Is Walter Cronkite the Last Trustworthy Man in America? : Well, If He Isn’t, Then Even He’s Having Trouble Finding Someone to Believe In

He was the avatar of trust, the man from whom more people received more good news or bad than any other person for nearly two decades. But it is immediately apparent that Walter Cronkite, anchor emeritus of the “CBS Evening News,” is not the way he was.

He still has the copious eyebrows, the ones that--depending on what angle they assumed--embellished a news story with more interpretation than any number of words could. But the once-distinguished gray hair is now snow white. He wears two hearing aids. His gait is hesitant and uneven, slowed by a painful right knee. The once Dutch-solid face--the only honest one on television, Art Buchwald once said--is now framed by long jowls and folds.

Old age hasn’t been entirely unkind. His aura of graceful authority has been enhanced. His voice, deeper and richer than in his anchor days, rumbles forth, basso profundo, and each word, each story, is freighted with a sense of momentousness. It is still a voice you can believe in.

But the most trusted man in America has changed in profound ways. Walter Cronkite, born and raised in the heartland, had a cheery optimism that essentially mirrored the outlook of average Americans: Work hard, be fair, believe in God and family, and all will be right with the world. That optimism is gone now, both in the man and in the nation, replaced by a hard-edged doubt and mistrust.

“The thing that disappoints me is my optimism/pessimism needles have swung over to the other side,” the 79-year-old Cronkite said during a long conversation in a Manhattan restaurant. He was reflecting on a pervasive decline of trust in institutions, heroes and the future. “I have believed all of my life, practically, and even in the face of a lot of contrary evidence, that this country is great and it has continuing potential to be the real model of democracy that we’ve always thought it would be and, indeed, which it still is to many people around the world who want to seek entrance to the United States. But I’m getting less and less certain that that’s the way it’s going to be.”

Cronkite is offended by House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his “vastly over-harsh” Contract with America, although he credits Gingrich with “extreme courage” for attempting to balance the budget. He is bothered by a sense of unfairness, and a feeling that most Americans are reluctant to deal with long-standing problems, particularly in race relations. He finds the gap between rich and poor “disgusting.” Always a political independent--a requisite for an impartial newsman, he says--Cronkite, Mr. Middle American Everyman, even advocates a new sociopolitical system. “We may have to find some marvelous middle ground between capitalism and Communism,” he says.

These days, he feels comfortable speaking about his political views. It’s been 15 years since he signed off as the “CBS Evening News” anchor, at the height of that network’s news hegemony. He spent 10 years on the CBS board of directors, but because of an acrimonious relationship with former CBS chief Laurence Tisch, he left the board in 1991.

He gives numerous speeches, lectures and interviews, often in connection with his special interests, among them the Rainforest Alliance, the World Federalist Assn., headed by onetime presidential hopeful John Anderson, the Committee to Protect Journalists and the World Wildlife Fund. His three-year series on cable’s Discovery Channel, “The Cronkite Report,” ended last month, and he has begun work on what may well be his post-retirement magnum opus, a documentary on his life and times titled “Walter Cronkite Remembers,” to air on CBS this fall. Meanwhile, his production company, Cronkite Ward, will be making an eight-part series, also on his life, for the Discovery Channel. He is still employed by CBS as a special correspondent, although this is largely an honorary position.

Cronkite has deep misgivings about the state of the country that could be characterized as mistrust. He is critical of institutions like the press and government, and particularly the office of the president. It would not, perhaps, be a stretch to say that if he was ever polled about the most trusted American, he probably wouldn’t vote at all. He, too, readily admits that he has lapsed from skepticism into cynicism.

*

Wasn’t there a time when the nation basked in a rosy, sweetly naive glow of optimism? A time when a president’s word was taken on faith? When government and law enforcement were sacrosanct, not the evil empires they have become to many?

Darrell West, professor of political science at Brown University, who has written about public opinion on political campaigns and elections, says that “the rising level of mistrust is the most profound change in public opinion over the last three decades. If you go back to the 1950s, about 70% trusted the government in Washington to do the right thing. Today about 70% mistrust the government. There is no other change that is that dramatic.”

