who, besides the President, are the men involved in this attack?
CRONKITE: I'd include almost everybody on the White House staff. You've got Herb Klein and Ron Ziegler to be considered in there. You've also got the advisors, Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, and the speechwriter, Pat Buchanan. Of course, it's unfair in a way to lump them all together, because I don't know who in that group might be raising a dissenting voice and suggesting that this is not the way to go about handling the press relations of this Administration.

PLAYBOY: Nearly all politicians have left the need to control the press to some degree. Is this Administration simply more sophisticated than its predecessors in the techniques of applying pressure effectively?
CRONKITE: I don't know that they're any more sophisticated, but they're the first ones who have deliberately set out to use those techniques.

PLAYBOY: What has been the chronology of this attack? Was Vice President Agnew's 1969 Des Moines speech—in which he attacked the "tiny, enclosed fraternity of privileged men"—the start of it all?
CRONKITE: I think that was the open declaration in the battle. Before that, it was simply felt that this Administration's antagonism had been about like the antagonism shown by previous Administrations, Democratic as well as Republican—particularly Democratic—toward the press. An adversary relationship, we all agree, is a good thing. But the Agnew attack suddenly became a matter of Administration policy and, more than that, a threat to use Governmental weapons against the press. Then following Agnew's speech, there was a tightening in attitudes on the part of press-relations people in the Government. It was a subtle thing.

PLAYBOY: Not being cooperative with reporters?
CRONKITE: Yes. And clearly displaying a feeling that they felt they were under pressure from the press but that they were going to be protected higher up. They took the hard line.

PLAYBOY: There have been private complaints by news executives of other networks about rather direct applications of this hard line. They say that staff aides of the FCC, and sometimes Administration staff people, upon hearing that a controversial documentary is in the works, will telephone the station managers of affiliate stations and remind them that their license is coming due for renewal in a few months. They raise that reminder in connection with whether the station manager is going to clear the documentary for broadcast or not. Has that happened at CBS?
CRONKITE: I haven't heard anything like that here at CBS, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

PLAYBOY: In December of last year, Clay T. Whitehead, who is President Nixon's communications advisor, announced to a journalism fraternity in Indianapolis that a bill was in the works that would place a local station's license in jeopardy if the station couldn't "demonstrate meaningful service to the community." Whitehead said "the community-accountability standard will have special meaning for all network affiliates. They should be held accountable to their local audiences for the 61 percent of their schedules that are network programs." Whitehead used the words bias and balance in defining this accountability. What do you think is behind such a requirement?
CRONKITE: I think the Administration would like to deflate, if possible, the power of the network news programs. But I don't know how in the world local station owners could do that. I think it's impossible. On the basis of what knowledge are they going to edit locally what we broadcast nationally? They don't have the sources of information available at their finger tips, as we do. Are they going to challenge a statement made by a network news correspondent in Saigon? How are they going to do that? Are they simply going to decide it doesn't sound right to them? Or it doesn't sound fair to them? I think this is what Mr. Whitehead would like to impose.

PLAYBOY: Why?
CRONKITE: This Administration clearly feels that its strength is out in the country, in the smaller communities, the land of the great silent American, as they would have it. The networks, this thinking goes, are more "liberal" in their outlook than the individual stations. I think they might be fooled in that assumption if they began to tamper with the flow of news. But the other part of Whitehead's proposition was the carrot dangling at the end of the stick: an increase in the license term to five years, instead of the present three. This would mean vast savings in legal fees for the station owner. The bill would also assure the owner that if anyone challenged his license, it would be up to the challenger to present proof that the station hadn't performed its function, rather than the station owner's responsibility, as now defined by law, to prove he'd done a good job. And that, obviously, is very appealing—and rather insidious as a temptation to "cooperate" with the Government. But I think most station owners know there's no practical way they can exercise any real judgment over network programming, either entertainment or news.

PLAYBOY: They could decide to cancel the network feed.
CRONKITE: Yes, they certainly could. I would assume that that's the intent of the Whitehead proposal, in its ultimate: If the networks don't shape up by reflecting community attitudes, then the only recourse of the local station is to cancel them. Which means that you would be frozen in the establishment attitude of each individual community. If network news didn't coincide precisely with the view at the local level, off the air we'd go. If enough local stations did that, you wouldn't have network news any longer. But I don't think that's likely to happen.

PLAYBOY: Wouldn't it be possible for local-station anchormen to use the same sources of information that you have at the network level and to give their own national newscasts?
CRONKITE: Certainly. They can use the A.P. and the U.P.I., just as we do. But the great bulk of our reporting is with our own network correspondents, our own film crews around the world. I don't know who would supply the local stations with film. There have been attempts at syndicated news-film services that haven't been successful. I think it would be fine to have a television news association similar to the A.P. or the U.P.I., an association in which you would have a staff of foreign correspondents and foreign film crews. But it's a very expensive proposition, and it would cost the local stations a great deal more than the present system of taking network news, which is subsidized by the network.

PLAYBOY: You had lunch with Mr. Whitehead recently. Did you raise these arguments with him?
CRONKITE: Yes, it was a diplomats' day; we had a "frank and open discussion." And, as the diplomats say privately, it didn't come to anything. We had, I must say, a quite pleasant lunch, but we have a fundamental disagreement on these matters.

PLAYBOY: What's the nature of your disagreement?
CRONKITE: Well, it gets down to a couple of things. First, Mr. Whitehead suggests that he's not really trying to get at network news; that's not the purpose of the license-renewal bill. If that wasn't the intent, I asked him, why did he make that speech to a journalism fraternity? And he said. "Well, it just seemed like a good forum at the time." I found that a little disingenuous. Then, secondly, he maintains that the Administration feels network news must exercise a greater degree of 'professional responsibility." I really couldn't get a definition from him of just what that "professional responsibility" is. I'd have a hard time defining professional responsibility myself. But my hackles rise when I hear it suggested that we're not responsible. We in broadcast news have ethics we defend and maintain as strongly as a doctor or a lawyer does; in fact, a lot more strongly than some doctors and lawyers I know.

PLAYBOY: Doctors and lawyers have rather well-defined codes of professional standards, but journalists don't. Do you think they should?
CRONKITE: I don't really see that they need to be imposed, and I see some dangers in it. Freedom if press and speech seems to imply that anybody can write or speak out, whether he's literate or not. Erecting standards would also suggest that you're going to legislate against the underground press, and I think that would be a mistake. If you're going to accept journalists only if they conform to some establishment norm, you won't have the new blood and free flow of new ideas that are absolutely essential to a vital press. I don't know that Tom Paine could have passed a journalism-review test.

PLAYBOY: One standard that Government already confers on broadcasters is the so-called fairness doctrine, which requires that both sides of controversial issues be presented. You have said you favor its elimination because it imposes artificial and arbitrary standards of balance and objectivity.
CRONKITE: Yes. I think the only way to free radio and television news broadcasting from the constant danger of Government censorship is to free it from any form of Government control. The only way to do that is to limit the licensing practice to a technical matter of assignment of channels.

PLAYBOY: Whitehead agrees with you on this. But he cites three "harsh realities" that he says make it impossible to eliminate the fairness doctrine at this time. The first is "a scarcity of broadcasting outlets," which he feels limits the range of viewpoints expressed on the air.
CRONKITE: I think that's false. There are certainly a limited number of bands on the open-broadcast spectrum, but we've got cable TV, which provides a multitude of outlets, coming along now. And even over the airwaves, how many outlets do you need to have enough? In almost every community today, the number of television stations is limited solely by economic viability. So where is this monopoly they keep talking about? It doesn't exist. You've got more television networks serving out news than you've got wire services.

PLAYBOY: Whitehead's second argument is that a great deal of economic and social power is concentrated in the networks. CBS, for example, does research and development in military and space technology, owns two publishing houses and has phonograph-record, record-club and film-communications divisions.
CRONKITE: That's right. We're big. And we're powerful enough to thumb our nose at threats and intimidation from Government. I hope it stays that way.

