In the days when Americans relied on just three television networks for news and information, the world must have seemed to many a simpler place. It was not, of course, but there likely was a reassuring feeling to know that, whatever was going on, CBS and NBC and ABC would explain events each weeknight. Three out of four people watching television in the early evening were tuned in to the networks' news broadcasts in the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, before twenty-four-hour news channels, only a handful of anchormen enlightened a national audience. They helped shape what tens of millions of people thought was important and how they thought about it.
One was Harry Reasoner. For much of the 1960s, he was the regular substitute for CBS evening news anchor Walter Cronkite, who became known as the most trusted man in America. "Harry reflected in his personal work that almost mystical quality it seems to take for good television reporting, exuding this atmosphere of truth and believability," Cronkite recalled. "He looked like a rather handsome but regular fellow. He looked like a man who came from Middle America. He didn't have any special air of region or accent. He was immediately acceptable as being imminently believable." Surveys near the end of the decade showed Harry Reasoner to be second only to Cronkite among viewers' favorite newsmen.
ABC took notice of Harry's popularity—and his desire to anchor his own newscast. Hired in late 1970, he was ABC's leading broadcast journalist for nearly eight years. Unlike Cronkite, he also delivered commentaries on Vietnam, Watergate, and other current events. Even with the smallest audience among the network newscasts, Harry and coanchor Howard K. Smith often reached from twelve million to fourteen million viewers each night. With their newscast, ABC began its long and eventually successful climb from last to first among the evening news programs.
Cronkite retired from the evening news in 1981, prompting TV Guide to ask its readers who on television they now trusted most. More chose Harry than anyone else. By then he had left ABC and was a correspondent on the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes, one of the most-watched television series on the air. For most of the decade, and for the rest of his life, Harry could be found on Sunday night reporting on an offbeat topic as more than twenty million people tuned in.
Harry's features—the hint of a smile, a knowing look in his eyes when he was being ironic or downright humorous—had been televised nationally since he had joined CBS News in 1956. Those who worked with him considered him one of the great writers of television news, facile with language yet insightful. "It was the grace of his language," longtime evening news anchor Dan Rather remembered, "whether it was something he had written out or was speaking ad-lib." Even more than his writing, his ability to read a script with authority but a conversational tone—honed through a variety of news and feature assignments—put Harry in the first rank of broadcast journalism.
Yet there was much more to Harry. After he died in 1991 at age sixty-eight, his frequent collaborator and close friend Andy Rooney observed: "If you have a clear impression of what Harry Reasoner was like from having seen him on television, I can promise you, you are wrong. Whatever you think he was like, he was not like that. I could not possibly explain to you what Harry really was like, even if I was sure I knew myself."
Those words presented a challenge to me as a biographer. In these pages I explore Harry Reasoner's life in the news—and his life beyond the newsroom. It began in rural Iowa in the 1920s and encompassed the Depression, a world war, and the beginning of the medium that would bring him national acclaim. Harry met the great men and women of his day and traveled around the world, but he kept many of the best qualities of small-town America.
As Rooney suggested, Harry's life contained surprising contradictions. He built a career on reporting but revealed little about himself, even to those close to him. He rose to the top of a highly competitive field but could appear lackadaisical. He sought the spotlight and public attention but was shy and quiet. He was a writer who did not enjoy writing. He was intelligent and well-read yet allowed indulgences to damage his work and his health. He was a man of morals who likely felt guilty for not living up to his own ideals. 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt put it this way: "Harry Reasoner had only one enemy . . . Harry Reasoner."
He was an uncommon observer of life who carried with him some of life's common flaws—and, from the standpoint of journalism, a thoughtful man in a profession that has never had too many thoughtful men. How that came about is one story Harry never told.
