Assignment to Hell (9 page)

Around campus he became celebrated for witty—and usually obscene—limerick composition, plus an uncanny ability to commit chunks of poetry to memory. AP arranged for him to work out of its Columbia office, so through most of his college days he had dual responsibilities. He graduated on the same afternoon with degrees in both journalism and English and did so well he earned a scholarship to attend Missouri’s Graduate School of Journalism. In 1934–1935, he completed his grad school course work but never finished the requisite thesis.

Boyle’s farewell party in Columbia when he was promoted to AP’s St. Louis office achieved such notoriety it was written up in the
Daily Tribune
. Thrown at the Log Cabin tourist camp, the soirée featured singing, dancing, and some drunken fisticuffs over a young lass, “but casualties were minor,” the paper reported.
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In 1936, he was assigned to the Kansas City AP office as a full-time reporter. Boyle spent a week covering the tragic gas explosion in New London, Texas, that killed nearly three hundred people—many of them schoolchildren. It was a grisly story that riveted the country for weeks. Among the other reporters interviewing grieving New Londoners was his counterpart from United Press, a fellow Missourian named Walter Cronkite.

Back in Kansas City, Boyle met Mary Frances Young, a secretary and spitfire blonde who shared his passion for joie de vivre and, once they could afford it, travel. Frances followed Hal to New York in 1937 when he was transferred to the New York City AP office. They were shopping at Macy’s one day when Boyle offered Frances the cheapest wedding ring in the jewelry department; she accepted the proposal but declined the ring: it would have busted their budget.
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In New York, Boyle worked his way up to nighttime city desk editor. The Boyles eventually moved into a snug apartment at 110 Waverly Place in Greenwich Village. They kept it through the war and for years after.
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C
RONKITE WAS A
K
ANSAS
C
ITY
kid, too, but his family moved to Houston, Texas, when he was eleven. What should have been a comfortable upbringing sadly went awry. He was the only child of Walter Leland Cronkite, Sr., a dental surgeon sent to the Great War’s front lines with a Missouri artillery unit headed by Lieutenant (later Captain) Harry S Truman. The ghastly sights that Dr. Cronkite witnessed in the Argonne Forest contributed, his granddaughter believes, to post-traumatic stress and an enervating bout with alcoholism that ultimately broke apart his little family.
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Cronkite’s mother was an arts devotee who doted on her only child. As her husband’s drunkenness grew worse and the Depression deepened, her son was forced to grow up in a hurry. Young Walter became increasingly
protective of his mother and began taking paternal care of the people who came into his orbit—a generosity of spirit that grew larger as the years went on.

Like Boyle, Cronkite was bitten by the journalism bug early in life. A retired newspaper reporter taught the fundamentals of reporting to students at San Jacinto High School. Young Walter showed so much promise that his teacher entered him in a newswriting competition sponsored by the Texas Interscholastic Press Association. Cronkite won the contest going away, dramatically ripping his copy out of the typewriter while other kids were still agonizing over their opening paragraphs.
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At the University of Texas in Austin, Cronkite wrote for the
Daily Texan
and broadcast sports scores for the campus radio station. KNOW couldn’t afford a sports ticker, so a half hour before he was scheduled to go on the air, Cronkite would wander into a combination smoke shop/saloon. Afraid he’d get nabbed if he wrote anything down, he’d sip a three-point-two beer while feigning nonchalance as he glanced at the ticker a few feet from the bar. He’d yawn as the bartender posted scores on a blackboard. Then, a couple of minutes before airtime, Cronkite would sprint to the station, relying on his memory to relay that day’s sports headlines. “It was one of the best bits of journalistic training I ever got,” Cronkite recalled.
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One semester Cronkite announced scores at a “sports club” that turned out to be a thinly veiled bookie operation. Fearing that the cops would bust the joint, Cronkite eventually quit, but not before he pocketed some nice cash.

Not unlike Rooney a few years later, he flirted with a left-wing clique but was too busy to become a campus crusader in the mold of future CBS colleagues Eric Sevareid at the University of Minnesota or Ed Murrow at Washington State. Cronkite joined the Curtain Club, a thespian troupe whose leading light was Cronkite’s fraternity brother (and future movie star) Eli Wallach. Cronkite didn’t act in a lot of plays but learned how to project his baritone.

