Fun_People Archive
6 Apr
The absolute rubbish report?

Date: Thu,  6 Apr 95 13:26:26 PDT
From: Peter Langston <psl>
To: Fun_People
Subject: The absolute rubbish report?

Forwarded-by: bostic@CS.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Forwarded-by: <OMITTED@alexandria.lib.utah.edu>
Forwarded-by: danceswithcarp <cdcombs@access.bloomington.in.us>
Forwarded-by: <dmandl@panix.net>

"And That's the Way It REALLY Is":
	Ex-wife's book is Bad News for Cronkite

by Nora Simpson
Special to New York Newsday

He may be considered the most trusted man in the world by 77% of
Americans, but according to Walter Cronkite's ex-wife, "for 25 years I
had to hide my pocketbook in a hollowed-out couch cushion to prevent him
from robbing every cent I have."

This and other startling revelations will appear in a no-holds-barred,
tell-all memoir by Dorothy Winthrop Cronkite, the news icon's wife of a
quarter century.  Among the other allegations made in the book, to be
published this fall by Simon & Schuster:  Cronkite had such a foul mouth
that terrified CBS news executives considered airing his nightly news
program with a 12-second delay; he was not on a special assignment in
Indochina as was claimed during a two-week absence from the airwaves in
1965, but rather on a "bourbon and whore binge" in Gatlinburg, Tennessee;
he amassed such a large pornography collection that he was offered
$340,000 for it by a Las Vegas night club owner in 1970; and he once made
his seven-year-old daughter swallow a live flounder after the child
misbehaved.

The most shocking claim of all: that Cronkite fathered more than two dozen
children while covering a story in the Philippines in the late 1950's.
"Americans used to refer to him as 'Uncle Walter'," the former Mrs.
Cronkite laughs, "but we always said that _Papa_ Walter would have been
more appropriate."

According to an ex-colleague of Cronkite's of CBS, who spoke on condition
of anonymity: "None of this is anything we haven't all known for decades.
I was in the navy for 15 years and I never heard a mouth like Walter's.
The man was absolutely out of his mind."

A spokesman for Cronkite dismissed the allegations as "absolute rubbish."

© 1995 Peter Langston