PLAYBOY: But are you powerful enough to broadcast in your own interest, as opposed to the public interest?
CRONKITE: That danger probably exists. I couldn't deny it. But there are an awful lot of journalists who wouldn't work for networks if they did that. That's the first line of defense. The second line of defense, which I admit is a matter of trust, is that none of the network managements is as venal as that. At least they haven't shown that side to me. I've been here for 22 years and I just don't think that's likely.

PLAYBOY: Whitehead again: "There is a tendency for broadcasters and the networks to be self-indulgent and myopic in viewing the First Amendment as protecting only their rights as speakers. They forget that its primary purpose is to assure a free flow and wide range of information to the public." Comment?
CRONKITE: That's absolutely what we ought to be doing. But that's not just what we're supposed to be doing; that's what we are doing.

PLAYBOY: Do you think the local-station license-renewal bill will succeed?
CRONKITE: I have a feeling that it won't simply because I believe that there are enough Congressmen today who are alert to the dangers to our free speech and free press that they would go very slow on anything of this kind. I think that this awareness is increasing in the country. Now, I'm afraid that we in the news media aren't popular with politicians, with any political party or any political creed. I mean, all we have to do is go back four years to remember the furor that was raised in Congress after the Democratic Convention of 1968 by Democrats who were shocked at the coverage that we dared give their clambake in Chicago. Now it's the Republicans in power.

PLAYBOY: You say you believe that Congress will be alert to the dangers posed to free speech, yet you say the news media aren't popular with politicians. If that's true, wouldn't Congress be likely to vote in favor of restrictive legislation?
CRONKITE: No. I don't think so. I don't think you have to equate popularity or unpopularity with rational consideration of a given issue. I think a lot of Congressmen will vote to support an institution they have disagreements with if the issues involved are important enough to transcend their own personal bias, as I think the issues in this bill clearly are. Those in command are never going to appreciate the press. It's fundamental that they shouldn't. When they do, we'd better look to our profession to find out what's wrong.

PLAYBOY: Do you think what some editorial writers have called the "chilling effect" of the Whitehead bill may have been achieved simply by its being brandished as a potential weapon?
CRONKITE: There is a chill right now on newspapers, and on broadcast news in particular. We feel it to a certain extent here at the network level, where we have the greatest strength. That's why they're after us first.

PLAYBOY: What form does this pressure take?
CRONKITE: We feel it on us with each item we report: that it's going to be questioned by the Administration, and in the higher echelons of the network, and among our affiliates. We may be called upon to explain an item, why we used it, why we chose that particular wording. This is a shadow and a threat that constantly hangs over us.

PLAYBOY: Does that threat influence the content of the news?
CRONKITE: I don't think so. It's like a cold draft coming through the door, but I think we're kind of bundling up and putting on our mittens and continuing to do our job. I don't know of any story that hasn't been carried on the CBS Evening News because of a chilling effect, but I don't know that that can go on forever.

PLAYBOY: Besides the Whitehead bill, there have been other recent assaults on the press. Four reporters have been sent to jail for refusing to hand over confidential information to the courts; a fifth—Jack Anderson's legman Les Whitten—was handcuffed and his notes were impounded. And a Nixon-appointed Corporation for Public Broadcasting has removed virtually all news and public-affairs programming from public-TV's 1973 schedule. Do you believe these incidents are all part of an orchestrated attack on freedom of the press?
CRONKITE: Yes, I do. I have no doubt at all that they amount to a very serious assault. This Administration has tried to bring, and may have succeeded in bringing, the press to heel. It has tried to suggest in every possible way that the press has no privileges in this society, that, indeed, if anything, the press should be put under much closer scrutiny by society as a whole. And this, I think, is a dangerous philosophy. This campaign against press credibility, to divide the nation from the press, is continuing—and is being stepped up, as a matter of fact. I'm thinking of Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz's remark in late February, when he announced that the cost-of-food index had risen in January by the greatest percentage in 20 or 25 years—and then said. "Of course, the press is going to misinterpret this." That was quite a prejudgement, it seems to me. How do you misinterpret the fact that food prices have gone up by the greatest percentage in 20 or 25 years? Butz figures that food prices are going to be nasty and difficult for the Administration to deal with, so let's put the blame somewhere else again.

PLAYBOY: Insofar as television is bearing the brunt of this attack, do you feel that CBS is the primary target—that the Administration is still vindictive about The Selling of the Pentagon and your own news reports last summer on the Watergate affair and the Soviet wheat deal?
CRONKITE: I like to think that we've been in the forefront of the reporting and therefore in the forefront when the flak starts to fly. That doesn't alarm me. I'm not alarmed for CBS. I'm alarmed for the entire country.

PLAYBOY: News analysis on all the networks has dropped off since the Administration's attacks began. There are fewer "instant analyses" of Presidential addresses, for example.
CRONKITE: I'm not sure I agree with you. I think that we at CBS bend over backward to be sure that we get an analysis on after every major address. Even when commercial considerations might have dictated going immediately from the address to the next program, we've cut into the top of that program in order to get a few licks in.

PLAYBOY: But are these licks as tough as they used to be?
CRONKITE: I don't know. I guess I have to be candid and say that it seems to me that on occasion our guys have pulled their punches. But I've talked with them about it—not officially, because that's not part of my function—and I get the impression that they don't feel they have. But they do feel threatened. This question of "instant analysis," though, is one of the major phonies of the whole anti-network, anti-press campaign. As any newspaper-man knows, it's rare that the press doesn't have a major Presidential speech several hours in advance. The newspapers must get it set in type, the editorial writers must have a shot at it for the next day's paper. So there's nothing instant about analysis. The network analysts have longer than the print press to study a speech, in fact, because they don't deliver their analysis until after it's given.

PLAYBOY: What about the "instant analysis" that Government spokesmen gave to The Selling of the Pentagon? Do you feel some of that criticism—for editorial bias and unfair editing—was justified?
CRONKITE: I think some of it was justified. I'm not a great defender of some of the editorial techniques used in The Selling of the Pentagon. I'm talking partly of rearranging the sequence of a military officer's conversation so that his remarks were taken out of context. I also think there was some emphasis on some aspects of Pentagon public relations that was kind of a bum rap. I think the firepower display and the touring exhibits are perfectly acceptable as Pentagon PR. I think the Pentagon ought to be showing the public what it's got and what we're buying for our money. How else is the public going to know? But the Government was nitpicking in an effort to destroy the general theme and the impression given by The Selling of the Pentagon, which was fully justified.

PLAYBOY: What was that general theme?
CRONKITE: The exposing of a great propaganda organization that has been developed not primarily to inform the public but to keep it sold on a big military establishment.

PLAYBOY: Can you think of subsequent documentaries that have been as tough and crusading as that one? Many feel it was the last of its kind. And it was broadcast back in 1971.
CRONKITE: I don't think the documentaries are less tough. We just don't have as many of them on as we used to, on any of the networks. I think this is a function partly of having kind of worn out the market for them, temporarily. What we have instead now is the Sixty Minutes format, the Sunday-interviews format. And I don't believe that anybody can say that that is soft. It's damn tough stuff.

PLAYBOY: Do you think that the public's apparent declining interest in documentaries has anything to do with the Administration's success in discrediting the press? Were you surprised, for example, at the low level of outrage following the Watergate exposé?
CRONKITE: I certainly was, very much so. I tie it to the fact that the people say, well, it's just another campaign-year press attack against Nixon.

PLAYBOY: Do you think the public really cares about freedom of the press any more? Or even about its own freedom of speech or assembly?
CRONKITE: I think people care in the abstract. But they don't understand the specifics. We did a poll on the Bill of Rights at CBS a couple of years ago. We asked people such specific questions as, "As long as there appears to be no danger of violence, do you think any group, no matter how extreme, should be allowed to organize protests against the Government?" Something like 76 percent of the people said no, they don't have that right. But the same people support the constitutional guarantee of freedom of assembly. So they believe in the abstract but not in the specific. And this is our problem.

