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Although he now earns $200,000 a year—a combination of fees and a base salary of about $25,000—Cronkite is still easygoing and gregarious. Thanks to his philosophy, "If it's for sale, buy it," he owns a 35-ft. ketch that he sails with his family in the waters around Long Island. In the 1950s he took up sports-car racing, even drove a Lancia in the Sebring twelve-hour race. Once, while tearing through the Great Smoky Mountains, he went off on a turn and plunged 100 feet into a stream. He was well belted in, and he emerged unhurt, but these days Betsy frowns on the sports-car bit.
In a business where ulcers are an occupational disease, Correspondent Cronkite seems to have only one persistent worry: that he may be shrinking. "When I was a young man," he says, "I could happily say I had achieved the American ideal of being six feet. Now I have to stretch hard to make it." Retorts his wife: "Nonsense, Walter has always been just a hair under six feet."
No Snow Job. Whatever his height, Cronkite has earned top billing in a star system that rivals any in show business. Alongside him are Huntley and Brinkley; ranking just below are such newscasters and commentators as CBS's Sevareid and Harry Reasoner, NBC's Frank McGee, ABC's Howard K. Smith. Wherever they go, the stars are instantly recognized. When they cover a story, their presence makes a story in itself. Their casual power to shape the news is immense. Ralph Renick, news director of Miami's Station WTVJ, says he will never forget the expression on Cronkite's face after his program ran a film of Negro children being beaten by whites in Grenada, Miss. "He positively recoiled," says Renick. "That hurt look was the most powerful kind of editorializing. It was as effective as Huntley and Brinkley getting their opinions across by sly side comments and making mouths."
The stars themselves have mixed feelings about playing the role of what Brinkley calls the "all-wise, all-knowing journalistic superman." Brinkley is bothered because "it's just impossible to know everything that is happening all the time, to really know what you're talking about." Cronkite has further complaints. Among the 1,000 or so letters he receives each week are some disconcerting notes from women who claim to have discovered a secret message in his broadcast beamed to them alone and are eager to arrange a tryst. But no such beefs from the stars will make the system go away. "People tend to believe certain individuals in times of crisis," says Sevareid. "They get a feeling with a broadcaster. They know if he is trying to do a snow job."
In the battle of the stars for ratings, Huntley-Brinkley and Cronkite seesaw back and forth as public tastes vary between a preference for the wry quip and the more stolid Cronkite style. Though he thinks a Brinkley bon mot is well