Frank Mankiewicz

Belying the image of Walter Cronkite as an journalist without any political motives, while anchor of the CBS Evening News in 1967 he secretly “pleaded” with Senator Robert Kennedy to run as an anti-Vietnam war candidate for President and he later acknowledged that, if offered, he would have accepted the slot as George McGovern's VP in 1972. Frank Mankiewicz, who worked for both Kennedy and McGovern before serving as President of NPR from 1977 to 1983, revealed the liberal Democratic political activism of Cronkite, who passed away on July 17, in a Saturday Washington Post op-ed, “Vice President Walter Cronkite.”

Mankiewicz, who would have the duty of making the public announcement of Kennedy's assassination, offered this insider account:

In the late 1960s, just after he returned from a long visit to Vietnam, Cronkite had sought a meeting with Sen. Robert Kennedy. I sat in as Kennedy's press secretary. The meeting was understood to be off the record, and no one else was present.

Cronkite began with an acknowledgement of Kennedy's desire not to run for president but pleaded with RFK to change his mind and to announce his intention to seek the White House right away, even though the election was more than a year off. You must announce your intention to run against Johnson, Cronkite urged, to show people there will be a way out of this terrible war.