An increasingly bitter Walter Cronkite never hid his disdain for his “CBS Evening News” successor, Dan Rather — until his bosses ordered him to zip it as part of his final contract with the network.
That’s one of the revelations about the complicated, stormy Cronkite-Rather relationship in “Cronkite,” Douglas Brinkley’s upcoming biography of the legendary CBS News anchor, who died in 2009 at the age of 92.
Rather, who declined to be interviewed for this story, lauds Cronkite in his new book, “Rather Outspoken,” writing of Cronkite’s early support for his reporting and anchoring stints — and only peripherally alluding to later “tension” and “problems” between them without getting into specifics.
Cronkite, forced to retire from the “CBS Evening News” in 1981 when he was 65 (CBS’s mandatory retirement age), initially endorsed Rather as his successor.
But, unhappy in what he considered a premature retirement, Cronkite soon began to turn “more and more bitter toward the Rather regime,” writes Brinkley.
When Rather stormed off the “CBS Evening News” set in 1987 — after being told that US Open tennis coverage would eat into his broadcast’s first 15 minutes — Cronkite said he would have “fired” Rather on the spot. “It was like he woke up in 1987 and saw me in his old job with successful ratings, making more money than he ever did — and I was relatively young to boot,” Rather says in “Cronkite.”
“He wanted to destroy me. I didn’t know what to do. I kept wondering how to handle his venom. I decided I didn’t want to fight him. So I hunkered down in the fetal position and just took it.”
According to Brinkley, the feud “escalated” the following year, when Cronkite, who pitched CBS a prime-time special on the 25th anniversary of the JFK assassination, became convinced that Rather spiked the plan. “I think it’s unfortunate that any other person feels about another as I do about Dan,” Cronkite says in the book. “But to me, I guess, Dan just reeks of insincerity.”
“Believe me, it was a complete nonstarter from the get-go,” Rather tells Brinkley. “It wasn’t . . . a serious consideration. But Walter created this false scenario that I had somehow nixed his Kennedy special.”
That summer, with Cronkite still carping about Rather, CBS had enough — signing Cronkite to a final, 10-year deal but stipulating that he stop bashing Rather in public, according to Brinkley’s book.
There’s no word on whether the two men ever made amends, but when Cronkite died, Rather — canned by CBS in 2006 after a botched “60 Minutes II” report on George W. Bush’s National Guard service — was effusive in his praise. “We had our differences,” he said on MSNBC, “but my admiration for his accomplishments never wavered.”