I remember watching Walter Cronkite on the evening news when I was a young boy. He went off the air when I was eleven or twelve and I still have memories of all the hoopla that surrounded his retirement. It was probably then that I first learned that he had been known as ‘the most trusted man in America’ and that he had famously warned against the continuation of the Vietnam War. But I have no personal relationship with Mr. Cronkite. In fact, I’ve always found his persona and legend to be somewhat puzzling.
Walter Cronkite, after all, was an unapologetic liberal. At least, that is how I experienced him in his retirement years. No matter how straight he had called the Vietnam War in the beginning, he had ultimately come down on the side of the counterculture, and, in my experience, CBS News had earned the undying enmity of the Right as a result. Neither Cronkite nor his network were trusted during my formative years, and it has always been difficult to imagine that they ever truly were.
As I got older, this conundrum only grew more complicated as I began to learn the history of the news business in this country. For example, I got my hands on Carl Bernstein’s landmark 1977 Rolling Stone article: The CIA & The Media. In that article, I learned some interesting things about CBS.
In 1953, Joseph Alsop, then one of America’s leading syndicated columnists, went to the Philippines to cover an election. He did not go because he was asked to do so by his syndicate. He did not go because he was asked to do so by the newspapers that printed his column. He went at the request of the CIA.
Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty‑five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services—from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go‑betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without‑portfolio for their country…
…Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were William Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Tirne Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the LouisviIle Courier‑Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps‑Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald‑Tribune.
By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.
Right there it says, flatly, that between 1953 and 1977, CBS News was the most helpful to the CIA of the three major broadcasting networks. Let me quote extensively from Bernstein’s segment on CBS.
■ The Columbia Broadcasting System. CBS was unquestionably the CIAs most valuable broadcasting asset. CBS President William Paley and Allen Dulles enjoyed an easy working and social relationship. Over the years, the network provided cover for CIA employees, including at least one well‑known foreign correspondent and several stringers; it supplied outtakes of newsfilm to the CIA3; established a formal channel of communication between the Washington bureau chief and the Agency; gave the Agency access to the CBS newsfilm library; and allowed reports by CBS correspondents to the Washington and New York newsrooms to be routinely monitored by the CIA. Once a year during the 1950s and early 1960s, CBS correspondents joined the CIA hierarchy for private dinners and briefings.
The details of the CBS‑CIA arrangements were worked out by subordinates of both Dulles and Paley. “The head of the company doesn’t want to know the fine points, nor does the director,” said a CIA official. “Both designate aides to work that out. It keeps them above the battle.” Dr. Frank Stanton, for 25 years president of the network, was aware of the general arrangements Paley made with Dulles—including those for cover, according to CIA officials. Stanton, in an interview last year, said he could not recall any cover arrangements.) But Paley’s designated contact for the Agency was Sig Mickelson, president of CBS News between 1954 and 1961. On one occasion, Mickelson has said, he complained to Stanton about having to use a pay telephone to call the CIA, and Stanton suggested he install a private line, bypassing the CBS switchboard, for the purpose. According to Mickelson, he did so. Mickelson is now president of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, both of which were associated with the CIA for many years.
In 1976, CBS News president Richard Salant ordered an in‑house investigation of the network’s dealings with the CIA. Some of its findings were first disclosed by Robert Scheer in the Los Angeles Times.) But Salant’s report makes no mention of some of his own dealings with the Agency, which continued into the 1970s.
Many details about the CBS‑CIA relationship were found in Mickelson’s files by two investigators for Salant. Among the documents they found was a September 13th, 1957, memo to Mickelson from Ted Koop, CBS News bureau chief in Washington from 1948 to 1961. It describes a phone call to Koop from Colonel Stanley Grogan of the CIA: “Grogan phoned to say that Reeves [J. B. Love Reeves, another CIA official] is going to New York to be in charge of the CIA contact office there and will call to see you and some of your confreres. Grogan says normal activities will continue to channel through the Washington office of CBS News.” The report to Salant also states: “Further investigation of Mickelson’s files reveals some details of the relationship between the CIA and CBS News…. Two key administrators of this relationship were Mickelson and Koop…. The main activity appeared to be the delivery of CBS newsfilm to the CIA…. In addition there is evidence that, during 1964 to 1971, film material, including some outtakes, were supplied by the CBS Newsfilm Library to the CIA through and at the direction of Mr. Koop4…. Notes in Mr. Mickelson’s files indicate that the CIA used CBS films for training… All of the above Mickelson activities were handled on a confidential basis without mentioning the words Central Intelligence Agency. The films were sent to individuals at post‑office box numbers and were paid for by individual, not government, checks. …” Mickelson also regularly sent the CIA an internal CBS newsletter, according to the report.