Yet the pandemic suspicion isn’t just confined to obvious targets like government or the president. That much-ridiculed decree of ‘60s youth culture--”don’t trust anyone over 30”--can be distilled to reflect the uneasy temperament of the ‘90s: “Don’t trust anyone.”

This is an age in which more than just right-wing groups deeply distrust government, when the schism between black and white Americans may be at its widest in half a century and “corporate re-engineering” has cost thousands of jobs in every major American industry. Certain staples of the American legacy--the value of a college education, job security, the financial boon of home ownership, the trusted family doctor, neighborhood schools and safe streets--have become ghosts from another era.

Yet another victim of this cynicism is the hero, for the hero today is certain to be a goat tomorrow. Hero worship of the sort the country engaged in when names like Ruth, Lindbergh, Gehrig, Roosevelt and Eisenhower invoked demigods rather than humans, is now regularly deflated because Americans have been conditioned to believe that heroes are, in fact, real people with real flaws and foibles. What might be an unpleasant tic in the average person is magnified to monstrous proportions in the hero. This is born of vigorous press scrutiny, which Cronkite says is not necessarily a bad thing, if it doesn’t lead to cynicism. Sadly, he says, it usually does, often because of overemphasis on the trivial or on gossip and innuendo. Some heroes, of course, remain unblemished--Colin Powell or Scott O’Grady are examples--but they leave the public stage quickly, leery of prolonged exposure to the media’s harsh spotlight.

Nor have the country’s great institutions--particularly the national government--fared well in holding the public’s respect. Since 1952, the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor has conducted a biannual survey of voters’ attitudes about political officeholders, with an eye toward their trustworthiness. The so-called American National Election Studies, considered a standard measure by many political scientists, found that respondents’ trust in government fell to historic lows in 1994. Thirty-seven years ago, when the survey first asked “are government officials crooked?” 24% of those polled said “quite a lot,” while in 1994, 51% held this sentiment. That surpassed a low mark in 1974, in the wake of Watergate, when 45% said the government was crooked.

The same mistrust held true when the survey asked: “Would you say the government is pretty much run by a few big interests looking out for themselves or that it is run for the benefit of all people?” In 1964, when the question was first asked, 64% said the government ran for the benefit of all. In 1994, 19% felt that was the case.

Santa Traugott, a University of Michigan senior research associate who helped administer the surveys, says “there’s a slight possibility in my mind that when you look at these things, you wonder which comes first--the media coverage of the phenomenon or the phenomenon itself . . . [We] wonder whether there is an interactive effect. We don’t know what direction the causal arrow is pointing. Maybe it’s going both ways.”

*

Somehow, Cronkite’s own reputation has survived this corrosion of credibility, even though he was--and remains--both the embodiment and apogee of one of the most battered institutions of all, journalism. This can be partly attributed to the fact that he left the anchor chair almost 15 years ago, long before network news suffered the dramatic cutbacks that have damaged its power and prestige.

The image of trustworthiness remains as firmly attached to Cronkite as it did March 6, 1981, when he stepped down from the job that earned him the label. In 1973, he was cited as the most trusted public figure in the United States in a survey conducted by independent pollster Oliver Quayle. Less than a year ago, a marketing firm called MediaPoll found that Cronkite was still the most trusted TV figure. Yet he scorns such polls. “They must not have polled my wife,” has been his standard joke when asked about them. Typically, he also blames the results on simple ignorance. “We seem to be an almost entirely incognitive kind of a population,” he once told an interviewer. Why, he wondered, should a TV personality be deemed most trustworthy?

The reason is that Cronkite has worked hard at the trust game over the years. Dating back to his days as a star United Press correspondent covering World War II, his self-avowed work ethic was always to give just the news, without favor or bias.

