Read Online Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley - Free Book Online

knack for making correct split-second judgments to scoop people. Cronkite of INS, patching together a living as a freelance writer in Austin, competed with the major wire services. “The columns to weekly papers over the state concerning the Capitol doings fell through,” he wrote home. “It seems that those who are able to support such a column already get weekly Associated Press or United Press columns for a very nominal sum.”
    After a year at INS, Cronkite was hired as a rewrite man by The Houston Press , which was owned by Scripps Howard. He moved to Houston’s Montrose neighborhood to live with his mother. “Hours,” he wrote a friend soon after moving back to Houston, “7 a.m. to 3 p.m., salary, $15 per week. My duties consist of taking stories over the phone and whipping them into shape.” The Press also asked Cronkite to organize the morgue (the newspaper archives). As a born bon vivant and lover of jazz, Cronkite soon owned the nightclub beat in Houston and Galveston Island—a truly great job for a hot-to-trot single man looking for a girlfriend. His journalism about music revues and movies was third-rate. And he drank too much whiskey.
    When Cronkite wasn’t judging the rollicking nightlife in Galveston, he covered the sedate Methodist and Baptist church news for the Press . For the first time he read the Bible with a sense of true understanding. He wasn’t writing political analysis yet, as he had hoped, but then, he wasn’t yet twenty. Time was on his side. He was generally happy with his Press work. But being desk-bound meant that “the poor old wanderluster”—himself—had no “means of wanderlusting.” With a fedora on his head, scrawny as a ship mouse, trying to grow a pencil-thin mustache to look older, he repeatedly begged his editor for an oceangoing vessel assignment, with the promise that he would write fun articles about the Caribbean. The Houston Press wasn’t interested—and in truth, even Cronkite wasn’t that adventurous when push came to shove. In the summer of 1934, for his first paid vacation, he didn’t book passage on a freighter out of Galveston to Jamaica, but went to Anna, Illinois, to see Bit Winter; the visit proved disastrous.
    The saga of Bit Winter had turned sordid for Cronkite. During the summer of 1934 he learned that she had been two-timing him. Just weeks after Cronkite began his sophomore year, Bit, who had graduated from high school in Anna, married twenty-year-old H. E. Hunskaker. To break the news, the new Mrs. Hunskaker wrote Walter a letter about the surprise marriage. Chi Phi pledge Woody Williams told Cronkite, who had been at a college lecture by folklorist J. Frank Dobie, that a letter from Anna was waiting for him at the frat house. Cronkite practically floated home to get it; he soon turned ill. “The old breath went out, the heart skipped a beat and sank as I read the parenthesized Mrs. H. E. Hunskaker,” Cronkite wrote her back. “And as I delved into the contents of the letter I had a million different sensations ranging from depths of sadness, which really prevailed throughout, to the heights of happiness that I imagined I was sharing with you.” Cronkite, in the same letter, went on to write a long, rambling, brokenhearted missive that read like a Hank Williams lyric. Bit had implied that he drank too much, and now, defending himself in a dust storm of temperance, he promised never again to “touch a drop.” It was all in vain. By letter’s end, Cronkite, recognizing that he had lost her heart, offered a melancholic good-bye. “Keep up the smoking though and maybe, when you’re in a reminiscent mood, you’ll see old Walt in those smoke rings and I can and will be seeing you in my dreams,” he wrote. “Please don’t forget me Bit. But don’t feel under any obligation to write. I will understand.”
    Cronkite was beyond devastated. His stomach regularly did flips. He couldn’t study. His heartbreak knew no bounds. He worried