Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley Page B

time, college was still considered a luxury, not a birthright, and given Walter’s steadily diminished return, the family couldn’t afford his UT tuition. He had squandered the opportunity to be a college-educated man. Antsy beyond words, Cronkite also didn’t have the patience to sit still in UT classes. He preferred toiling in the newspaper field full-time, but later in life he told his daughter Kathy that he was embarrassed because he hadn’t earned a degree at UT. Kathy pointed out that without a college diploma he had nevertheless become the best TV broadcaster in American history. “Yes,” Cronkite shot back, “but if I had gotten a formal education, I could have been the Kaiser!”
    Becoming a first-rate print reporter was more a pleasant daydream than a burning ambition for Cronkite in the mid-1930s. The newspaper industry that Cronkite entered looked primarily to one of the wire services—led by the Associated Press and the United Press—to obtain general news. The Hearst Corporation’s International News Service (INS) was the third largest. What Cronkite soon learned about the fiercely competitive wire service industry held true for all journalism enterprises: internal corporate policy and budget requirements shaped the direction of news coverage.
    The idea behind AP, founded in 1846, was that this association of newspapers would sometimes share reporting and otherwise underwrite the cost of gathering news in bureaus around the country and the world. The influence of the AP was tremendous, and its slant eastern and conservative.
    Edward W. Scripps founded the United Press in 1907 as, in his words, “the people’s news source,” and any paper could buy its service—even those that were subscribers to AP. The United Press never grew quite as big as AP, but its brilliant reporting from Europe during World War I gave it a reputation for high standards. By the time Cronkite entered the newspaper field in the mid-1930s, the general feeling was that AP was a more prestigious place to work, but it was just a journalism job. By contrast, UP, where resources were thin, was sold to cub reporters as a sacred calling.
    Cronkite’s big Austin break came when Vann M. Kennedy of Corpus Christi hired him in 1934 to write stories for the Austin bureau of INS, in a small office “up with the pigeons” on the press wing of the state capitol. An Alabaman by birth, the stiff-necked Kennedy was a gifted mentor. An advocate of objective journalism, Kennedy, an expert wire transmitter, was fact-driven and judicious, believing that reporting was a dignified occupation. “I learned the principles of great journalism from him,” Cronkite said, “because he lived them.” As an assistant reporter, Cronkite was basically a gofer at INS. But Kennedy, wanting him to earn his medals, refusing to offer a soft landing, also assigned him the heady job of covering Texas government. Kennedy represented intelligent and principled journalism to Cronkite. “I have never found anything I like so much as working at the Capitol,” Cronkite wrote in a letter home. “I go down a little after ten and work until one. . . . This week I met nearly all the Houston members of the legislature and worked the Teletype machine.”
    At INS Cronkite learned how to write in an adjective-free way and how to send a wire report. Journalism wasn’t a conceit to Cronkite—it was a trade with stature, a concrete way to earn money in the Great Depression. Under Kennedy’s watchful eye, Cronkite was taught how to get a story, how to write it, and how “ethics” mattered most of all. Competing head-on, the wire services undoubtedly made one another hungrier, and news in America stronger. Day in and day out, AP, UP, and INS raced one another for scoops with fanatical energy, commitment, and concentration. The battle for stories was brutal. The industry was not for the timid. Only an instinctive counterpuncher could prevail, one with a tough hide and a