And he was always most comfortable taking the middle ground. Only rarely did his opinions seep into his coverage of world events. The punditry he now regularly engages in on talk shows or in interviews was something he avoided assiduously. The one time he ventured into opinion--he spoke out against the Vietnam War in four “Evening News” commentaries after a 1968 trip to South Vietnam--became news itself. (Then-President Lyndon B. Johnson presumably told aides that if he had “lost Walter Cronkite,” he had “lost middle America.”). He never commented on the news again, and even now is ambivalent about having stated his opinion on the air, though he feels his opinions were correct. Cronkite instinctively knew that drawing attntion to oneself, or taking a stand on a controversial issue, had the unfortunate effect of eroding trustworthiness, particularly if you happened to be the nation’s leading anchorman.

He had his critics. The rap on Cronkite was that he was too middle-of-the-road, that he took his stand on Vietnam only after the rest of the country had swung against it, or that his fervent support of the space program crossed the lines of objectivity into boosterism. CBS News’ Edward R. Murrow (who was comfortable with opinion, the stronger the better) had tried strenuously to hire Cronkite, finally succeeding five years after the end of World War II. But Murrow later doubted his own judgment. He thought Cronkite pedestrian, overly cautious, not a thinker like himself.

Yet for Cronkite, the middle ground was terra firma. For this son of a dentist from St. Joseph, Mo., it was the bedrock upon which trust grew and that helped foster an illusion--intentionally or unintentionally--that his closely held opinions were the opinions of each of his viewers. By his estimation, he got many offers over the years to run for the Senate or for president, and even for mayor of New York. An equal number of these, he says proudly, came from Democrats and Republicans. Andy Rooney, a friend and colleague from World War II, when Rooney was a reporter for the Stars and Stripes, said that once after a tennis game 15 years ago, Cronkite told him that “both sides--Republicans and Democrats--have asked me about a possibility of running for office. Wait’ll they find out I’d take away every gun owned by everyone in America. They don’t know that about me.”

They thought they knew a lot, though. “He deserved [viewers’] trust,” Rooney says. “It’s funny that those qualities come through eventually, that you do get to know someone beyond specifically what you see of them on television.”

*

So where has trust gone? To Cronkite’s thinking, several factors have contributed, all of them linked by a single theme: a less-educated citizenry. Stepping into this breach of ignorance are those people Cronkite derisively calls “demagogues,” or figures of authority in leading institutions, like law enforcement or government, who use this ignorance to further their ends. Vitriol, he says, is their weapon of choice, so that important debates--the national budget, welfare, health care, law enforcement, tax law, nuclear energy, environmental issues--are reduced to battlegrounds of essentially meaningless rhetoric. Because most Americans are not educated in the minutiae of these subjects, cynicism is born, he says. And from cynicism springs distrust.

On this subject, Cronkite’s opaque blue eyes narrow and his voice rises in anger: These demagogues are “demagogues on the street”--rogue cops--”or demagogues in the halls of Congress. They play up for prejudice or for their own personal advantage, either on the street corner simply to get an audience or doing it in office to stay in office.”

But loss of trust begins with the question of education, “which lies at the very bottom of every problem that we have. If the people were truly well-informed, were truly philosophical, were truly aware of our associations with one another, [then] presumably our dialogue and our reporting would be considerably better than it is.” But “the tragedy is, we aren’t educated to any degree. Education levels are so low that the public does not have a capability of making an informed judgment as to how trustworthy these people should be, so we’re handicapped from the beginning.

“A lot of the uneducated public carries around Harvard degrees. It is not all in the inner cities. Those with the Harvard degrees are uneducated in a general philosophy that I find so important, which is the understanding of civil dialogue, the understanding of the other fellow’s viewpoint, and an attempt to moderate or mediate between the two.”

The irony is not lost on Cronkite that we live in a self-proclaimed Information Age, where more pure knowledge is more readily available than ever before. The “press”--his catchall term for the information glut--is a subject Cronkite speaks out on frequently, on the lecture circuit, in classrooms, at forums. The press must play an important roll in promoting skepticism, because an informed public is a skeptical one. And in Cronkite’s rule book, that is a very good thing indeed.