PLAYBOY: Implicit in the Administration's attempts to force the networks to "balance" the news is a conviction that most newscasters are biased against conservatism. Is there some truth in the view that television newsmen tend to be left of center?
CRONKITE: Well, certainly liberal, and possibly left of center as well. I would have to accept that.

PLAYBOY: What's the distinction between those two terms?
CRONKITE: I think the distinction is both clear and important. I think that being a liberal, in the true sense, is being nondoctrinaire, nondogmatic, noncommitted to a cause—but examining each case on its merits. Being left of center is another thing; it's a political position. I think most newspapermen by definition have to be liberal; if they're not liberal, by my definition of it, then they can hardly be good newspapermen. If they're preordained dogmatists for a cause, then they can't be very good journalists; that is, if they carry it into their journalism.


As far as the leftist thing is concerned, that I think is something that comes from the nature of a journalist's work. Most newsmen have spent some time covering the seamier side of human endeavor; they cover police stations and courts and the infighting in politics. And I think they come to feel very little allegiance to the established order. I think they're inclined to side with humanity rather than with authority and institutions. And this sort of pushes them to the left. But I don't think there are many who are far left. I think a little left of center probably is correct.

PLAYBOY: Some critics believe that this left-of-center tendency produces a kind of conventional wisdom for liberals—a point of view that's common to most newsmen. During last summer's convention coverage, for example, George McGovern was repeatedly characterized as a likable but conniving bumbler and President Nixon as an unlovable but efficient manager running a closed shop. According to Richard Dougherty, Senator McGovern's press secretary during the 1972 campaign, the press never rests until it has found a convenient tag. Then, unconsciously, it edits its coverage to fit this preconception. Is this a legitimate charge?
CRONKITE: God, it worries me more than almost any other single factor. It's a habit that I justify to myself because of the time element. You quickly label a man as a leftist or a conservative or something, because every time you mention him, it's almost impossible to explain precisely where he stands on various issues. But labeling disturbs me at every level of our society. We all have a tendency to do it.

PLAYBOY: Doesn't the fact that the same labels tend to be applied to the same people by all the networks—as well as by the print media—imply that there's a bit too much editorial camp-following in the news business?
CRONKITE: Don't forget that in political campaigns those who cover a candidate are all living and working together in the greatest intimacy. I mean, there's a lot of cross-fertilization, and these reporters become kind of a touchstone for the rest of the press. That's inevitable, I suppose. But the idea that there's some elitist liberal Eastern establishment policy line is absolutely mad.

PLAYBOY: To the extent that there is at least a tendency to group-think, what do you think the effect of it is?
CRONKITE: To the extent that there is an effect. I think it's to be deplored. But I don't know that there's anything you can do about it. We're perhaps all conditioned by similar backgrounds, similar experiences. And you'll find. I think, that if we do, indeed, react in a knee-jerk fashion to news stimuli, so do people in every other business.

PLAYBOY: Isn't that the essence of Vice President Agnew's charge—that newsmen are conditioned by similar backgrounds and experiences?
CRONKITE: Again, he's thinking of the elitist Eastern establishment as our common background and experience. I'm thinking about covering the police station in Louisiana in Howard K. Smith's case or North Carolina in David Brinkley's case. That's the kind of experience I'm talking about—experience of America, experience with the people, experience with the burgeoning and overburdening bureaucracy, experience with those who have a tough shake in life. That's the experience I'm talking about.

PLAYBOY: How do you feel about advocacy journalism—the kind of reporting that puts the sort of experience you mention in the service of a newsman's own personal convictions? Is it possible that there isn't enough of this—rather than too much, as Agnew claims--in the media?
CRONKITE: I think that in seeking truth you have to get both sides of a story. In fact, I don't merely think, I insist that we present both sides of a story. It's perfectly all right to have first-person journalism; I'm all for muckraking journalism; I'm all for the sidebar, the eyewitness story, the impression piece. But the basic function of the press has to be the presentation of all the facts on which the story is based. There are no pros and cons as far as the press is concerned. There shouldn't be. There are only the facts. Advocacy is all right in special columns. But how the hell are you going to give people the basis on which to advocate something if you don't present the facts to them? If you go only for advocacy journalism, you're really assuming unto yourself a privilege that was never intended anywhere in the definition of a free press.

PLAYBOY: In reporting an official statement that a newsman knows to be patently untrue, do you think that in the interest of presenting both sides of a story, he should feel an obligation to report also that it's a lie?
CRONKITE: I think you're probably obligated to report it—but you're also obligated to check the records first.

PLAYBOY: Can you think of a story in which a man who's been quoted has been shown by independent checking to be untruthful?
CRONKITE: Yes, that happens quite frequently. For example, there's a Pentagon announcement about the purchase of a new weapons system that's going to cost so much, and we point out that development costs have already run a lot more than that. This is a routine part of reporting.

PLAYBOY: The job of corroborating the facts in a story can be complicated by a newsman's closeness with his source. Jack Anderson and others say that most newsmen in Washington are so dependent on high-level sources, so impressed with being able to associate with the mighty, that they become their unwitting allies. Is this a fair appraisal of the Washington press corps?
CRONKITE: I think it's a serious problem, and not just for the Washington press corps. It's a serious problem for the country-court reporter, the police reporter in Sioux City or anywhere else. How close do you get to your sources? It's a hard decision. In order to protect your objectivity, you can turn your back on them socially; but by so doing, you can also cut yourself off from inside information.

PLAYBOY: Anderson insists that sources tell him things because they're afraid not to.
CRONKITE: Well, I think that's right. But I don't approve of everything Anderson does and everything he prints. He often has inadequate evidence. I think he takes the minor episodes and blows them into what appear to be major scandals. On the other hand, he's the one guy who's doing a consistent job of investigative journalism, at least on a daily basis in Washington. And I do agree with him that there are many reporters in Washington who deliberately seek social favors, to the considerable detriment of their reporting. But there are also a lot of lazy reporters who aren't high enough on the social scale, the impact scale, to get the big invitations. They simply find it's a lot easier to take the handouts and rewrite them than it is to do a day's work.

PLAYBOY: Another problem in Washington news coverage seems to handicap broadcast reporters more than the print press. The networks don't seem willing to spend the money for specialist reporters, and their general newsmen are shunted from story to story, never staying on one for a long time. Doesn't that handicap you?
CRONKITE: Yes, there's no question about it. It's part of our basic problem in network news, something the public should be aware of. The problem is lack of personnel. The reporters we have in the field are the best in the business, I think; most of them are graduates of newspapers and news services, and they are superb. But we don't have enough of them, and we're never going to—simply because we don't have the outlet for them. I mean, we may have room on the Evening News for maybe three or four reports oncamera and a total of 10, 12 or 15 other items that are going to run 15 to 20 seconds each. It's pretty hard in those circumstances to economically justify maintaining a staff equivalent to that of the A.P. or U.P.I.


In television, we can introduce the public to the people who make the news. We can introduce them to the places where the news is made. And we can give them a bulletin service. In those three particulars, we can beat any other news medium. But for the in-depth reporting that's required for an individual to have a reasonably complete knowledge of his world on any given day—of the city and county and state—we can't touch it.

PLAYBOY: There is a famous story that the CBS news director once pasted up your transcript of the Evening News onto a dummy of The New York Times, and it covered less than the eight columns of the front page.
CRONKITE: Yes. The number of words spoken in a half-hour evening-news broadcast—words spoken by interviewees, interviewers, me, everybody—came out to be the same number of words as occupy two thirds of the front page of the standard newspaper. We are a front-page service. We don't have time to deal with the back pages at all.

