The Fromson File

I knew Don Hewitt when he was up and down, mostly up. It was before I joined CBS News. I was an AP reporter on home leave and passing through Manhattan, Sandy Socolow invited me to watch a broadcast of a mid-day news program with a relatively unknown anchorman named Walter Cronkite, a program in which Hewitt was the executive producer.

Socolow and I had been roommates in Tokyo back in the days when he was a wire service reporter for the International News Service. When we started across the bridge that passed over Grand Central Station in Manhattan, the tempo changed with each step we took enroute to the broadcast studio on Lexington Avenue. Once inside and ready to go to air, I was transfixed on Hewitt and his then director, Freddie Stollmack. At the commercial break, there was shouting and bombast that made my head spin. I said to Socolow later, anyone who goes into broadcast journalism ought to have his head examined.

Of course, three years later. when I was an NBC News reporter (!) covering the 1960 presidential campaign, Hewitt was the executive producer of the first televised presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. The Republican candidate brushed off Hewitt’s suggestion that he allow some makeup be applied to his heavy facial shadow. Nixon said did not want “any of that Hollywood stuff.” If you are a presidential history buff, you will remember that Kennedy won on his good looks, his articulate answers and his charm. Nixon, whatever one may have thought of his reputation as a leery man of darkness, suffered by comparison.

When the debate was over, three reporters ( I was one them, the others being Tom Wicker of the New York Times and Al Otten, of the Wall Street Journal) were sitting with Henry Cabot Lodge, Nixon’s vice presidential running mate. As he rose from a sofa. the normally circumspect Lodge angrily shut off the television set and declared, “He Goddamned well has blown the election.” We agreed that Kennedy had emerged with the upper hand. But Lodge’s aides, who had been listening to the debate on radio in an adjoining room were convinced that Nixon had won.

Hewitt took a lot of the heat from the Republicans, but that didn’t bother him. He would kill for a good story and the debate was one of those rare moments in history .to relish. Two years later, when I was with CBS News, I had to set up a telephonic interview between Nixon, who was trying to regain some traction in the great game of politics by seeking the governorship of California. We were set up in Nixon’s law office when the anchorman, Harry Reasoner, who was filling in for Cronkite that day, literally seemed to wander out of the studio to shop for a tie. Hewitt was furious, but he never let on how angry he was. His main concern to me was “whatever you say to Nixon don’t tell him I’m the producer. He’ll think for sure that it’s a plot against him.”

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Tags:   60 minutes · Buck Zimmerman · cbs news · Don Hewitt · Richard Nixon · Sandy Socolow · Walter Cronkite2 Comments

Time is running out before we’re robbed of our sanity. Long ago in World War II, there used to be a patriotic poster that hung on many walls. It read, “loose lips sink ships.” Today, our ship of state is in mighty danger of being sunk because of the reckless violation of one of our treasured liberties: freedom of speech. Reckless free speech. It pains me to say this because I’m a First Amendment fanatic with a strong belief in free speech, no matter how reckless it is sometimes. But we should remember that freedom is not absolute anymore than it is allowable to yell fire in a crowded theater.

What can be said of the public when the loud mouths of Fox News enjoy some of the highest ratings of any cable television programs in the country? Fortunately, we can thank Jon Stewart for keeping us awake most evenings by poking fun at O’Reilly and Beck who are the Abbott and Costello on a ship of fools. Rush Limbaugh, talk radio’s schlockmeister, also gets a few seconds of attention from Stewart, but fortunately not much.

It is no wonder that Rupert Murdoch, who claims to have voted for Barack Obama last November, hasn’t checked his commentators even mildly. He and Roger Ailes hide behind the myth of presenting news that is “fair and balanced.” But as long as the ratings and ad revenues remain high, O’Reilly and friends no doubt will stay right where they are. It is when Limbaugh, the corpulent commentator, goes on the radio airwaves to liken the president’s tactics to those of Adolph Hitler, and Beck, a former CNN polluter and more recent inductee in Fox News, claims that our president hates white people, you know it is time to put the brakes on their charade. This is not a call for censorship, but a demand for accuracy. These guys need to be policed by tough-minded editors or the kind of executives who used to be in charge of program practices on the television networks.

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Tags:   Bill O'Reilly · CNN · Fox News · Glenn Beck · Jon Stewart · Roger Ailes · Rupert Murdoch · Rush LimbaughNo Comments.

I had dinner with Walter Cronkite the first night he arrived in Saigon on what was his personal fact finding trip “into country” after the Communists’ 1968 Tet Offensive. He was a hawk, a supporter of the conflict in Vietnam like so many Americans of his generation.

Walter clearly was troubled by the visual images from Tet contrasted with mixed messages he was getting about the war, especially LBJ’s assurance that the war was going well. In the rooftop restaurant of the Caravelle Hotel Cronkite’s frustration was apparent immediately. “How are we going to win this damned war?” he asked me.

