The real life of Adrian Cronauer

Mar 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Jim Barthold

Adrian Cronauer is no Robin Williams. He knows Robin Williams; they're friendly. But he's no Robin Williams.

Cronauer, who keynotes this year's IWCE 2005, will be forever linked with the manic comic thanks to the brilliant riff Williams turned on Cronauer's military service memories in the movie “Good Morning Vietnam.”

“If I were half as funny as Robin Williams, I'd be out in Hollywood going na-noo, na-noo and making a million dollars,” said Cronauer in a mellifluous voice that immediately identifies him as a veteran of the radio booth. “Once people get to know me, they realize very quickly that I'm not Robin Williams, and it doesn't seem to bother them after that.”

Unlike Williams' disruptively manic disk jockey, Cronauer is a “lifelong card-carrying Republican” who took active roles in both the Dole and Bush/Cheney presidential campaigns. Another big difference between the two:while the movie's Cronauer character always seemed a hairline from full military establishment ostracization — or worse — the real-life Cronauer played within the bounds of the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) format.

“I was faced more with apathy than opposition,” recalled Cronauer, who developed his morning radio shtick listening to Rege Cordic's radio shows in Pittsburgh in the 1950s. “That meant I wasn't doing exactly what Robin Williams did. He did a lot of one-liners. Mine was more situational humor.”

Cronauer honed the morning gig at Iraklion Air Station, evolving a “calm, matter-of-fact ‘Good Morning Iraklion’” into the Howard Dean-like primal yell immortalized by the movie.

Cronauer's deadpan delivery hides a quiet sense of humor that will never be confused with Williams' mania. That sense of humor seeped through the material he compiled about his Vietnam experiences and drew the attention of the comic actor and his agent, Larry Brezner, who bought an option on a 1979 screenplay Cronauer wrote as a TV sitcom.

Before Brezner and Williams stepped in, rejection was a general rule for the project.

“I guess it was just a little too close in time; nobody believed you could do a comedy about Vietnam,” he said.

But Williams saw the potential.

“He read it and said, ‘Oh, disk jockey, [a] chance to do all my comic shtick,’” Cronauer said. “Every year they'd renew the option. About four years later, they called me up and said, ‘We've decided to throw away the original and start over again.’”

Cronauer went to Hollywood, spilling his guts about his experiences in Vietnam.

“It went through five different versions. I'd noodle some suggestions for additions and deletions and changes; a few of them they accepted; most of them they ignored,” he said.

The end product had audiences laughing, and Cronauer, sitting in a screening room watching it, amazed.

“‘Son of a gun,’” he recalled thinking, “‘they actually made a movie out of this thing.’”

Perhaps most important, the movie gave the disk-jockey-soon-to-turn-lawyer a bully pulpit for his job today as special assistant to the director of the Pentagon's POW/MIA Office. It's a job he took because of his political connections and his desire to help his fellow veterans and their families.

“When the [first term George W. Bush] administration came in, they asked if I wanted to join them. Their thinking was that I'm a high-profile veteran and well-known in the veterans' community,” he said.

He was mulling the offer when terrorists brought down the World Trade Center towers and got him thinking about rejoining the military. Instead, he says, he followed his wife's advice and entered public service.

The work has rewards and frustrations. There are still approximately 88,000 people missing from all the wars. While many will never be located, there is always hope, he said.

“Just last year we retrieved the remains of four Americans from two different airplane crashes in Tibet,” he said. “We're still retrieving remains from World War II.”

Even though he “decided it was time to finally get into an honest profession and went to law school and graduated when I was 50,” Cronauer still has more than a passing interest in broadcasting. That's why he's somewhat obsessed with how the airwaves are used, abused and obtained.

“It's not written in the Constitution or anything else. … Congress, just out of the clear blue sky, said the airwaves belong to the people, which means, in essence, that it belongs to Congress,” he said. “The electronic spectrum is the only natural resource in which there's no such thing as private property rights. You can't own a piece of the spectrum.”

This has caused “all sorts of problems” because Congress first decided it would lease, but never sell, the airwaves back in the 1920s. Broadcasters buy licenses but don't own them, he said.

“Within the past decade or so, they have been selling frequencies, selling licenses to use those frequencies and one day somebody is going to get a high-powered lawyer and go into a federal court and say, ‘Your honor, my client paid a lot of money to use this piece of spectrum … and he therefore should have some rights to use it,” Cronauer said.

And that could shatter the whole underpinnings of the broadcast industry as it has evolved.

“The concept that you cannot own the airwaves has caused far more harm than good,” he said.

It's not really a surprising direction that Cronauer has taken over the past 40 years since he left Vietnam. In those days, he was fighting the constraints of a boring radio format that had lost its relevance in a modern war era where the electronic media was becoming a player.

Perhaps what is ignored by the movie is the most telling part of Cronauer's character. He never stopped working from within the establishment to better the lives of military personnel. Today's challenges — working to find service personnel missing for decades — are no less difficult and no less important.

“I guess the most rewarding part of the job is family updates,” he said. “We rent a hotel room on Saturday morning and invite anybody who lives within a 300-mile radius who's a family member of somebody who is missing to come in. For some of these family members, this is the first time in decades they've heard anything.”

It might not be much, but, like the change from easy listening to morning mania, it makes a difference.

“It means so much to them, and they are so grateful,” said the man who will forever be linked to Robin Williams but has done so much more as Adrian Cronauer.