PLAYBOY: In recent years, the television press has been criticized not merely for the superficiality with which it reports the news but for actually creating or transforming news events—riots, for example. Do you think that's a valid criticism?
CRONKITE: There's a very serious problem with that. Demonstrations have always been staged for the purpose of attracting attention. There's no purpose for a demonstration except to get public attention and—it's hoped—sympathy. Certainly, the demonstrators are going to be where the cameras are. Certainly, they're going to let us know in advance that the demonstration will take place. Certainly, they're hoping for live coverage. Certainly, if you have live coverage, it's going to be a more lively demonstration than if you don't have live coverage. But I don't think that we're responsible for the events. We unquestionably have an influence on them; but so does a newspaper reporter's or a still photographer's presence.

PLAYBOY: But TV camera crews are very conspicuous, whereas a newspaperman can be lost in the crowd.
CRONKITE: Lights are the biggest problem. And I guess for that reason the Chicago convention may have been the end of lighted demonstration coverage, because lights attract demonstrators like moths to a flame.

PLAYBOY: Television has been assailed at least as much for its coverage of the Vietnam war as for that of demonstrations against it here at home. Do you think we found out from television—soon enough, at least—what was really going on in Vietnam? In the early war years, network news executives seemed to subscribe to the conventional assumption that American generals and politicians were simply doing what had to be done to preserve freedom, and the war was covered accordingly. It wasn't until long afterward--1968 and later—that TV newsmen such as yourself began to express doubts about the justness of America's involvement in Indochina. Wasn't this lag in critical reporting one of broadcast news's great failures?
CRONKITE: I'm not sure I can give an entirely satisfactory answer. The coverage changed. Yes. It changed. It went through several periods. Let's go back to when American troops were first committed over there in sizable, easily identified units, as opposed to two or three American advisors working with the Vietnamese troops. Up to '65. as our involvement deepened, we were increasing our coverage. We were doing stories on advisors out in the field, and the dangers to them, and the occasional death. But it wasn't a daily flow of combat film. For one thing, we weren't interested in endangering our correspondents to do that kind of thing. But in '65, when we began committing total U.S. units, it was another story. Here were American boys fighting in a war. The news story became these boys at war. If you're going to do that honestly, you're going to have to go up where the blood is flowing. That's where the story is; the story's not back in the base camp. We were taking the war into the homes of America—and that's where it belonged. In a war situation, every American ought to suffer as much as the guy on the front lines. We ought to see this. We ought to be forced to see it.

PLAYBOY: But Vietnam wasn't just a visual story. It was a complex story of ideas, of political assumptions, of men's attitudes. To convey an understanding of the war on this level necessitated sophisticated reporting. How high was the journalistic quality of the TV newsmen who went over there in the early years? How about those guys who hung around the press headquarters in Saigon for the so-called "five-o'clock follies"—those no-comment news conferences? How long did it take them to realize they had to stop taking handouts and find out what was really going on?
CRONKITE: I don't think there was any lag at all. As a matter of fact, I was surprised—and a little annoyed—at reporters during my '65 visit over there. I had gone over believing in what we were doing: I came back concerned because I saw a build-up of forces far greater than our leaders ever told us we were likely to commit. That's when my disillusion began. But at first, when I arrived, as I say, I was annoyed at the skepticism of the reporters at the press conferences in Saigon. They were accepting nothing at the five-o'clock follies. More than seeking information, they were indulging in what I considered self-centered bearbaiting, pleasing their own egos, showing how much they knew. And I was a little offended. I thought they shouldn't betray their extreme youthfulness. Maybe, I thought, they were a little wet behind the ears. I wondered why they didn't just do their jobs, ask the questions and then go on and get the story.

PLAYBOY: Didn't the military have a strong hand over there in directing the flow of news, deciding where a man could go with his camera?
CRONKITE: Yes, they did, but they always do in a war situation. And I think that the press ended up getting the truth anyway—and telling it.

PLAYBOY: Well, it wasn't a reporter who uncovered My Lai but a disgruntled soldier, Ronald Ridenhour, who tried for months to peddle his story to the press before The New York Times accepted it. There was great resistance on the part of the press to accept his version.
CRONKITE: That could very well be, because this sort of story comes to us quite frequently. There are a lot of things that, if we had the manpower and the time and so forth, we could investigate: the letters that come to us about conditions at mental institutions, or in prisons, or the welfare situation, that undoubtedly are true. But as for My Lai, had it come to us first, I don't know precisely how we would have handled it, but I can see where we would have had considerable difficulty in handling it. Here was one soldier's charge; we couldn't have just gone on the air with it. We would have had to go out and spend a tremendous amount of effort to check the thing out. A really overwhelming amount of effort. And we just haven't got the resources to do it.


I think that the attitude of a managing editor, faced with that tip, might very well have been, "God, that sort of thing goes on in all wars. It's probably not as bad as this soldier says it was. It's probably somewhere between that and not having happened at all. As a matter of fact, we've already reported several like that—obviously not as bad as that, but charges that civilians had been shot, and so forth." And just dismissed this story for that reason. My Lai, fortunately, was finally uncovered, to the very great credit of Seymour Hersh.

PLAYBOY: You were quoted as saying that if Daniel Ellsberg had brought the Pentagon papers to CBS, you wouldn't have run that story either.
CRONKITE: I didn't say that. Somebody else said it, I think. But I'm not sure that it's quite true. I think if he had brought them here, we would have gone to a newspaper and said, "Let's work together on this. Let us summarize them and you present the full text." But the Pentagon papers are a tough one. I don't know that if I were the editor of a newspaper, I would assign a reporter to try to get hold of the secret reports of the Pentagon. In fact, I'm pretty confident I wouldn't.

PLAYBOY: Why not?
CRONKITE: Because I think that going in from the outside to get hold of secret papers is legally indefensible. I don't think the press has a right to steal papers.

PLAYBOY: Isn't it just as legally indefensible to print papers stolen by someone else?
CRONKITE: No. Once they've come out of the secret files and are in circulation in any way whatsoever, I'd say then that the public is entitled to know whatever anybody else knows. But I don't think an individual is entitled to know what is inside secret files while they're still secret. Please understand, however, that I'm for complete declassification of secret papers. Overclassification is one of the areas in which the Federal Government is terribly culpable. But I think we have to get at it through legal means.


I don't believe we have any right to violate the law. I'm a real old-fashioned guy in that sense: I believe in law and order. I don't like the fact that the phrase has become a code word for bigotry and suppression of civil rights and a lot of other things. I don't believe in that for one damned ever-loving minute. But if you take the words for what they really mean, I think law and order are the foundation of our society. And I just don't believe that anybody should take it unto himself to violate the law, no matter what good he thinks can be achieved, because you can extend that right up to lynching. Now, what Ellsberg did is for his conscience to work on. I admire tremendously his courage and bravery and his fortitude in doing what he did. But I would never assign a man to do that for CBS.

PLAYBOY: So a public good came from something you oppose in principle.
CRONKITE: It's not clear yet that Ellsberg violated the law. The trial is still on as we talk today. Ellsberg, after all, was the author of much of this material. He was a participant in it, you know.

PLAYBOY: Whether or not Ellsberg is guilty of a crime, is there never an instance, in your opinion, in which breaking the law could be justifiable? What about civil disobedience as practiced by Martin Luther King?
CRONKITE: Clearly, there may come a time when civil disobedience and protest against what is considered an unjust law might be considered proper. I'm inclined to believe, though, that if I had to stand on absolutes. I'd prefer to stand on the absolute of law and order, even in such a case as that. I think there are means in our society to correct injustice, and I don't think that civil disobedience or sticks and stones provide the way to do it.


I'm glad that things have worked out to speed integration in this country; certainly, for 100 years we damn well did far too little--didn't do anything, in fact. I'm glad we've finally gotten off our behinds and gotten going here in the last couple of decades. We have probably been spurred to some degree by the demonstrations that the great Martin Luther King directed. So you've got to say, well, it works on occasion. But I still think the better way would be to do it within the law.