Salant’s investigation led him to conclude that Frank Kearns, a CBS‑TV reporter from 1958 to 1971, “was a CIA guy who got on the payroll somehow through a CIA contact with somebody at CBS.” Kearns and Austin Goodrich, a CBS stringer, were undercover CIA employees, hired under arrangements approved by Paley.
Last year a spokesman for Paley denied a report by former CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr that Mickelson and he had discussed Goodrich’s CIA status during a meeting with two Agency representatives in 1954. The spokesman claimed Paley had no knowledge that Goodrich had worked for the CIA. “When I moved into the job I was told by Paley that there was an ongoing relationship with the CIA,” Mickelson said in a recent interview. “He introduced me to two agents who he said would keep in touch. We all discussed the Goodrich situation and film arrangements. I assumed this was a normal relationship at the time. This was at the height of the Cold War and I assumed the communications media were cooperating—though the Goodrich matter was compromising.
At the headquarters of CBS News in New York, Paley’s cooperation with the CIA is taken for granted by many news executives and reporters, despite the denials. Paley, 76, was not interviewed by Salant’s investigators. “It wouldn’t do any good,” said one CBS executive. “It is the single subject about which his memory has failed.”
Salant discussed his own contacts with the CIA, and the fact he continued many of his predecessor’s practices, in an interview with this reporter last year. The contacts, he said, began in February 1961, “when I got a phone call from a CIA man who said he had a working relationship with Sig Mickelson. The man said, ‘Your bosses know all about it.'” According to Salant, the CIA representative asked that CBS continue to supply the Agency with unedited newstapes and make its correspondents available for debriefing by Agency officials. Said Salant: “I said no on talking to the reporters, and let them see broadcast tapes, but no outtakes. This went on for a number of years—into the early Seventies.”
In 1964 and 1965, Salant served on a super-secret CIA task force which explored methods of beaming American propaganda broadcasts to the People’s Republic of China. The other members of the four‑man study team were Zbigniew Brzezinski, then a professor at Columbia University; William Griffith, then professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology., and John Haves, then vice‑president of the Washington Post Company for radio‑TV5. The principal government officials associated with the project were Cord Meyer of the CIA; McGeorge Bundy, then special assistant to the president for national security; Leonard Marks, then director of the USIA; and Bill Moyers, then special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson and now a CBS correspondent.
Salant’s involvement in the project began with a call from Leonard Marks, “who told me the White House wanted to form a committee of four people to make a study of U.S. overseas broadcasts behind the Iron Curtain.” When Salant arrived in Washington for the first meeting he was told that the project was CIA sponsored. “Its purpose,” he said, “was to determine how best to set up shortwave broadcasts into Red China.” Accompanied by a CIA officer named Paul Henzie, the committee of four subsequently traveled around the world inspecting facilities run by Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty both CIA‑run operations at the time), the Voice of America and Armed Forces Radio. After more than a year of study, they submitted a report to Moyers recommending that the government establish a broadcast service, run by the Voice of America, to be beamed at the People’s Republic of China. Salant has served two tours as head of CBS News, from 1961‑64 and 1966‑present. At the time of the China project he was a CBS corporate executive.)
There is no mention of Walter Cronkite, but it’s very clear that his whole news agency was hopelessly compromised. Of course, this was true of the entirety of the domestic news business. The news in this country was under the influence of the intelligence agencies from at least 1948 on, through a program code-named Operation Mockingbird. By infiltrating the news business on every level, the CIA was able to engage in anti-Leftist propaganda on an international level. Sitting atop this structure of deceit was the ‘most trusted man in America’ who ended every broadcast with his trademark sign-off, “and that’s the way it is.” But that wasn’t the way it was. The whole edifice only worked because the front-man was so trusted.
I don’t blame Cronkite for this. He was a good news man. But I’ll never be able to look at Cronkite and his years at CBS News with unjaundiced eyes. He was part of a mass deception. The scary thing is that the modern day news business is probably far less infiltrated, and yet it does its propaganda role more effectively than ever (see run-up to the invasion of Iraq).
I think we got a better picture from Cronkite than we get today. So, let us honor his life and career on the occasion of his passing, but let us not do so with rose-colored glasses.