I was hesitant to answer, but having traveled up and down the country for several months, having seen evidence of “live and let live” between the Vietnamese government and the Viet Cong, like the sharing of water and rice, I’d concluded that we were witness to a civil war that would not end until we got out of the way and let the two sides decide the future of their country by blood or diplomacy.

Walter was stunned. Like President Kennedy and so many Americans conditioned by the Cold War, he believed in the domino theory that assumed a defeat in Vietnam would lead to the communization of all of Southeast Asia. Cronkite acted as if he could not believe what he was hearing. “That’s just plain crazy,” he said.

At the dinner were Peter Kalisher, CBS’s Paris bureau chief and Cronkite’s executive producer Ernie Leiser who chimed in. “That’s the problem with you so-called ‘Old Asia hands.’ “You think you have it all figured out.” In self-defense, I replied, “Wait a minute, you guys asked me for my opinion and that’s what I gave you. Quite to the contrary, I had not yet figured it out. I only wish that I could.” The dinner ended and soon I left Saigon for the battle at Khe Sanh, but I confirmed Cronkite continued to hear similar messages from other CBS correspondents who had echoed my belief about the realities of the war.

In the weeks that followed, Walter traveled to see the war for himself in the battle for Hue. He gave no sign that he was re-evaluating his view of the Vietnam conflict, for whatever his thoughts were, he kept them to himself. Cronkite rigorously defended the Evening News as a balanced, unbiased presentation of the day’s events. But then on February 27th he summed up his Vietnam trip at the end of a CBS Special Report on the war in Vietnam with a personal departure that stunned the nation:

“To say that we are closer to victory today,” he said, “is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right.” Cronkite went on, “in the next few months we must test the enemy’s intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.”

His commentary was a shocker that stunned America; a different Cronkite than I had ever heard before, because until then he had so scrupulously avoided expressing any personal opinions on the air. The question remained, was there a single, defining event or was it the sum total of what he had seen and heard that led to his profound change of heart about the war?

By November 2002, Ernie Leiser was in declining health. Shortly before he died, I wanted to confirm my belief that he had actually written the script for which Cronkite got so much credit. Leiser confirmed my hunch. “I wrote every word of it, but,” he emphasized that “it could not have gone on the air without Walter’s approval.” He added, “When Walter was troubled by Vietnam, he sought out the friends and people he felt comfortable with from his World War II generation.” Ernie remembered the evening before their departure for home when they were invited to dinner with General Creighton Abrams, the successor to General William Westmoreland as commander of all forces in Vietnam. Cronkite knew Abrams from the Battle of the Bulge in World War II and as the daring tank commander of the 2nd Armored Division in the European campaign against Nazi Germany.

After a few drinks, Leiser recalled, Abrams declared firmly that “we cannot win this Goddamned war, and we ought to find a dignified way out.”

That, Leiser told me, “affected Walter profoundly and caused him to approve my script.” In the end, it was his comforting image of decency that enhanced his reputation as a fair-minded but troubled critic of the war. It was important to those of us in the field to know that Cronkite had the courage to risk his reputation when he could just as soon have remained silent.

Murray Fromson, a former CBS News correspondent, is a Professor Emeritus in journalism at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication. He has just completed a memoir, “The Whole Truth and Nothing But.”

Tags:   CBS Evening News · cbs news · Ernie Leiser · Peter Kalisher · vietnam · Walter CronkiteNo Comments.

Judge Sonia Sotomayor and I can never forget the mutual experiences we endured as children of the Bronx and fans of the New York Yankees. We both grew up in modest circumstances, the difference being she was blessed with dedicated parents who were inspirational models. I was raised in three foster homes because I inherited divided parents, both the children of immigrants, who fled from each other and me during the Great Depression.

Two and a half decades may have separated our adolescent years, but I’d bet that the Yankees were our subliminal favorites because they were winners at a time when too many of us were surrounded by losers. The Judge will be remembered by many for her decision, ending the seven and half months old strike of major league baseball in 1994. I grew up loving baseball after Lou Gehrig picked me up at home plate, an autograph-seeker, and took me into the dugout in Yankee Stadium in 1937.

But I’m sure it was the poverty of hard times that propelled Judge Sotomayor and me to seek better lives. My youthful years occurred when anti-Semitism was rampant in New York. For the first time I sensed humiliation when one of my foster mothers escorted me to a relief agency where used clothes were thrown in my face. The Judge, I’m sure, experienced the pain of discrimination because she was a Hispanic which went with being considered lower class. Eventually, she sought her way out and up through the law. My path was by way of journalism. Her values were honed through 17 years on the bench. Mine evolved, listening to Edward R. Murrow reporting from the rooftops of London and then meeting him on the border dividing Burma and China; even later, interviewing four honorees of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Somehow, as I watched the first day of confirmation hearings on Judge Sotomayor to be an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, the opinions expressed by the seven aging white men composing the minority of Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee deliberately ignored the issue of what is expected of a sitting judge.. We can anticipate little difference when the full body of the Senate votes in the weeks to come.

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