PLAYBOY: The opinions you've just expressed are stronger than any you've ever delivered on the air about this issue—which seems to reflect your views about the importance of remaining an objective reporter. Yet you departed from that policy when you returned from a visit to Vietnam in 1968 and advocated an early negotiated peace in a series of editorials at the end of your nightly newscast. Are you glad you did it?
CRONKITE: Glad? I'm not sure. In a lot of people's minds, it put me on a side, categorized me in part of the political spectrum. And I think that's unfortunate. It's a question in my mind now, looking back, weighing the long-term disadvantages with the short-term benefits. When I went over there, I didn't know what I was going to report back, actually. I didn't go over to do a hatchet job. I didn't go over to be anti-Vietnam, to be against American policy. I was leaning that way; I had been very disturbed ever since the '65 build-up. I was particularly disturbed over the lack of candor of the Administration with the American public, about the constant misleading statements as to the prospect of victory—the light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel stuff. I thought--and I still think—that was the most heinous part of the whole Vietnam adventure. I had also been disturbed about the vast overkill, about what we were doing to the people of Vietnam.


But even then, I was still living with my old feeling of sympathy for the original commitment, in line with Kennedy's promise that "we shall support any friend to assure the success of liberty." Nobody was kidding himself about the nature of the South Vietnamese regime, but we thought we were trying to create conditions that would promote the growth of democracy, give them a right to self-determination. So I went out in '68 still basically believing in our policy but increasingly disenchanted with what we had actually been doing over there ever since '65. Then, after the Tet offensive, Johnson and Westmoreland and McNamara were saying we had won a great victory--you know, "Now we've got them; this was their last great effort." And it was clearly untrue. That was what broke my back. That's why I felt I finally had to speak out and advocate a negotiated peace.

PLAYBOY: What do you think was the effect of your editorials?
CRONKITE: I think the effect was finally to solidify doubts in a lot of people's minds--to swing some people over to the side of opposition to our continued policy in Vietnam. I must be careful no to be immodest here, but I happen to think it may have had an effect on the Administration itself.

PLAYBOY: On President Johnson?
CRONKITE: Yes, although he denied that to me personally. Not just about my reporting but about everybody else's. In fact, in our last conversation, ten days before his death, he went over that ground again, as he did in almost every conversation. It weighed on him very much, apparently. He talked about the Tet offensive and he said a lot of people were sure it was Tet that really turned him off, and he said it wasn't so and that it wasn't my reports that did it, either.

PLAYBOY: Did Johnson ever confide in you about his feelings on the war? In the course of those last interviews you had with him, did he say anything that contradicted his public statements in office?
CRONKITE: No, never. It was one of the disappointments of the interviews we did. I thought, when he was out of office, that he would let his hair down and say, "Well, there were some points where I think we went wrong; there were some things I did that I wish, looking back on it, I hadn't done." But that never happened, either in personal conversation or in the interviews. And I think that's because he didn't entertain any such thoughts. Our private talks were reasonably personal. I'm sure he thought that they were confidential, and therefore there would have been no reason not to say it if he felt it. He was a loquacious man in person, and I believe these feelings would have flowed if he had felt them.

PLAYBOY: Another about-face for you in '68 occurred at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. It seemed almost a coming-out for you in a lot of human ways. It was as though you had gotten fed up with being above the battle. You saw Dan Rather get punched out on the convention floor and you made a reference to thugs. And then you said you felt bad about having said that.
CRONKITE: Yes, I did.

PLAYBOY: Do you still?
CRONKITE: Yes. I know that outburst kind of makes me more human in the eyes of the public and therefore, perhaps, improves the impression that people may have of me--that I'm not just an automaton sitting there gushing the news each night. But I think that each network ought to have someone who really is above the battle. CBS has 24 minutes of news time every evening. I know I could do 22 minutes of news just as objectively as I'm trying to do it now, and then I could put on another hat and for two minutes I could give a scathing editorial opinion, analysis, commentary, whatever you want to call it. It would be right out of the guts and depths of my soul each day, and it probably would be a pretty good piece. I'd like to think. What was revealed about me in those two minutes wouldn't affect the objectivity with which I conducted myself for the 22 other minutes of that program. But I can't for one minute expect anybody else--except, perhaps, another journalist--to believe that.

PLAYBOY: Some critics have discerned traces of editorializing in other facets of your coverage. During the space flights, for example, you were affectionately referred to as "the other astronaut," and your enthusiasm was obvious.
CRONKITE: Well, I can see why they would come to that conclusion. I don't fault them for coming to it. I was a space booster; I believed in that program. But I don't think that affected my criticizing the program, which I did on many occasions. I thought they should have gone with an extra Mercury flight, for instance. There were a lot of things in Mercury and Gemini and Apollo--in the matter of equipment and delays and some of the usual hardware problems--that I didn't think were handled right. And I talked about that during the space shots. I didn't ever pull those punches. But that in no way dimmed my excitement over man in space. I think it was the most exciting adventure of our time and probably of centuries; probably since the original explorations of the New World. I have no apologies to make for that.


Now, of course, it's fashionable to criticize all the money that was spent--"We should have used it here on earth" and all that sort of thing--but I still don't think that's right. If you could guarantee that the 24 billion dollars would have been spent on our cities instead of on space, then I would be inclined to agree that the money was perhaps not apportioned in the right fashion. But you know it wouldn't have gone to the cities. I think history is finally going to have to make some decisions on this matter. I think that those who are being critical are going to have to eat some words before the whole thing is over, because I think we're going to find that space is terribly valuable to us.

PLAYBOY: In your coverage of President Nixon's trips to China and Russia, did you feel you even had a chance to be objective, or did you feel that you were merely part of an entourage?
CRONKITE: Well, you can't help but feel you're part of an entourage when you're transported, fed, babied by management. But I didn't feel I was part of an ideological entourage. They had my body and I hoped they would deliver it back to the United States intact at the end of the trips; but they didn't buy my brain and soul. The problem in China was that, for one thing, there wasn't a hell of a lot of substance to the trip. The great story in China was clearly the Marco Polo aspect of going in and seeing this country for the first time, with live cameras in the streets of Peking and Shanghai, and that sort of thing. There wasn't any substance we could get hold of; we didn't know what Nixon and Chou En-lai were talking about; we weren't told. So the story was, to me, the President of the United States being there and the pictures of the place. That's what we covered. Yet people said back here we should have had more substance. So then we go to Russia, where the story is all substance. I mean, there was one agreement after another--in a country we had seen a hundred times on television. And people said, "Why didn't we get to see more of the Soviet Union?"

PLAYBOY: On news events such as these, you're not only a correspondent but part of management as well. In fact, your title is managing editor of CBS News. How much editorial responsibility do you have?
CRONKITE: It's about like being managing editor of a newspaper. When I assumed that title, some of my friends in the press were critical--not in their columns but they suggested it was some kind of show-business gimmick, a title that had been lifted from the ancient and honorable print media. But when I pointed out what I did, I think I pretty well convinced them it was a sensible title. I participate in making assignments, in the decisions about what will be covered, future programing plans--what we're going to go after and, ultimately, what goes into the program. And I edit the copy. Every word that's said goes through my hands and is usually touched by my hands in some way. I edit almost every piece, rewrite many of them and originally write some of them.

PLAYBOY: If you were to quit tomorrow----
CRONKITE: There's a great idea.

PLAYBOY: Would the public get a substantially different picture of the news from CBS?
CRONKITE: Not really. I'm not sure, though, that some of the things I eventually hope to accomplish around here would be quite as easily and quickly done by somebody else, because I think I've established a certain degree of credibility with the public and with my employers as to my honesty and integrity. There's a mutual trust there. On that particular score, I may have a value beyond that of the daily broadcaster.

