Assignment to Hell (73 page)

Spurred by a rivalry with his
Herald Tribune
colleague Marguerite Higgins, who was every bit as feisty and fearless as he was, Bigart’s writing in Korea was in the same league as his 1944 work in Italy. Homer persisted in covering war from the cannon’s mouth, taking risks that left other reporters dumbfounded. He and Higgins ended up sharing a Pulitzer with four other correspondents for their collective work in Korea.

Bigart, no misogynist, nevertheless tormented Higgins in every way he knew how; no shrinking violet, she returned the favor. When Homer was told that Higgins was pregnant, he supposedly muttered, “Oh, g-g-good. Who’s the m-m-mother?” When the baby was born, Bigart allegedly inquired if Higgins had eaten it. Homer’s great friend and confidante Betsy Wade once asked Bigart which of the two stories was true. “Yes,” Homer replied.
³¹

In 1955, when the
Herald Tribune
began to sputter, Bigart reluctantly moved to the
New York Times
. But his heart always stayed with the
Trib
. Wade called the
Trib
“a writer’s paper”; it was the place that had hung with Bigart through thick and thin. In truth, the stiff-necked
Times
never gave Bigart the latitude to share his tart observations. Wade, who edited much of Bigart’s stuff at the
Times
, always had to be on the lookout for the acidic barbs he’d slip into his copy, just to see if the pooh-bahs were paying attention.

It is a telling commentary on Vietnam that both of the Pulitzer Prize–winning correspondents sent to cover its early skirmishing—Hal Boyle and Homer Bigart—detested it and asked to be removed as soon as possible. Bigart became a mentor and hero to the young reporters cutting their teeth in Saigon and Da Nang—among them, Peter Arnett, Malcolm Browne, Neil Sheehan and, eventually, David Halberstam. In a 2011 conversation Sheehan remembered Bigart peppering a dissembling officer with questions, then punctuating his interview with: “Do y-y-you really think we’re that s-s-stupid, C-C-Colonel?”
³²

When Bigart first arrived in Vietnam, Sheehan followed him around for a few days to get a feel for how Homer approached a story. Neil tagged
along on helicopter assaults into Vietcong hamlets, listening as Bigart asked the same questions, over and over again. The whole exercise seemed pointless.

“Jesus Christ, Homer, we spent two days walking through the rice paddies and we don’t have a story,” Sheehan complained.
³³

Bigart raised an eyebrow. “There’s no story?” he challenged Sheehan.

“Well, what is it?” Sheehan countered. “What do you mean?”

“You don’t get it, kid. They can’t do it. It doesn’t work,” Bigart rasped. “It doesn’t work anymore.”
³⁴

Bigart had seen in a matter of days what it took U.S. officials years to admit. Vietnam became for Bigart the Italian campaign redux, a rudderless conflict with murky objectives, run by commanders much too preoccupied with their PR images—and with telling their bosses what they wanted to hear instead of what they needed to hear.

Homer’s first marriage ended in divorce; his second wife passed away in 1969. His third marriage, to children’s book author Else Holmelund Minarik, proved happy. Gone was the pasty insecure guy with the nervous stammer and the chain-smoking jones.

Bigart in middle age became something of a dapper sophisticate, almost always impeccably turned out, sporting stylish suits, fedoras, and horn-rimmed glasses. Somehow in midlife he even managed to curb his stammering.
³⁵
He assumed a desk near the front of the
Times
’ newsroom and became (at least a little) less owlish; he enjoyed playing éminence grise. When introduced as a “Pulitzer Prize winner,” he was invariably quick to say with a grin, “
Two-time
Pulitzer Prize winner,” spoofing the pretentiousness of it all but still reminding listeners that, yes, he had won journalism’s most prestigious award
twice
. He earned other press honors, a George Polk Award, a Meyer Berger Award, and an Overseas Press Club Award. Although he professed to hate war it continued to animate him; Bigart developed a passion for the American Civil War, collecting books and mementoes and combing battlefields.

Over the years Homer became the
Times
’ go-to guy on big assignments, covering Israel’s trial of SS war criminal Adolf Eichmann, Mississippi during the awful Klan-retaliation days, and later in the ’60s, touring riot-torn
cities and college campuses. Bigart was such a stickler for truth-telling that eight different countries did what the First Earl of Tunis, Sir Harold R. L .G. Alexander, had wanted to do in Italy: tossed Bigart out or banned him from coming back.

