The Fromson File

One of the lessons a political reporter learns early in life is never to underestimate greatness. Case in point: Ted Kennedy. I’m sure that none of my colleagues covering his early emergence on the national horizon in the 1960s bet on him as a promising young star, even when the lives of his brothers were [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Thirty-six years ago I was in Georgia and Abkhasia on assignment for CBS News. Last Friday, I was in the network’s Moscow bureau watching the war unfold between Russia and Georgia. In between repetitive scenes of bombing, shelling and chaos, I switched channels to absorb the spectacular unveiling of the Olympic Games in Beijing. Obviously, it was [...]