PLAYBOY: Actually, you're not only a network newsman but a TV star. Does that status affect the way you're able to cover a story?
CRONKITE: It's a major handicap. There's an advantage to it, quite obviously, in that I can reach people more easily than a less-well-known newsman could. This works around the world, I find. I get in to see heads of state, usually through their American representatives, ambassadors or what not, just because they've seen television coverage. But, on the other hand, just like the camera that appears at the scene of a riot, when I appear I change the nature of the situation. I can't go to a bar and take in an average conversation, because it changes when I'm there: They're talking to the press.


And the same thing is true even when I meet important people. Yesterday a journalist who was doing an interview with a very important person in Washington told me he thought that his interview subject was arrogant and domineering. Well, I haven't seen either of these characteristics in this man, and I said so. My friend said, "Well, he probably isn't that way with you. With you, he probably feels he's dealing with an equal, or has some fear of your power, and therefore is much more courteous, much more willing to exchange ideas." And I suppose that's true. But I think if I have enough time, I can break down most barriers. I think if I went back to that hypothetical bar for two or three days in a row, I'd find that I was accepted as a fairly regular fellow and the facade would wither away.

PLAYBOY: How do you feel about the personal side of being a television star? Do you like to be recognized, sign autographs and all that?
CRONKITE: Well, the autograph thing is flattering; that's exactly the word for it. But it's exceedingly tiring. It'd be nicer if you could turn it on once every few months, as sort of an ego builder, and then turn it off again. It's not fun to be the center of attention all the time. You know that people's eyes are on you. My wife and I like to dance, and we don't do it very often, but just the other night we were at a big occasion, an opening in New York, and we were Joel Grey's guests. In the early stage of the evening, at the Waldorf, we were dancing; but we suddenly realized, heck, everybody's kind of watching us dance. And that's not fun. I'm not an exhibitionist--at least not quite in that sense. I'd like to be a song-and-dance man; that's my secret ambition, but----

PLAYBOY: Wait a minute. You've always wanted to be a song-and-dance man?
CRONKITE: I've always thought one of the great things in life would be to entertain people with songs and dances and funny sayings. But it's just a fantasy. Another Walter Mitty dream.

PLAYBOY: Has your wife enjoyed the celebrity life?
CRONKITE: I think so, to about the same extent I have. That is, I can't deny it's nice getting a good table in a crowded restaurant without a reservation--a few emoluments of that kind. But I think both of us would have liked a more quiet life.

PLAYBOY: How do you escape? What do you do for privacy and enjoyment?
CRONKITE: Well, I enjoy totally escapist reading: I duck into historical sea stories. I enjoy the C. S. Forester kind of stuff--and there are 10,000 imitators of Horatio Hornblower who kind of keep me going. It's about a simpler period, a romantic period--strong men doing daring deeds, and a rather simplified moral code--and that makes it rather easy to take. I really enjoy solitude and introspection. That's why I like sailing. I like sitting in the cockpit of my boat at dusk and on into the night, gazing at the stars, thinking of the enormity, the universality of it all. I can get lost in reveries in that regard, both in looking forward to a dreamworld and in looking back to the pleasant times of my own life.

PLAYBOY: Tell us about that dreamworld.
CRONKITE: Oh, my dreamworld personally is to just take off on that boat of mine and not have to worry anymore about the affairs of mankind, and about reporting them, and taking the slings and arrows from all sides as we do today, since we can't seem to satisfy anybody. After ten years of it here in this particular spot, it gets tiresome. I'd like to be loved, like everybody else.

PLAYBOY: Do you feel the slings and arrows personally?
CRONKITE: Yes, I do. Most of them aren't directed at me personally, but they disturb me deeply anyway. And the criticism comes from both sides. The conservative press picks up the Administration line and hammers that back at us; and the liberal press snaps at us all the time about the things you've been bringing up, quite justifiably: about space, about civil rights, about our coverage of the war. So my dreams are to not have to fight the battles anymore.


My dreams for the world are the same. I get fearful about what the world is coming to. You know, most people are good; there aren't very many really evil people. But there are an awful lot of selfish ones. And this selfishness permeates society. It keeps us from the beauty of where we could go, the road we could travel. Instead of being always on these detours and bumbling along side roads that take us nowhere, we could be on a smooth highway to such a great world if we could just put these self-interests aside for the greatest good of the greatest number. It applies to the industrialist who puts out a product into which he builds obsolescence, and to the guy up in Harlem who throws his garbage out the third-floor window. It's everybody's fault. I just find it hard to understand how man could come so far, how he can be so damn smart and at the same time be so damn stupid.

PLAYBOY: You're not alone in being discouraged with contemporary society; some writers are beginning to call the age we live in "postconstitutional America." They view with particular alarm such trends as the tendency toward unregulated, unlimited surveillance. What's your opinion?
CRONKITE: I can't decry it enough. I just don't see how we can live that way. It's not America, and it's not what we believe this country stands for. It's so terrible that I'm convinced there's going to be a great revulsion to it. I think we've come as close as we can to living in a kind of chaotic police state--and I say chaotic because it doesn't have any central headquarters; everybody's doing it. We're living in a state where no one can trust his telephone conversations, nor even his personal conversations in a room, in a bar or anywhere else.

PLAYBOY: Have you ever suspected that your phone was tapped?
CRONKITE: Oh, yes. My home phone and the one here at my office. I think anybody in the public eye--even in private business--who believes that his conversations are sacred today is living in a fool's paradise.

PLAYBOY: The Justice Department, in utilizing such tactics as bugging, stop-and-frisk searches, no-knock raids and preventive detention, has claimed these steps are necessary to control crime. Do you agree?
CRONKITE: I think this erosion of due process is reprehensible. Of course, we do have a serious crime problem in this country, there's no doubt about that. We've got to take off our gloves and somehow or other wade into this problem of crime and face quite openly its relationship to the slum living conditions of a large part of our population, and the resultant welfare circumstances in which they live, the resultant slippage in moral standards--that is, honesty, integrity, hard work and all those old fundamentals.

PLAYBOY: The increase of street crime has been blamed by some on Supreme Court decisions that conservatives feel protected the rights of criminals at the expense of their victims. More recently, it's been the liberals who have attacked the Court, particularly since its decisions have begun to be redirected by its Nixon appointees. Where do you think the Supreme Court is headed?
CRONKITE: Reading the past and looking at this Court now, in view of the most recent major decision, the abortion decision, I think it's impossible to predict the course of the Supreme Court. And I think one makes a mistake to do so. I think in our history we've been very lucky in our Supreme Court Justices, even as we have with our Presidents. For different reasons, perhaps, but the system seems to work pretty well. I've been appalled by a couple of recent Supreme Court decisions, but I was appalled by a couple of Warren Court decisions, too.

PLAYBOY: What decisions of the Burger Court have you found appalling?
CRONKITE: Well, primarily the matter of subpoena of newspapermen and their responsibility to reveal sources. I think that was disastrous, absolutely disastrous. But where the Court is going, where it's going to end is anybody's guess. It's a more conservative Court, to judge by its performance so far; but look at some of the people who, after coming on the Court, have taken positions that seemed absolutely antithetical to their past records. Justice Hugo Black was one of the most controversial men to go on the Supreme Court, I suppose. And he turned out to be one of the greats.

PLAYBOY: Isn't the current Court among the most political in American history?
CRONKITE: Well, I suppose that people of liberal persuasion would be inclined to think that, even as people of a conservative persuasion were inclined to think that the Warren Court was a terribly political Court. I'm very hesitant about criticizing the Supreme Court at this point. I think it has every promise of being a fair Court, if it goes down the line. I'd hate to prejudge it at this stage.