The scary thing is that the modern day news business is probably far less infiltrated, and yet it does its propaganda role more effectively than ever (see run-up to the invasion of Iraq).
The CIA makes a better managing editor than oil companies.
Precisely.
AG
Booman writes:
I counter:
I am sorry, Booman…where do the excuses end? Just because Unca Walt was a lovable, avuncular old figure all of his life…even in his relative youth…does not ameliorate the plain fact that he was front and center in the trancing-out of America for about 40 years. He read the news the way his controllers wanted him to read the news. When the Vietnam War was a good war, that’s how he presented it. When it bacame a bad war…a good war and/or a bad war in Orwellian 1984-speak…that’s also how he presented it.
1984 came a little early this century.
Say around 1956, when Operation Mockingbird put most of this country into a hypno-trance from which it…and apparently, Booman as well to some degree…has not yet even begun to awaken.
He was a front man for the CIA, Booman.
Say it loud and say it clear.
He was a front man for the CIA and the Permanent Government of the Corporate State of America, and those entities were wrong. They were wrong up and down the line, and the end result of their efforts, the current sad state of this country, the millions of deaths that they caused, the billions of lives that they ruined so that we could drive around in Super Duper Luxmobiles and eat McPoisonburgers until we rotted of fat content…all of these were made possible by Walter and his clones.
He was a fucking enabler.
Nothing more.
Excuse him as “a man of his times?”
Ok wif me as long as you excuse say Leni Reifenstahl and Goebbel’s other busy little propaganda- producing workerbees, excuse Stalin’s and the KGB’s Pravda people.
The only real difference?
Walt chose a longer, more consistent winner. But every rotten, morally bankrupt winner eventually, inevitably loses. Karma is a bitch, Booman, and the piper will be paid.
Every fucking time.
The best thing that we could do now? (Not that we will, of course.)
Admit our mistakes.
One of the most egregious of which was the formation of the hypnomedia machine of which he was an OG.
An original media gangsta, tweed jackets, cancerous pipe and all.
Father Knows Best?
Wake the fuck up.
I got yer rose colored glasses.
Right here!!!
Wake the fuck up.
Waklter Cronkite?
Even Ray Charles could see that shit.
Bet on it.
AG
You are, as always, over the top. Comparing Cronkite to Goebbels and CBS to Pravda is just absurd — it’s like a rightwing nut calling Obama a fascist. Back in the day, Cronkite and CBS were the root reason the rightwing got the idea that the media had a liberal bias!
Believe me, I lived thru it, the perma-gov really did NOT appreciate Cronkite using his influence to garner sympathy for civil rights protesters or turn the American public against the Vietnam War.
Bullshit.
I lived through it too. Wide awake and watching the CIA-created dream time, from the JFK farce right on through today’s Afghanistan War hype.
What a crock of lockstepping, clomp-clomp-clomping leftiness idiocy.
The “right wing” was (and is) as fooled as was (and are) the leftiness clones…that’s you, sjct, and Booman too…who currently clog the blogwaves with their ineffectual patter.
The real deal?
These people..and their publicity men as well…are and were equal opportunity hustlers.
They took down Nixon just as surely as they did JFK and they had no compunctions whatsoever about controlling farcical assholes like Reagan and Bush Jr. to get their way.
It’s just business.
It is all just business.
And it has been exceedingly bad business for well over 65 years now.
Wake the fuck up.
AG
The best of us have some failure, the worst of us have some redeeming values. I realize that none of us are perfect.
I never thought of him as Uncle Walt.
Thanks for the dose of reality, BooMan.
In those days, the CIA used domestic resources for intelligence gathering and for cover to gather intelligence abroad. Those were pretty circumscribed operations. And the folks involved in these sorts of things pretty compartmentalized. And a lot of the folks engaged in this sort of intelligence gathering looked at it as the free flow of information. They were likely to be able to use what they learned about other countries in media reports, scholarly articles, speeches, and so on. They were restricted only in what they learned about US involvement in other countries. That is where the compromise came in; news blackout on the little about US involvement that these intelligence gatherers noticed.
The folks who were really compromised in those days were the ones working with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. The FBI was the agency engaged in domestic warrantless surveillance, innuendo, destruction of careers, and manipulation of the US media.