Homer retired in 1972 and a year later was given a
More
magazine journalism medal, coincidentally named in honor of A. J. Liebling. The award was presented by, among others, Homer’s Vietnam protégé David Halberstam “for four decades of single-minded attention to his craft, persistent skepticism toward all forms of power and tenacious pursuit of social injustice long before such reporting became fashionable.”
³⁶

In retirement, Homer and Else moved to a farm outside West Nottingham, New Hampshire. He returned to his reclusive ways, rarely leaving the property and avoiding the lecture circuit and J-school forums. Sadly, he never wrote a book on his war experiences or anything else. Without daily deadline pressure, he couldn’t write—or so he claimed.

When in the ’80s writer Karen Rothmyer and the Columbia University Press did a book on Pulitzer winners, the prize committee had no forwarding address for Bigart; some assumed he had passed away. Rothmyer found him in West Nottingham, a gracious white-haired gentleman still blessed with a devastating wit, trying to press a glass of gin into her hand.
³⁷
Bigart’s own drinking became so heavy that Else began cutting his gin.
³⁸
Maybe the martinis helped Bigart ward off nightmares about accidentally shooting down Robert Perkins Post over Wilhelmshaven.

He died at eighty-three after a difficult bout with cancer. Whenever Rooney or Cronkite talked about Bigart they grew wistful, always referring to him as a dear friend, wickedly funny and irreverent, the quintessential newspaperman. In their youth, they had shared the same disheartening beat and flown in the same formation over Hitler’s Germany. There had been a lot of nights together at places like the Cross Keys in Molesworth and the Savoy and the Bell Pub and the Lamb and Lark in London.

On November 22, 1963, Bigart was in the
Times
’ newsroom when the tragic story came across the wire. He dutifully filed the assassination article assigned to him; early that evening, he went out for a somber drink with colleagues. At one point he excused himself to call his wife from a
phone booth in the bar. His coworkers had been struck that day by Bigart’s composure. But as Homer talked with his wife in the glass booth, his friends saw the toughness dissolve: Bigart was weeping.
³⁹

T
HE EVENTS OF THAT HIDEOUS
weekend in Dallas made Bigart’s friend Walter Cronkite a national icon, the rock on whom America leaned in moments of crisis. It was more than just his Midwestern decency; underneath the comforting presence viewers could sense Cronkite’s steely resolve.

One of the reasons Cronkite could stay so calm is that he’d seen worse. He’d sweated in smoking B-17s at Molesworth, watched entire London blocks go up in flames, and seen the fear in children’s eyes at a Dutch bomb shelter.

Walter Cronkite had seen the world fall apart—and be put back together again.

Like his performance for UP during the war, his success at CBS News was hardly preordained. It’s not as if Cronkite showed up in the late ’40s and owner William Paley snapped his fingers and said, “There’s our anchorman!” It took more than a decade of sweat equity, of internecine dueling with Edward R. Murrow and his boys—not to mention some fairly degrading moments on the air—before Cronkite took the helm of the CBS Evening News.

An early critique from Andy Rooney was one of the reasons Cronkite developed such an avuncular on-air persona. Writer Rooney watched Cronkite rehearse one day and said, “Why are you yelling at me?” After that, Cronkite toned down his voice and relaxed his body language. It worked: viewers were drawn to him.

As late as 1964, however, there were still CBS executives convinced the network’s ratings would improve with someone other than Cronkite anchoring. Office politics didn’t faze Cronkite; he figured he’d just go back to UP. Yet just four years later, Cronkite had become such an important part of our societal fabric that when he editorialized against U.S. involvement in Vietnam, President Lyndon B. Johnson flipped off his television set, turned to aides, and said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost America.”

Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, Cronkite was infatuated with America’s space program. NASA’s astronauts reminded him of the flyboys he’d loved in East Anglia, the hell-for-leather daredevils that part of him had always wanted to be. But when writer Tom Wolfe spotlighted the Mercury astronauts’ wild-ass ways in the book and movie
The Right Stuff
, Cronkite took exception. Sure military airmen were a little crazy; they’d have to be to climb into those crates, Cronkite believed. But Wolfe never saw what Cronkite did during World War II: their imperishable courage.