PLAYBOY: Are you concerned about backsliding in the enforcement of earlier Court decisions in the area of civil rights?
CRONKITE: Well, yes, though I don't know that it's any more than a swing of the pendulum. But it's to be regretted, because I believe we were making progress. As for busing, though, I've got to be honest about it: That never seemed to me to be the right solution. I think breaking down housing patterns--mixing up the neighborhoods, to use the phrase of some people--is the answer, rather than putting kids in buses for three, four and five hours a day. I don't care whether you're black or white, the neighborhood school is a fundamental concept. Admittedly, I've always believed that you must break down the patterns of segregation and prejudice through schooling; you've got to start with the child. But I think that busing, as hard as it's been to sell to people, is too easy a solution. I think that other solutions--like housing integration and equal employment opportunity--may be tougher, may take longer, may be more expensive, but I think they've got to be better.

PLAYBOY: Would it be fair to describe your position on race relations--and most other issues--as middle of the road?
CRONKITE: I think it probably would. I just don't understand hard-shell, doctrinaire, knee-jerk positions. I don't understand people not seeing both sides, not seeing the justice of other people's causes. I have a very difficult time penetrating what motivates such people. I'm speaking now of the particularly militant left as well as the particularly militant right. But I'm also speaking of people in that great center, whom I sometimes despair of when they accept so glibly the condemnation of other factions within our society--whether it's welfare people or the rich.


There are many people in this silent America who are bitter against the rich. We forget that. You know, from my Midwestern background, I know the Archie Bunkers of Kansas City; they're really basically my own family. I know exactly how they felt about all other walks of society, the lower classes as well as the upper. Unless you were a 32nd-degree Mason living on Benton Boulevard in Kansas City, Missouri, and a white Protestant, there was something a little wrong with you.

PLAYBOY: With that kind of background, where did you get your sense of fairness?
CRONKITE: From my parents. My father was a liberal when he was a young man. Though he's basically kind of set in his ways, as older people are inclined to be, he was terribly upset over the treatment of blacks when we moved to Texas. He went down to teach at the University of Texas Dental School in Houston, and also to practice. And the very first crack out of the box, the first social occasion we went to, we were sitting on the porch of the rich sponsor down there, in a fancy section of town--such a fancy section it didn't have alleys--and we ordered ice cream. In those days, nobody had a freezer, so you ordered it from the drugstore. A young black delivery boy brought it over.


There wasn't any alley, as I say, and he parked his motorcycle out in front of the place and walked up the front walk, across the lawn. And this fellow sat, with rage obviously building in him, and watched him come up the walk. When this young man set his foot on the first step of the porch, this fellow leaped out of his chair and dashed across the porch and smacked him right in the middle of the face. He said, "That'll teach you niggers to walk up to a white man's front door." And my father got up and said, "We're leaving." We almost went back to Kansas City. Growing up in the South, one's attitudes are affected quite seriously by such early experiences.

PLAYBOY: Do any other such experiences come to mind?
CRONKITE: Well, there was another one that also involved ice cream. This time I was the drugstore delivery boy; I did bicycle deliveries and we had a couple of blacks who used motorcycles for more distant orders. They were both great guys. One of them was a particularly close friend of mine--as close as you could be in the environment of Houston at that time. We weren't about to go out together anywhere, but we were good friends at the drugstore and sat out back and pitched pennies and shot crap and a few things like that.


As I say, he was a very nice guy, came from a nice family. His mother was a washerwoman, his father was a yardman, but they had great dignity. He had three or four brothers and sisters. Anyway, one night, as he parked his motorcycle and was walking between two houses to deliver some ice cream to the back door, he was shot by one of the occupants--the one who hadn't ordered the ice cream. He was listed as a Peeping Tom and the murder was considered justified. Incredible. I mean, this guy was no more a Peeping Tom than I was--maybe less so. Of course, if he'd gone to the front of the house, the guy who ordered the ice cream might have shot him. I almost never got over that case.

PLAYBOY: When did you decide to become a journalist?
CRONKITE: About the time I started junior high school. I became the happy victim of childhood Walter Mittyism, and it's never really gone away. The American Boy interviews ran a series of short stories on careers. They were fictionalized versions of what people did in life. And there were only two that really fascinated me at that point. One was mining engineering and the other was journalism. Anyway, I started working on the high school paper in Houston and I found that was what I wanted to do. In fact, that's really all I wanted to do. I didn't want to go to school anymore. But I did. I worked my way through the University of Texas in Austin as a newspaper reporter and did a little radio. Did a lot of other things, too, such as working in a bookie joint for a while.

PLAYBOY: What was your job there?
CRONKITE: Announcer.

PLAYBOY: In a bookie joint?
CRONKITE: On the public-address system. When they hired me, they said, "You sit back here in this room, and as the stuff comes over, you read it out over the P.A. system." Well, I'd never been in a bookie joint before, so I gave them the real Graham MacNamee approach on this, describing the running of the race. A mean character ran the place, a guy named Fox, and he looked like one. He came dashing into the room and said, "What the hell you think you're doing? We don't want entertainment, we just want the facts!"

PLAYBOY: Your first critic.
CRONKITE: Yeah!

PLAYBOY: When you got out of school, according to your bio, you joined United Press and later covered World War Two for them, and among the dispatches you filed was one from the belly of a Flying Fortress during a bombing raid over northern Germany. Under those circumstances, was it good copy?
CRONKITE: Well, it had a dramatic lead. Homer Bigart, who was then a correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, and I were at the same base. We were heading for the bomber command headquarters, outside London, to be debriefed after a long day's raid over Germany. We were both tired and I said, "Homer, I think I've got my lead: "I've just returned from an assignment to hell. A hell at 17,000 feet, a hell of bursting flak and screaming fighter planes.'" I just recited it. I don't know if you knew Homer Bigart, but he stuttered very badly in those days--and he turned to me and put his hand on my arm and said, "Y-y-y-y-y-y-you wouldn't."

PLAYBOY: Did the experience teach you anything about war?
CRONKITE: I didn't need to be taught anything about war. I had already learned about it. But I still didn't understand--and don't understand today--how men can go to war. It's irrational, it's unbelievable. How can people who call themselves civilized ever take up arms against each other? I don't even understand how civilized people can carry guns.

PLAYBOY: Were you under fire as a correspondent?
CRONKITE: Lots. People take a look at my record, you know, and it sounds great. I'm embarrassed when I'm introduced for speeches and somebody takes a CBS handout and reads that part of it, because it makes me sound like some sort of hero: the battle of the North Atlantic, the landing in Africa, the beachhead on D day, dropping with the 101st Airborne, the Battle of the Bulge. Personally, I feel I was an overweening coward in the war. Gee, I was scared to death all the time. I did everything possible to avoid getting into combat. Except the ultimate thing of not doing it. I did it. But the truth is that I did everything only once. It didn't take any great courage to do it once. If you go back and do it a second time--knowing how bad it is--that's courage.

PLAYBOY: After the war, you stayed on in Europe with United Press, finally returning to this country in 1948. Two years later, you joined CBS News in Washington, as a correspondent. Since CBS is a large, competitive organization, how did you manage to rise to your present position there?
CRONKITE: I was just plain old lucky to be in the right place at the right time. But I think that to take advantage of luck, you've got to have some ability to do the job. As far as the ability to work oncamera is concerned, that part of it was an absolute accident. I never trained for it; I'm just lucky to have it. Whatever it is, it seems to work. I was also ambitious as a young man and pushed myself along, not to become president of United Press but because I wanted to be where the story was. So I pushed to get where I could go. And I guess the whole thing just built up into a store of experience, and with experience came a certain amount of knowledge.

PLAYBOY: In the years since you've been reporting the news at CBS, we've seen America's belief in its own rightness and invincibility crumble, its moral sense lost, or at least mislaid. Has it been shattering to you--as a man who believes in the system--to see all this happen?
CRONKITE: No, not shattering. I'm still sitting here and doing my work; I'm not in a mental institution--although maybe some think I should be. But it has eaten at me. Sometimes I think about early retirement, simply to get out of the daily flow of this miserable world we seem to live in. But shattering? I have to say no. I think at times, though, that maybe I'm not as sensitive as I ought to be, that I ought to have gone nuts by now, covering all of this and seeing it firsthand. I sometimes wonder if maybe I'm not really a very deep thinker or a deeply emotional individual.