I do remember Walter Cronkite. My first memories of him are as a voice on the radio and only the “This is Walter Cronkite” tag line. I remember “You Are There”, a CBS attempt at educational television. Cronkite played a reporter covering notable historical events and reporting them in the style of a 1950s news reporter. The Battle of Waterloo, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address,…
On the CBS News, he was trusted because of his avuncular delivery and his calm in some of the most traumatic realtime news coverage of US history: the JFK assassination and the four-day coverage of the funeral, including the on-camera murder of Jack Ruby; the beginning of the Vietnam War, with Dan Rather covering battles and ducking bullets; the Civil Rights movement in its final triumphal push to overthrow segregation of public accomodations; the resignation of LBJ; the assassination and funeral of Martin Luther King; the assassination and funeral of Robert Kennedy; the Battle of Khe Sanh; the Tet Offensive; the Watergate hearings; the US Embassy hostages in Teheran. So when he said that the Vietnam War was a mistake, America trusted him that that was true.
There is no evidence that either he or Dan Rather were compromised. Indeed the rightwing attacks on both (milder in the case of Cronkite) indicates that they probably were uncompromising.
CBS is another matter with a complicated history. CBS brought an end to McCarthyism when not other media would stand up. It dared air Edward R. Murrow’s “Harvest of Shame” report on migrant labor. It provided a venue for Paddy Chayefsky (later writer of Network) to show some of his minor plays. And at the same time, CBS lent its cover for CIA intelligence. Both were done under Paley’s leadership. One might consider this more inconsistency than hypocrisy on Paley’s part. Or the fact that there were a lot of liberal hawks in the CIA.
I too would like to think Walter and Dan weren’t compromised. Cronkite had a likable personality, and Dan was colorful and seemed like a hard-working eager-beaver young reporter.
But on the one major case both covered extensively at the time and in subsequent years, the Kennedy assassination, both, imo, came up short in fairly reporting the controversy. Especially one-sided and flawed was the report in 1964 when CBS rushed to broadcast a one-hour glowing report on the just released Warren Report, whose 900 pages they literally could not have read by air time, and in 1967, a 4-hour cleverly edited attempt at buttressing the many holes in the official case.
To his partial credit, if the story is true, Dan Rather in later years (early 90s) supposedly told a former asst counsel for the House Select Comm’ee on Assassinations that “We blew it on the Kennedy assassination.”
Cronkite, for all the talk of his being The Most Trusted Man in America, and for all the hours he and CBS spent propping up the Warren Report while leaving the few dissenters they bothered to interview on the cutting room floor, never seemed to be able to sway the public to the official point of view which, in the surveys I’ve seen, has consistently scored low compared to the number in the conspiracy camp.
Walter, it should also be remembered, was a bit of a hawk on the VN War pre-1968, an early booster as he reported from Nam during the period when Lyndon began the escalation in 65. He got wise though, post-Tet, and was greatly helped in re-assessing the situation when Gen Westmoreland’s top military assistant, Gen Creighton Abrams, spoke off the record to Cronkite about how the war was turning into a “stalemate.”
Another unfortunate moment, which I haven’t seen mentioned in the news coverage so far, was in 1968 when Cronkite got an exclusive interview with Mayor Daley at the Dem Convention, this after the CPD had run wild bashing heads of protesters in the streets outside the hall. A complete softball interview.
For those interested I’d recommend two very good books which touch on this. There is THE SCIENCE OF COERCION by Christopher Simpson which goes into the the media, the intelligence industry, the propaganda industry, science and the big bed they were all sleeping in.
The other is KATHARINE THE GREAT by Deborah Davis, about the Washington Post empire. Once you understand the Graham family’s connections to the world of intelligence, Ben Bradlee’s past connections with the CIA (he worked out of their Paris office to promote the idea of the death penalty against the Rosenbergs during the Red Scare period) and Bob Woodward’s connections with intelligence (he had top secret clearance for the Office of Naval Intelligence) you will never see Watergate the same way again.
You will be better prepared to see how we are manipulated by the powers that be.
RE the WaPo, I recall reading somewhere that in the 1980s, Kate Graham paid a visit to the CIA, where she informed our spies that (paraphr) “There are some things the public has no right to know about.”
Apparently she felt that in the years following the Watergate reporting, there were just too many darned idealistic journalist types who wanted to do actual investigative reporting, but that things had gotten out of hand. Can’t have that.
Last I checked, the last good thing to come out of the WaPo’s stable of reporters was 35 yrs ago in Watergate, and then Carl Bernstein’s eye-opening and helpful article in 1977 on the CIA’s thorough and long-standing penetration of our media, which Booman has thoughtfully excerpted here today.
