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.