He also landed a part-time position with the Austin bureau of Scripps Howard’s
Houston Press
, covering the state legislature and learning how to place gratis calls from a pay phone by inserting a hairpin instead of a
nickel. When the
Press
offered him a full-time job in Houston, Cronkite leapt, leaving school before earning his degree. The country was caught in the vise of the Depression; his parents, struggling with Walter Senior’s substance addiction and flagging dentistry practice, needed financial help.

In 1936, Cronkite returned to his boyhood home to take a job as a rookie broadcaster at Kansas City’s KCMO Radio. The term always used to describe prewar Kansas City was “wide-open”—a euphemism that covered a variety of “forbidden” pursuits, from bootlegging and black jazz to strip clubs and illicit gambling—all of it enriching the coffers of Boss Pendergast. KCMO was owned by a crony of Boss Tom’s; thanks to Pendergast’s muscle, it enjoyed one of the Midwest’s most powerful broadcast signals.

The station also insisted that its “talent” take stage names, so Cronkite became “Walter Wilcox,” budding newsman and sportscaster. Cronkite-Wilcox was a jack-of-all-trades, handling copywriting and narration duties, too. It was while reading ad copy, in fact, that he summoned the courage to introduce himself to Betsy Maxwell, a lithe redhead and recent graduate of Hal Boyle’s alma mater, the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism. It appears to have been love pretty much at first sight. After two months of dating they drove out to Independence one lunch hour intent on eloping at the Jackson County Courthouse. But at the last second they got cold feet.

It would be another four years before they walked down the aisle, a period in which Cronkite bounced from radio announcing to reporting for United Press, back to radio as a play-by-play broadcaster for the University of Oklahoma football squad, and even to fledgling Braniff Airways as a public relations flack. While working for the airline, he scored a coup when he arranged for striptease artiste Sally Rand and her trademark naughty balloon to be pictured on the steps of a Braniff plane.

When he rejoined UP’s Kansas City office, he often served as an overnight rewrite guy, embellishing stories in ways that made him wince in future years.
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Cronkite loved doing offbeat features, especially pieces that allowed him to obliquely address the town’s wicked ways. As the prospect of war loomed larger, he was interviewing a Kansas City burlesque performer named Hinda Wassau.

“What do you think, Miss Wassau, will be burlesque’s part in maintaining wartime morale?” Cronkite queried. She grabbed him by his coat lapel and hissed, “Let me tell you something. The morales behind a burlesque stage are just as good as the morales at Radio City!”
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Betsy, meanwhile, became the Kansas City
Journal-Post
’s advice-to-the-lovelorn columnist. On the evening of September 1, 1939, her husband was working UP’s overnight desk when the flash came across the wire that Adolf Hitler’s troops were pouring en masse across the Polish border. Cronkite stayed up past dawn, hawking the latest developments and imagining himself covering the blitzkrieg from the front.

As the war spread in Europe in the spring of 1940, he begged UP for a foreign desk or overseas assignment. But none came; much to his disappointment, he stayed put in Kansas City for another eighteen months.

Walter and Betsy were at the Maxwell homestead in Kansas City for a family gathering when news came over the radio that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. Soon thereafter, Cronkite got his wish: he was transferred to UP’s foreign desk in New York. Betsy and Walter found a little walk-up in Jackson Heights; Cronkite took the subway to UP’s offices near Park Row in Manhattan.

Reading the dispatches of the
New York Times
’ Robert Perkins Post from London and listening to the CBS broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow made Cronkite yearn to get to Europe and report on the war himself.

H
AD
C
RONKITE BEEN IN
P
ARIS
with Joe Liebling in 1940 he might have been less eager to see Hitler’s legions up close. Once Harold Ross gave his blessing in early October 1939, Liebling made plans to fly to Lisbon on the Pan American Clipper.
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Liebling left for Europe without his emotionally volatile wife. Ann Beatrice McGinn was a radiant but troubled redhead whom Liebling had met when she tore his ticket while working at the box office of a Providence movie house. The McGinns were shanty Irish; her father had died when she was three. She and her siblings were raised in a grim orphanage that left permanent scars.