Of course, it’s been 32 yrs now, and this issue is one which is badly in need of an update.
Perhaps some reporter with unusually good ties to CIA. Sy Hersh seems to have such ties, for instance. Unless, of course … well, I won’t go there …
I don’t think I’d call Cronkite’s legacy “mixed”, unless I could suggest something he could have done to effect more positive change.
Was he part of the system? Sure.
Would he have done ‘better’ if he’d pulled a Howard Beale and ranted about the CIA’s infiltration of his network? Or gone rogue and tried to start an independent news agency? I really doubt it.
Just remember when you are watching this generation of journalists venerate the good old days under Cronkite, that the good old days weren’t so good.
Only 22 minutes/night of news from the 3 major networks in the 60s, then add PBS in the 70s, sponsored by Mobil Oil.
Not a great deal there to venerate. Especially when we consider the pre-1968 years when the media largely just parroted the Establishment line. As with VN and that other issue I noted above.
Walter’s commentary on Nam in 68 was an exception to the rule of not rocking the boat. Over at ABC, their anchor, Howard K. Smith, actually began to deliver more hawkish comments on the war (his personal commentary was a regular feature of his news broadcast, iirc) following Tet.
I’m doubtful there has ever been a so-called Golden Age of Broadcast News.
Though Walter Cronkite’s unique and authoritative delivery could be considered golden …
I only think people(including me) say they are golden in comparison to the idjits we have in the TradMed today .. and your Mike Stark video is just further evidence
Nothing changes.
CBS’s involvement with US overseas propaganda doesn’t make the case against it. The “Cold War” (which Eisenhower so effectively promoted) had become a national obsession. No one was opposed to trying to infiltrate propaganda or spies or saboteurs into “enemy” territory. I doubt that there were any major news organizations that would have refused (or maybe that could have refused) to participate as advisors. It was a shameful time for America, and probably the seed of what we are now dying of, but singling out CBS seems like kind of a stretch. It suggests that what they did was extraordinary when in fact it was just a symptom of the polluted pond we all swim in.
Cronkite was a perfect ringmaster for the delusional circus Americans wanted to watch forever the way a meth addict wants to shoot up forever. His voice and manner made it seem as if everything was OK, aside from a few occasional glitches that he gained credibility from reporting on without ever hinting that there might be some rot in the foundation. He marked the high point of a time when “we”, the white middle class, were “one nation” under one stern but lovable electric uncle.
Personally I find the endless overblown tributes tiring and annoying, not for his network’s involvement in overseas propaganda, but for the benign ignoring of the Red Scare evils that foreclosed our future as a decent country for generations.
studs terkel he wasn’t…
charles kuralt neither, let alone bill moyers, donahue…
i doubt he was a deep thinker, more character actor, with decent intentions, a follower, with a kind of genetic integrity, but muddled with poor judgement.
he handed america its nightly pacifier, during the windup to her most unfetteredly imperialistic years. nice unca walter.
great thread, all you folks.
Quite an interesting set of comments here. Most I suspect from folks too young to experience him first hand.
Let me say…
a) I am fully committed to the notion of the importance and power of the the fourth estate. No less than any other pillars of US democracy should it be compromised… by itself or others
b) Events have to be viewed in the context of the times. The period in question was a time when by accident or purpose people were rightly concerned about the nuclear death of the planet. Sharing notes with the CIA or gathering facts on things that might not be newsworthy but nevertheless important wasn’t seen as any less unpatriotic than Ernie Pyle self censoring his reporting from the Front during WWII to appease Army leadership.
c) Prior to Cronkite, there wasn’t much “national” news media. Only people in NY read the NYT. Only people in DC read the WP. As all of America was just beginning to turn to their new TV sets, he was the collective and common voice of the news. He was out front in defining that role and I think also understood the importance and power of it.
d) I had the benefit of taking part of a lunch with him in, I think about 1989. He was a speaker at a conference I was helping to manage for my company at the time. He felt a strong sense of responsibility and accountability for his role in defining what TV journalism had become, both good and bad. He also understood the role he still had to play in critiquing the state of the news media. He saw it as an obligation, given who he was, not a joy. I also found him to be a bit “stuck in the past — Murrowesque, Eisenhower — ” in his worldview. But that is not a sin.
He was a good man IMO, and not just because he reminded me of my grandfather when I was a kid 🙂