But is the book accurate? Or is it a rough fabrication? Through my professional contacts, I have come up with a copy of the first draft, and even though it could get me in trouble, I am releasing it here, now, so you can judge for yourself. Is this just an attempt at character assassination by a disgruntled former employee? Or was Walter Cronkite really not the person we thought he was?
Election night 1968 hit Cronkite hard. Eleven months before, at the end of the Tet Offensive, he had taken it upon himself to declare that the war in VietNam was now "unwinnable" following this "disaster for the United States." But the declaration had not ended the war as he had hoped. Worse, his preferred Presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, was now in his grave, Lyndon Johnson had declined to run for a second term of office, and the Democratic party had fielded Vice President Hubert Humphrey against Republican Richard Nixon, with disastrous effect. Nixon was elected in an electoral landslide by a public weary of the war that Cronkite had helped to demonize.
Facing at least four years of Republican rule, Cronkite immediately took to the bottle. "As soon as the election was called," said Dan Rather, "he reached for the bottom drawer of his desk. We all knew what was coming after that."
Rather says that he helped his mentor finish off the bottle of "newsman's courage" (really Wild Turkey) but it wasn't enough. Cronkite borrowed the keys to his assistant's souped up Ford Mustang, and they went tearing down the streets of New York City, looking for open bars.
The first place they hit was trying to close for the night, but Cronkite had entrenched himself on a stool next to a trio of Pan Am flight attendants. He wouldn't move until he was served, and the bartender greased the wheels of his departure by offering him a couple of unopened bottles of vodka.
Cronkite and Rather left the bar, each with a bottle in one hand and a stewardess in the other. "Walt kept trying to get his to chug from the bottle," Rather said. "He kept telling her he wanted show her 'how that's the way it is.'"
The third stewardess drove while Cronkite killed the rest of his bottle in the back seat with his evening's companion. Rather's stewardess produced a series of Thai sticks, and the quintet was soon passing those around, too. They hit a couple of after-hours clubs on their rounds, adding a large bottle of Jack Daniels to their cache, using it to wash down the Benzedrine supplied by Cronkite's escort.
The real trouble didn't start until one stewardess started having trouble keeping down the meal of eggs and corned beef hash she had eaten when they stopped at an all-night greasy spoon. She leaned out the window of the Mustang and sprayed the Manhattan streets with undigested food while Cronkite, now at the wheel, hit speeds of up to 90 miles an hour.
Looking for something to wipe off her mouth, the stew opened the glove compartment to find the Smith and Wesson .38 Police Special that Cronkite's assistant, a former NYC cop, kept there. Cronkite immediately had an idea, and sometime around 4:30 a.m., slammed the Ford to a stop near the low-rent end of the theater district and led the others into an alleyway, where he kicked over garbage cans looking for "rats and other Republicans."
The third stewardess tried to talk Cronkite out of this, but he insisted he was a crack shot with a handgun, claiming that he had learned to shoot from Edward R. Murrow himself. When a suitable target could not be found, he talked his stewardess friend into standing up against a brick wall with the mostly-empty whiskey bottle on her head. A few bleary attempts to aim later, he finally heeded the cries of the third stewardess. "You're right," he slurred. "that Jack in there is making the bottle wiggle." He then gulped the last of the Jack Daniels down before placing the bottle on the head of his volunteer.
From this point on, details of the story get fuzzy. Police reports indicate that three rounds were fired from the revolver. One shot is known to have grazed the length of Cronkite's outer right leg, and fragments from the bullet's ricochet on the concrete embedded themselves in the newscaster's right foot, giving him the limp he would work to conceal for the rest of his life. Another of the shots is alleged to have been fired when Cronkite spotted a "Nixon's The One!" sign on a passing bus.
The third shot, of course, was the infamous one, wherein Cronkite took boozy aim, squinted hard as the transparent bottle blended in with the brick wall, pulled back the hammer, and gave a sloppy jerk to the trigger.
Fact or fabrication? The decision is yours!