PLAYBOY: Are you serious about early retirement?
CRONKITE: Oh, I don't suppose it'll happen, at least not in the foreseeable future. I've just negotiated a rather lengthy extension of my contract.

PLAYBOY: So you wouldn't have accepted that Democratic Vice-Presidential offer we heard about, had it been made by George McGovern.
CRONKITE: No, I don't think so. Well, I don't know. I don't know what I would do with a political opportunity if it actually came down the pike.

PLAYBOY: Would you really have considered it?
CRONKITE: Well, if it were seriously tendered--and this is all so hypothetical, because it never was, you know, let's be perfectly honest about it. As I reconstructed it, the McGovern people were sitting around in a meeting and somebody simply said, "Look, I just saw a poll that said Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America, what about him?" And I think that's just about as far as it went. Nobody said that there were loud guffaws, but it would have gotten back to me directly if they had gotten any more serious than that. If they had gone any further with it, though, they would have uncovered the fact that I'm not a registered Democrat. I'm not a registered anything. I'm a total independent.

PLAYBOY: Do you have any other skeletons in your closet?
CRONKITE: Well, I'm just not going to talk about them!

PLAYBOY: Have you ever seen yourself as a statesman?
CRONKITE: Well, I must admit I've seen myself as a Senator. I see it in a very romantic way, jousting for justice and that sort of thing, on the floor of the Senate. But I don't know how effective I'd be in the political infighting. And I think we forget how hard public servants work. When you see them in action in Washington, you appreciate that they work awfully hard, long and tough hours. It must also be the most frustrating job in the world, spinning wheels as they do so much of the time. I really wouldn't want to undertake all of that. Far less would I ever want to be President. Even if I were temperamentally suited for the job, which I'm not, I wouldn't regard myself as qualified--except perhaps by good intentions.

PLAYBOY: Do you think Nixon is qualified for the job--temperamentally or professionally?
CRONKITE: Well, whether or not I agree with some of the things he's done as President, there's no question that he's had plenty of experience to qualify him for the job. As for his temperament, I think it's regrettable, particularly for a man in his position. I guess I just don't understand a man like Nixon--the completely private man. To stand off and almost hold your hands up and say, "Don't come any closer"--that bothers me in anybody, whether it's President Nixon or my nextdoor neighbor. It must be terribly sad and lonely to be so aloof, to be unable to throw one's arms around one's fellow man and hug him to you. I think President Nixon would like not to be that way; I think he'd like to be an outgoing lovable man. But he knows he's not; it's not in his make-up. Somewhere in his genes, he just didn't come out that way. I think it bothers him, and I think it may affect a lot of his thinking.


You understand that I'm doing this analysis from about as remote a position as one can have. As you well know, I'm not exactly one of the inner circle. As a matter of fact, I'm cut off from the White House today, presumably because of my outspokenness about the war and about Administration attacks on freedom of the press. I regret this very much. I'm very sad, at this stage in my professional life--where, rightfully or wrongly, I have acquired a large audience and some prestige--that people in high places aren't inclined to invite me into their groups.


On occasions when I've been with President Nixon--and they've been fairly rare, countable on the fingers of one hand--I've had a tremendous feeling of wanting to reach out to him. I wanted to kind of help him. I wanted to say, "Look, let's let our hair down and talk about these problems." I have no doubt that this man wants to do what's right. But, as I said, I think what he's trying to do in several cases is absolutely dead wrong. I think that the attack on the press is so antithetical to everything that this country stands for that I just can't understand it.


I would love to be able to shut up about all of this. I don't want to stand out here as a spokesman for the free press against the President of the United States and against his Administration. That's not a comfortable thing to have to do. The attacks haven't come from our side, though. We're like the troops in the trench during a cease-fire that's being violated by the other side. You know, if we could just lay down our arms and say, "Come on, the Constitution says we have free speech and a free press, and broadcasting ought to be a part of it; now let's just admit that and acknowledge that this is the way this country has always run, and let's run it that way." Gosh, that would be great.


I just don't understand why the Administration took this position in the first place. The press wasn't that anti-Nixon in '68 or '69. I think most of the liberals in this country would say the press was cozying up to him, if anything. And yet, whammo, this whole explosive attack on the press. It all gets back a little bit, I think, to the President's personality, to his remoteness. He has never been able to sit down with newsmen, put his feet up, get out the bourbon bottle and say, "Come on, gang, let's have a drink; you guys sure laid it into me today." That's the sort of thing that goes on all over Capitol Hill every afternoon. And I think that because President Nixon can't do that, his aloofness grew into coolness, into misunderstanding of the press, and then into antagonism toward the press and eventually into a campaign against it.

PLAYBOY: Why does so much of the public seem to acquiesce in this campaign? Is it something about the times we live in?
CRONKITE: I think you put your finger on it right there. It's a revolutionary time and people are never comfortable in a period of revolution. I think they try to regain some sense of security through the use or threat of force. But force isn't the mainstay of our democratic system. Dialog-debate is, and that's regarded with suspicion and indifference by most people at this particular moment in history. I suppose it's only human, when you're backed into a corner in debate, to get mad, to lash out with your fist or to leave the room as a last resort. I think that's what's happening today. Demands for law and order are translated into suppression. As I said before, I believe in law and order, not as a code word but as a keystone--along with freedom and justice--of the democratic process. We've got to stand for law and order. But when the effect of maintaining order is to chip away at the Bill of Rights, to suppress dissent and debate, then I think we're in very serious trouble.


I think these charges by the Administration fall on receptive ears in much of our country, among so many classes of people, because they feel so afraid, so unable to understand, let alone cope with, the tumultuous times we live in, so helpless to hang onto the values they were taught to believe in, so threatened by the revolutionary changes they see going on around them, that they're looking for scapegoats--and the press is a handy one. It's tragic that they can't see the press as the bulwark of their own freedom. I suppose the only reason I keep going, the only reason I haven't been shattered by all this, as I said earlier, is that basically I have hope that it's all going to turn around. In time, I think there'll be a new tolerance, and with it will come a strong resistance to all of these pressures against our liberty.

PLAYBOY: Where will this resistance come from?
CRONKITE: I think it'll come from the people. You know, we've shown amazing resilience all these years of the American experience. We go through these dark periods, but eventually we come back into the shining light of day. And I think we'll come back again.




PLAYBOY: You are perhaps the most outspoken of all newsmen in defending broadcasters' rights against Government intimidation. In fact, you have used the word conspiracy in describing the Nixon Administration's efforts to discredit the press. How would you characterize this conspiracy?
CRONKITE: Let me say, first of all, that after I used the word conspiracy the first and only time, in a speech to the International Radio and Television Society in New York a couple of years ago, I began to regret the use of the word—only because I found that there were still people who equated conspiracy with some of the witch-hunts of the past. The word has nearly lost its true meaning. Having said that, I still feel that this is basically what has taken place: a well-directed campaign against the press, agreed upon in secret by members of the Administration. I can't see how it's possible to have such an orchestrated, coordinated campaign without some prior plan and agreement—which really comes out to be a conspiracy.

PLAYBOY: Can you trace it to one person in the Administration?
CRONKITE: I certainly think that the President has to be held accountable, since he's the boss.

PLAYBOY: Do you attribute Nixon's hostility toward the press to his personal bitterness about the way the press has treated him?
CRONKITE: I think that may be true, although it's very hard to ascribe motivation to anybody. Circumstantially, the evidence would point to that. Certainly, he's had his bouts with the press before; his disappointments have been shown in public. There is the case of the 1962 gubernatorial concession statement in California. There is his failure just in recent months, at a very critical time in history, to appear more frequently before the press and the public to explain the workings of the Administration. I think all these things point to that general attitude toward the press.