Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley Page B

were killed. With no other choice at hand, Cronkite’s ancestral homeland, under the threat of continued German bombing, surrendered; this led to five years of brutal occupation. More than 250,000 buildings had been destroyed. “The Dutch people would never be the same again,” Cronkite believed. “When the reports of the bombing of Rotterdam came in, we could scarcely believe the stories of heartbreak and devastation.”
    Cronkite now hoped to join the Army Air Corps if the United States entered the European war to help the Dutch people. The Luftwaffe now had the ability, it was feared, to bomb London back to the preindustrial age. Both he and Betsy—big believers in Billy Mitchell’s “Air Power Doctrine”—responded to a Roosevelt administration call for airplane pilots by signing up for flying lessons in Missouri. A huge aviation buff since childhood, Walter hoped to learn how to pilot the P-39s and P-40s, the best Army Air Corps fighters. A monkey wrench soon presented itself that changed the direction of Cronkite’s life. One afternoon at flight school, Cronkite learned that he was color-blind. When asked to read a chart by a U.S. Army optometrist, he couldn’t tell red from green. The condition meant he’d be exempt from the draft and ineligible for military service. It was a devastating blow to the ego of the young Unipresser. He felt neutered. While Betsy professed sadness at her husband’s visual impairment, a secret part of her celebrated: his diagnosis would keep him out of combat. Forging onward, she ended up getting her pilot’s license. It was Betsy’s big one-up over her husband, who later would bundle honorary doctorates the way some men collected butterflies or coins.
    Judging by all the press reporting from Great Britain, America would soon be pulled into World War II. Cronkite, wanting to help the Allied cause, refocused on his journalism career and campaigned for reassignment by the United Press to New York City. Kansas City was too cloistered from the gathering storm. If he couldn’t pilot fighter planes, then he’d at least report on them. UP was known for moving journalists willy-nilly from bureau to bureau; as of 1933, the average tenure at one office was a year and a half. Cronkite had been at the Kansas City bureau for more than two years. At every opportunity when speaking with UP executives in New York, Cronkite mentioned his abiding interest in becoming a foreign correspondent who could report on military aviation.
    The U.S. military draft was draining UP of a lot of young talent. When UP news manager Earl Johnson, at the wire service’s New York office, irritably said not now to Walter’s relocation requests, it churned up resentment in Cronkite. Nevertheless, he hunkered down in Kansas City, working harder than ever at his UP bureau job, which often took him out of state to meet sources who liked roadhouses and pool rooms. He got acquainted with pawn shops, burlesque theaters, blood-donor stations, and drab hotels offering dollar beds. “If I hadn’t been trained as a journalist, we wouldn’t have made it,” Betsy Cronkite said of their marriage. “All the stories you hear about life with a newsman are true—chasing fire trucks, crazy hours and the company they keep, all for the sake of getting the whole story. During our first years of marriage, we were apart more than we were together.”
    Talking with fellow reporters at UP, Cronkite learned that Murrow, on CBS Radio, had become the new patron saint of journalism. Cronkite was a tad skeptical and a lot envious. As Cronkite learned from a telephone chat with Johnson, the real genius behind CBS’s European operation was William S. Paley, the network’s energetic president. Paley had started in radio in 1928, when he signed a fifty-dollar-a-week advertising contract between his family’s cigar company and Philadelphia radio station WCAU for The La Palina Hour . The program was a winner: La Palina cigar sales shot