The newsman is also quick to admit that the press, for the most part, has failed. Instead of creating a nation of skeptics, it has helped create one of cynics. For Cronkite, the failure of the press is especially troublesome because--with some glaring exceptions--it is better than it has ever been. And it is also painful because this is Cronkite’s profession. He has witnessed the dissolution of his own once-great news organization, CBS News--a victim of the tortured logic “of the more people you fire the higher your stock [price] goes.”

Public trust was high in the early ‘50s because “the press, in covering Washington, did not do the kind of tough investigative monitoring of government that it had learned to do later. I know, because I was in Washington in ’52 and . . . the correspondents were there mostly for getting their publishers invitations to the gridiron dinner.”

“That is not meant to tar the majority of them [but] just before lunch, they’d go through the lobby of the Press Club, right by the bar, and they’d go right down a line picking up press releases from all the bureaus of the government, stuff them into their pocket, and then go into the bar.”

So why has the press failed? “Because it never was ordained to educate--that should not be its mandate and it is a mandate it cannot perform. A daily newspaper or daily broadcast, for heaven’s sakes, cannot be the elementary school teacher, if you please. You can’t raise people’s educational levels to a degree where you can expect them to understand the headlines we have to indulge them in.”

Instead, that is the job of the politicians. In Cronkite’s ideal world, politicians say what they mean, and follow through on what they promise. It is a world where differences of opinion are vetted in a civilized manner. Each side respects the other’s position and sees merit in the opponent’s argument because they have enough education to do so.

The job of establishing this civil dialogue falls to the president, but to succeed in the art of politics, one must be an artful dissembler, or worse, “an arm twister.” The basic equation, as Cronkite sees it, goes something like this: To win political office you must lie occasionally, and to lie, suffice it to say, undermines public trust. And just about all politicos “have feet of clay.”

In an era where trust is at an all-time low, that might sound obvious to the point of absurdity. But in Cronkite’s mind, only one president of the last quarter century or so had “very high personal integrity and great intelligence”: Jimmy Carter. “[But] he failed because he wasn’t an arm twister.”

During Cronkite’s 50 years as a working journalist, he says he’s witnessed at least two extremes of the political spectrum: Adlai Stevenson and LBJ, both of whom he admired greatly. When covering Stevenson’s ill-fated 1952 campaign for the presidency, he remembered reading a speech that been handed out to the press just before it was delivered. “We were in awe over this marvelous position he had taken,” Cronkite recalls. But he watched with incredulity as Stevenson crossed out whole portions of it; the speech he finally gave was totally different. “Everything has two sides to it and it’s one of the things that makes it difficult to be a politician,” he says. “With Adlai Stevenson, as much as I loved that man’s mind, I think he would have made a poor president because he saw both sides of every issue, and his ability to make up his mind, I think, had to be severely affected by that.”

There was no such hang-up with LBJ, to whom Cronkite admits deep feelings of ambivalence. He was friends with the Texan when he was in office--the only president he had such a relationship with (he was close to Dwight D. Eisenhower only after he left office.) “No matter what I said about him on the air, he couldn’t be friendlier when we were together. I feel that we were good friends.”

Nevertheless, Cronkite gives LBJ a “four” on a trustworthiness scale of one to 10. (The only lower score he gave a president was a three for Richard M. Nixon.) The reason, he says, is “because of Vietnam, and the great division that the people had about that, meaning that they were not being told the truth. But also because he had an image as an arm twister, a bellower [and] I think the public sensed that with him, or they knew it.” A certain type of politician, he says, “can make the most scurrilous attack on their political enemy and then they can get out in the cloakroom, and they’ve got their arms around each other with big smiles--” ’Oh, I got to you today, Ed. Having dinner tonight? Is Mabel coming?’ It’s a game and LBJ was a master at it.”