If Cronkite became the most trusted man in America, it was because he’d seen Americans at their best; in his own mortal way, he spent the rest of his life trying to live up to those qualities. Fortunately for the rest of us, he took us along on his journey.

It was Cronkite’s affection for servicemen and servicewomen that drove him to be so active on World War II legacy projects. He wrote forewords for a dozen or more books, consented to interviews for scores of others, and narrated another dozen or so documentaries: some for CBS in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s; some for the Discovery Channel as part of his
Cronkite Remembers
series; and, in his twilight years, two remarkable films produced by British documentary maker Alastair Layzell,
City at War
and
Legacy of War
.

D-Day Plus 20 Years
, featuring Cronkite interviewing General Eisenhower in London, Portsmouth, and Normandy, was CBS News at its best: provocatively written and gorgeously filmed with a stirring score courtesy of Aaron Copland. Early in the filming, as the crew was getting footage of Ike crossing Omaha Beach, a group of French schoolchildren happened to stroll by, escorted by nuns. There’s a marvelous moment when the former President of the United States and Supreme Allied Commander patiently waits for the group to pass, greeting each nun with that electric smile and nodding, “Sister … Sister …”

At another point Cronkite was planning to drive a jeep along the beach at Omaha while interviewing Ike about the seaborne invasion. But Walter and producer Fred Friendly agreed that since Eisenhower was giving Cronkite the tour it would be more appropriate—not to mention more compelling from a television point of view—to have Ike do the driving.

“General, you drive, don’t you?” Cronkite gently inquired.

“Of course I drive,” Eisenhower snapped, as if Cronkite had somehow challenged his manhood.

Mamie Eisenhower and Betsy Cronkite were watching from a nearby bluff. Mrs. Eisenhower turned to Betsy and said, “My dear, your husband has never been in greater danger. Ike hasn’t driven in 30 years.”
⁴⁰
Between Eisenhower’s rustiness and the old jeep’s temperamental clutch, it took several minutes before Ike and Walter stopped lurching.

At the end of the piece Cronkite asked Eisenhower to put D-Day into perspective. “Well,” Eisenhower said as he cleared his throat, “it’s almost unreal to look at [Normandy’s beaches] and remember what it was like. But it’s a wonderful thing to remember what those fellows twenty years ago were fighting for and sacrificing for, what they did to preserve our way of life. Not to conquer any territory, not for any ambitions of our own. But to make sure that Hitler could not destroy freedom in the world.”

The documentary concluded with a revolutionary moment for 1964: a sweeping helicopter shot of the cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, with Omaha Beach framed in the background. It cost Paley and Friendly a bundle, but it was worth it, especially when accompanied by Copland’s “Simple Gifts” from
Appalachian Spring
.
⁴¹

A year later, Eisenhower joined Cronkite for a special on the twentieth anniversary of V-E Day. CBS News again used the occasion to showcase something momentous: It arranged for Ike’s old ally and rival Bernard Montgomery to appear in London via the Early Bird satellite.

Cronkite kicked off the segment by introducing Eisenhower, who barely slipped in “Hello, Monty,” before the Britisher launched into a self-glorifying soliloquy. While Monty was bloviating, Ike disgustedly muttered, “Son of a bitch!” The hookup to London was so crude and the microphone so balky that Ike’s epithet, which surely would have caused an international uproar, went unnoticed.
⁴²

In the 1990s Cronkite participated in various World War II fiftieth-anniversary celebrations. One of the most poignant was presenting an Overseas Press Club plaque to the Château de Vouilly for hosting the First Army press corps in the summer of ’44. Mme. Hamel’s grandson James,
who was conceived during the German Occupation but born four months after
la Lib
é
ration
, accepted the honor.
⁴³

A decade later, while contributing to
City at War
and
Legacy of War
, Cronkite got to visit places in the U.K. he hadn’t seen in decades. He worshipped at the rebuilt Guards Chapel at Wellington Barracks, reading aloud the names of the victims of the V-1 attack. He dined at the Savoy and toasted his correspondent pals. He flew on a restored B-17 at Duxford. He toured the old barracks at Molesworth and admired the new stone memorial saluting the men of the 303rd Bomb Group, including Congressional Medal of Honor winner Jack Mathis, the mortally wounded bombardier who died before he could yell, “Bombs away!” Alas, there wasn’t time to have a beer at the Cross Keys.