Their courtship and marriage were as erratic as her psyche. At various points throughout the ’30s she was institutionalized for behavior that was alternately diagnosed as manic-depressive or schizophrenic. The Lieblings were separated more often than not. Neither adhered to their vows of fidelity. Ann’s condition steadily worsened; heavily sedated, she would often disappear for days at a stretch.
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She apparently had a fixation for New York’s Irish cops. Liebling caught Ann and one of Gotham’s finest in flagrante delicto in his apartment one afternoon. “I don’t mean no harm,” the cop told Liebling, “but a piece of tail is a piece of tail.”
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For Liebling’s part, getting three thousand miles away from his oft-suicidal wife must have been an attractive scenario.

Liebling’s flight to Portugal was nearly deserted; after the seaplane docked at Lisbon Harbor, Liebling boarded a train that was detained by belligerent policemen at the Spanish border. It was Liebling’s first exposure to Fascists, whom he described as “strutting sparrows of men.”
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He jumped aboard the blacked-out Sud-Express and pulled into Paris on October 12, checking into the Hôtel Louvois across the square from the Bibliothèque Nationale. The neighborhood had in abundance two Liebling must-haves: haute cuisine and hot prostitutes.

He had plenty of time to indulge in both. There wasn’t much conflict to cover in late ’39 and early ’40. The Phony War, as coined by American skeptics, or
la drôle de guerre
, the Strange War, as the French called it, was at its apogee. Dug in behind the Maginot Line in France and the Siegfried Line in Germany, neither side had made much noise since Hitler’s attack on Poland in September of ’39. Many commentators believed that Hitler’s passivity—it was scornfully labeled “sitzkrieg”—was a sign of weakness.

It may have been delusional, but Liebling, at least to a point, fell for it. Parisians, being Parisians, ignored the military’s plea to black out their windows; the city’s nightlife rolled on, almost unabated.

During the year-end holidays he traveled to Strasbourg to interview French soldiers staring down the Wehrmacht. “The mist on the river Christmas morning was so heavy that the French soldiers in the little redoubt on the Strasbourg side were hampered in their game of trying to see Germans through their machine gun sights,” he wrote.
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Liebling asked a
French officer if it would be all right to peek over the parapet at the German sentries patrolling the Kehl side of the bridge. The captain told Liebling to take off his tin helmet first. “If they think you are an Englishman they may fire,” the officer warned. Bareheaded, Liebling gingerly craned his neck but couldn’t make out any enemy soldiers.

Back in Paris, Liebling scrambled to make his dispatches, pegged as Letters from Paris, relevant. He interviewed French generals and German prisoners, trying to make the Allied armies look resolute and
les Boches
weak and venal.

One Sunday morning Liebling was strolling through Montmartre with a French acquaintance when they bumped into a musical panhandler bellowing into a megaphone. Roughly translated, the ditty went:

Hitler hasn’t got one
Not at all, not at all!
Hitler hasn’t got one
Not even a little tip!

Harold Ross was so prudish that he wouldn’t permit the
New Yorker
to print the prurient riff. Liebling fans had to wait until the publication of
The Road Back to Paris
four years later to chuckle over the passage. It turned out, of course, that Hitler had much more than a little tip, at least in matters of war.

The French were indeed in denial that spring—and so was Liebling. In an April 27 article, Liebling told readers that the “great joke of the past fortnight” was Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’ claim that the Germans would be in Paris by the middle of June. A music hall comic that Liebling had seen that week drew howls of laughter by urging Parisians to learn German so they could chat with Hitler when he got to town.
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Liebling wrote his mother every few days, often on Hôtel Louvois stationery. Even after the Nazis launched their blitzkrieg across the Ardennes on May 10, Liebling was still sending his mother pie-in-the-sky accounts of French resolve.
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Liebling so loved the French that it must have been impossible for him to conceive of their impotence. But by May 29 he conceded
to his mother that “this has been a terrible month.” French courage, he wrote, “is wonderful as ever, but for the first time, I am beginning to wonder if it will be enough.”
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