Cronkite says President Bill Clinton is basically trustworthy “[and] he’s done the right thing by his own lights.” He hastens to add, however, that Clinton’s “political decisions have been bad. Would I, at this lunch, give him my wallet and ask him to pick up a few greeting cards and return the wallet this afternoon? I wouldn’t have any problem with that at all.” When reminded that Clinton is running the country, not running errands for him, Cronkite says, “Well, I don’t know. We’ll have to make a judgment later.”

Cronkite is less kind in his assessment of the trustworthiness of the Kennedys, both JFK and Bobby. “I was very much affected by what I thought was [John F.] Kennedy’s arrogance, and I was offended by it. I don’t think that the public was offended by it, I’m sure they weren’t.” This, he says, “doesn’t apply to his obvious sexual exploits, because I didn’t know about that. I’m one of the few people who covered Washington who admits to not knowing. None of the others do either, but now they think they did.”

Cronkite likes to tell a story about Bobby that illustrates the danger of crossing the line from being a newsman to being a pundit. In early 1968, Bobby was mulling his run for office as Johnson’s second term was imploding. But before jumping into the race, he asked Cronkite to lunch, ostensibly to discuss his recent anti-Vietnam commentaries on the “Evening News.”

Kennedy spoke long and passionately of his desire to end the war (also Cronkite’s views, as it would happen), and “I said, ‘You know, senator, feeling as strongly as you do, I think you ought to run.’ ” Kennedy then dropped the subject of the war and turned to Cronkite, grilling him about his residency in Connecticut. But Cronkite pointed out that he lived in New York. “But you’re not [registered as] a Democrat.” Stunned, Cronkite immediately suspected that Kennedy had checked the rolls, and told him he was an independent. It didn’t matter. Kennedy urged him to run for his Senate seat in New York anyway, as a Democrat.

“Politicians and secrecy being what they are in Washington, and with only two of us in the room, Johnson had [the story] that afternoon. He called Frank Stanton [CBS president] raising hell about my urging Bobby Kennedy to run.”

Later that afternoon, CBS newsman Roger Mudd learned that Kennedy was, indeed, planning a campaign. The CBS News Washington bureau chief, Bill Small, knew that Cronkite had lunched with Kennedy and urged him to call for confirmation. Kennedy provided a statement only on the condition that it be used in full: “I am thinking of running for the presidency of the United States even as Walter Cronkite is thinking of running for the Senate.” The statement wasn’t used.

*

Cronkite never did run for office, but that didn’t stop the offers from coming in. He says they cropped up every week during political seasons (a famous rumor had him sharing the ticket with John Anderson in 1980). “It would be a terrible thing,” he says, “if we have to suffer a person who has reached prominence, particularly an anchor person . . . who thinks he can build on that prominence to run for public office.”

The former anchorman admits he has no easy prescriptions for a nation afflicted by mistrust. Even journalists, he says, must ultimately have a peripheral role in the solution, whatever it is, because their job is not to educate but to convey facts, not to proselytize but to be objective brokers of information. “Some people would like to bind some sort of responsibility . . . to the press, but we’re not prepared to discharge that responsibility,” he says.

So how does the country begin to trust again? After 50 years observing three major wars and an endless parade of charlatans and heroes, Cronkite is aware that many people look to him s an oracle, an eminence grise with all the answers. It is an image he is uncomfortable with, yet he is supremely comfortable saying that the common denominator in all of America’s problems, including its festering dilemma with trust, can be solved by improving education. All answers loop back to that.

“Today,” he says, “”we see the extreme strain which all the presumably strongest economic powers are suffering from in an effort to support both the free independence of capitalism and the costs of humane social welfare. With scarcely an exception, the democratic nations are failing to support both. So a different system is going to be required.

While each nation has distinctive problems, for the United States the first priority of the new order must be a revision of the educational system to. . . guarantee that each of our citizens will have equal resources to share in the decisions of the democracy, and a fair share of the economic pie.”

“Fair” is a word that seems tolie at the heart of everything the most trusted man in America has always stood for.